X is for Exodus
X is for Exodus, the only book of the Bible that clearly mentions abortion. Given the way today’s evangelical Christians vigorous oppose abortion, you might think that it was explicitly forbidden in the Bible. Not so.
In the Hebrew Old Testament, abortion was defined as a crime. But this isn’t what we usually mean by abortion, that is, the intentional ending of a pregnancy. The Exodus passage describes a scene in which men are fighting, fighting so hard that they knock into a pregnant woman, who loses the pregnancy. The woman is an unfortunate bystander, not someone exerting reproductive autonomy.
Take a look at the scale of punishment, and nature of the offense comes into focus. If the woman were to die, it’s clear: this is homicide. This is the occasion of the famous “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” Biblical injunction. But if she lived, punishment was a fine, the amount to be set by the woman’s husband. He could decide how much harm had been incurred. The crime is one of assault.
The discussion of pregnancy loss comes right after a ruling about a man killing his enslaved man or woman, and before one about bodily harm done to an enslaved person. In other words, this was an offense where somebody had damaged something belonging to a man — an enslaved person or a fetus and a wife. Perhaps the ruling also spoke to the woman’s experience of violence, since the amount of the fine could reflect how bad it had been.
When the Old Testament was translated into Greek, this crime gained new meanings. Now Exodus specified that if miscarriage ensued, and the fetus was already formed, the punishment was the same as any other homicide, a life for a life. In ancient Greek medical writing, formation referred to the time when the product of conception began to look vaguely like a being. Before that time, it was all just un-organized stuff, or so they thought.
It’s obvious these thinkers were men: none of this was remotely workable in real life. According to Aristotle, a male fetus took form at 40 days, 90 if female. He thought males were more perfect. Perhaps imperfect females took more work? But few women could pinpoint the night they conceived, and none of them could specify if it were a male or female they were carrying!
The legacy of the Greek Old Testament was to encode this idea of “before and after” into Christian thinking. What mattered was not formation, but ensoulment — an even more ineffable moment in pregnancy. Church fathers argued about when this moment happened, and after many centuries, decided it was at quickening, when a woman first felt a fetus move. For the church, intentional abortion before quickening became a minor offense. Only in 1869 did a pope proclaim that life began at conception.
Want to know more?
Kathleen M. Crowther, Policing Pregnant Bodies. From Ancient Greece to Post-Roe America, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023).
Zubin Mistry, Abortion in the Early Middle Ages, c. 500-900, (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: York Medieval Press, 2015).
Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, “Debating the Soul in Late Antiquity”, in Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day,ed. Nick Hopwood, Rebecca Flemming, Lauren Kassell, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018): 109-121.
Even more? Read my book!
Image credit: This British sampler was completed in 1903. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/228444
Disclaimer: Today I’d refer to pregnant “people,” but in the historical times that I write about, pregnancy was a female thing, and ideas about abortion were strongly shaped by gender politics.