It’s the eve of Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, and it’s a good day for asking forgiveness and thinking about the injuries — intentional or accidental — that we inflict on others.
Somewhat in that vein, I’m thinking about regret and experience, particularly around sexuality and abortion. Lynn Gazis-Sax offers this wonderful post inspired by this equally fine piece from Christy at Dry Bones Dance. And I’m thinking about the PR campaign that is spreading like wildfire among my pro-life friends surrounding the new book Changed: Making Sense of Your Own or a Loved One’s Abortion Experience.
The book is by Michaelene Fredenburg (a splendid name, whatever else may be said), who is about my age. From interviews (I haven’t read the book), we learn that she became pregnant at 18 and chose to terminate the pregnancy. Had she carried to term, the child that might have come into the world would have graduated from college (assuming a normative time to degree) this past spring. That caught my eye, because as I have shared many times, I got my high school girlfriend pregnant in 1985. Had a child been born as a result of that pregnancy, he or she would have come into the world sometime in early February 1986 — and would thus have been, like Michaelene’s potential offspring, ready for college graduation this year.
In the interviews I’ve read — and at the AbortionChangesYou site developed to promote the book and the message — the message is emphasized that undergoing an abortion (or being close to someone undergoing an abortion) can have lasting and damaging psychological consequences. And you know, I’ve got no problem with that. Honestly, not a month goes by that I don’t find myself wondering what it would be like to have a child in his or early twenties. Time and again, I have tried to imagine whether my high school ex and I would have had a boy or a girl; I wonder about what the child would look like, what their interests would be, and what it would have been like to become a father so very young. And given the life I led for so many years, I have often wondered if I was responsible for other abortions about which I never knew. (For that matter, I still occasionally contemplate the possibility, one hopes remote, that I might have a child out there somewhere.)
Did going through the abortion experience (as closely as any male can) change me? Of course it did. I’d like to say it turned me into a lifelong advocate of effective contraception, but that would be a substantial fib; I had plenty of foolishly unprotected sex in the years that followed. I didn’t “learn a lesson” quite as well as I would like to imagine. But the experience did touch me, and the memories of what my girlfriend and I went through nearly a quarter century ago still come into my consciousness, particularly around the time of the abortion (late June) and the due date (early February).
But here’s the thing: the fact that we experience pain, and even regret, doesn’t mean we made the wrong decision at the time. Cancer treatment changes people too (ask Lance Armstrong), sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. Some people end up being glad they had the cancer, others wish that they had never been cursed with this most dreaded of diseases. Which treatment option to pursue for cancer is (or, insurance permitting, ought to be) a highly personal decision. And those who are fortunate to survive treatment usually are transformed in a deep and serious way. Hence the groups that flourish for cancer survivors to meet and talk with each other.
No one wants to have an abortion before they get pregnant. No one, presumably, wishes for cancer. We all would like a world where every conception is wanted, and where cancer never begins its deadly march through the bodies of the living and the healthy. Abortion is a response to something not having gone as we would have hoped it to go; surgery or chemo are responses to something inside of us doing what we wish it would not do. But regret is not the opposite of necessity, or even of the good. I grieve that I was responsible for an abortion, I regret that a potential child was conceived which never came into this world — and I believe, deep in my heart, that abortion was the best possible decision. This is not mental gymnastics, folks. Regret and certainty are not mutually exclusive, and the presence of the former is not evidence that a past decision was wrong.
I’ve written before about the myth of a “right” response to abortion. In that light, I think a campaign to help women (and men) who are suffering from guilt or remorse or depression or emptiness as a result of an abortion is a good thing. I think it’s especially helpful in communities where abortion is seen as sinful. Of course, the worry is that the pro-life side will take the dangerous tack that the only proper way to heal from an abortion is to go beyond expressing pain and regret and actively (perhaps publicly) repent. If repentance (combined with, say, a firm willingness to join the anti-abortion movement) are posited as necessary steps for healing, then a campaign like AbortionChangesYou will surely do more harm than good.
Of course, many women who have abortions don’t experience regret or remorse or sorrow. And just as we ought to honor the feelings and experiences of those who do react negatively to an abortion, we must see the feelings and experiences of those who react with relief and even exuberance as equally valid. Let me recommend, along those lines, Jennifer Baumgardner’s new book: Abortion and Life.) And along with checking out the AbortionChangesYou site, check out a not dissimilar organization that takes a much more holistic view of the abortion experience: Exhale. From the Exhale website:
Exhale offers a free, After-Abortion Talkline that provides emotional support, resources and information. The talkline is available to women and girls who have had abortions and to their partners, friends, allies and family members. All calls are completely confidential and counselors are non-judgmental.
At Exhale, we believe there is no “right” way to feel after an abortion. We also know that feelings of happiness, sadness, empowerment, anxiety, grief, relief or guilt are common. Abortion can be hard to talk about and finding the right person to talk with can be even harder. Exhale provides the opportunity to talk with someone that supports and respects you, in a safe and confidential environment.
Bingo.
On this eve of the day of atonement, I am more cognizant than ever of my flaws and my failings and my need for forgiveness. When it came to that abortion so many years ago, the main step I needed to take was to ask my girlfriend to forgive me for not doing my part to insist on contraception. We had made a mutual, hormonally impulsive choice to have unprotected intercourse. But the fact that she was partly responsible didn’t vitiate my own responsibility. I could have acted differently, and I didn’t. Though neither of us was religious in our teens, I knew I needed to ask her forgiveness, and I did — she gave it. And she asked mine. We did have something for which to atone, but my sin lay less in my disregard for the value of potential life and more in my unwillingness to consider all that might happen to the body and heart of a young woman whom I loved.
I regret many things that have happened in my life. I regret that I put my family and friends and ex-wives/lovers through so much pain as I struggled with my addictions and mental illness. At the same time, I honor the fact that those struggles were — as far as I can tell — indispensable in making me who I am. Though I know that post hoc ergo propter hoc is often a fallacy, in my case my capacity for empathy and compassion and for justice (as insufficient as it still is) is considerably larger as a result of the misery I went through. Could I go back, I would not undo what happened. Abortion changed me. Three divorces changed me. Being hospitalized against my will changed me. All of those experiences brought me pain, but they also made me a richer, deeper, more loving human being.
And on this Erev Yom Kippur, may I humbly suggest that those in need of asking for slicha (forgiveness) include those who take the very real hurt and pain of post-abortive women and twist it for the sake of advancing a fundamentally anti-woman agenda.
UPDATE: See the comments section for a note from Michaelene Fredenburg, whose words suggest that I ought to distinguish more clearly between right-wing support for the “Abortion Changes You” site and book and the actual intent of the book and site, which she insists is not political. I’ll take her at her word, and withdraw the suggestion that the project is entirely designed to advance the anti-abortion cause.
The evening of Yom Kippur also has a name - Kol Nidre. Just because you might be interested. A very thoughtful post.
Or maybe that’s a term for the worship service and not the night itself. Now I’m not sure :)
The Christian time of atonement isn’t emphasized until we celebrate Lent in the late winter, but I always appreciate the thoughtfulness that these times elicit in people of the various traditions.
In the progressive Christian churches in which I’ve served, we also seek to provide wholeness to people who have undergone abortion - the woman carrying the fetus, her partner, family, friends - if they desire it. Sometimes the wholeness manifests in needing to vent against a society where the right-wing view is both political and religious - that conservatives often take the entire Christian identity in pushing their anti-abortion beliefs.
Heck, I’d hate Christianity too, if I thought that’s what it really was. But wait, I’m being rude and judgmental to the conservatives now. :)
I didn’t know about Exhale and appreciate that reference.
A great post, thank you for sharing.
Right on, Hugo.
And I’d like to add that the people who speak of grief after an induced abortion seem to have no interest in people grieving a spontaneous abortion (miscarriage). Those who prayed for a child, welcomed a child, and then had the child snatched away: do they not wonder what the child might have looked like, might have done? Do they not wonder when that missing child might have celebrated?
But then, of course, supporting people who lost a wanted child does not advance anyone’s agenda.
Good point about miscarriages, John.
Aerin, as a Christian who practices Kabbalah as well as a faith in Jesus, I seem to have double opportunities for reflection and atonement: Lent, culminating in the long walk of Holy Week; the Ninth of Av and the High Holy Days. Then again, the more atoning I do — and the more reflection I do on the atoning death of my savior — the better.
Thank you, John, for speaking out for those of us who have had a miscarriage. After having one, and having friends who have had multiple miscarriages, the grief is very real and intense. I don’t think people talk about it because it it such a painful subject. At best, people (and the doctors) say, “you got pregnant once - try again”.
Emily,
Kol Nidre is both the evening service on Yom Kippur and the prayer that begins the service.
Hugo wrote, “many women who have abortions don’t experience regret or remorse or sorrow.” But does that mean they are *right* not to feel remorse, etc.? This complete deference to individual feelings doesn’t seem to be the way you approach other moral issues on this blog. For instance, a lot of people don’t seem to care about the animals they eat, but you probably want them to start caring. You wouldn’t let a white person shut down discussion on racism by saying “Well, I don’t feel privileged.” Is emotion the last word, or can we find a non-shaming moral standard that honors the complexity of the abortion decision but doesn’t collapse into competing subjectivities? I’m not sure what that standard would be–this is more of a procedural question about how we discuss the issue (or don’t).
And I’d like to add that the people who speak of grief after an induced abortion seem to have no interest in people grieving a spontaneous abortion (miscarriage).
This comment is bizarre, in the way that someone commenting that France is weird because they drive on the left would be bizarre.
In my observation of the very strongly child-valuing community, miscarriages are mourned and much-sympathized with. They are one of the things that get brought up as examples of uncontrollable bad things, since they’re a common experience. (Given the guesstimate that 20% of detected pregnancies end in miscarriage, in a child-valuing community miscarriage will be part of most people’s experience.)
Cathy, that’s a really good point about miscarriages (SamChevre, I think that the point John was making was more about the fact that miscarriage-related grief isn’t publicly discussed and acknowledged nearly as much as the anti-choice groups discuss grief after abortions.) Having seen what my SIL went through, there isn’t a lot of support out there generally from random acquaintances, and it’s rough to deal with.
I’ve been a volunteer with Exhale for almost 5 years now, and the fact that we need to honor *all* of the feelings that come up around abortion (which can also deal with miscarriages as well) just keeps making more sense as time goes by. Thanks for mentioning us, Hugo!
I’ve always thought it was odd that people are encouraged to not share news of their pregnancy until they’ve reached a ’safe’ period where miscarriage is less likely - given how many women I’ve known who lost their first child during that risky first trimester, and knowing how painful it was for them, it seems like it’d be healthier for at least some of them if they could just talk about it and acknowledge their feelings. But it’s always been so hush-hush.
Jendi, I don’t see abortion and meat-eating as quite the same thing, obviously. The choice to have an abortion is a difficult one for many, an easy one for some — often because of the particular set of circumstances that led to the pregnancy in the first place, and because of their own views about life. We end factory farming not by prescribing guilt as the appropriate response to meat-eating but by working to give people consciousness about the conditions in which animals live — and, even more importantly, by giving them healthy, tasty, nutritious vegan alternatives. The veganism movement wants to convince people that they can love food without eating animals. If the right-to-life community would embrace contraception more fully, we could do so much more to reduce the incidence of abortion. Sexual pleasure can come (literally) without vulnerability to pregnancy, food pleasure can come without consuming animal flesh. That’s an analogous message.
Here’s what I wrote in my February post (linked above) on the myth of a right response. I made the points more clearly there than I have in this post:
…there are plenty of people who grieve an abortion but do not regret having had one. Grief says: “that hurt me”; Regret says: “that was wrong of me to do.” Grief is an acknowledgement that an experience was painful and difficult, perhaps leaving an enduring wound — grief is a statement about feelings. Regret is a moral statement in which a past action is judged to have been the wrong one. These two emotions sometimes go together, but frequently not. I grieve my divorces — and grieve the abortion for which I was partly responsible. But I don’t regret getting divorced or regret that my high school girlfriend had the abortion. Those were the best decisions given the circumstances.
I like the Exhale approach — it meets women where they really are, rather than with an imperious presumotion of a “right” emotion.
Regret is a moral statement in which a past action is judged to have been the wrong one.
I call that repentance.
If I say “regret”, I mean that something out of my control is other than I would wish.
So I grieve over my friend, who died after a botched surgery.
I regret that my grandfather died the day before I arrived to visit him after not seeing him for years.
I repent that I punched my brother in anger.
Hugo,
“We end factory farming not by prescribing guilt as the appropriate response to meat-eating but by working to give people consciousness about the conditions in which animals live — and, even more importantly, by giving them healthy, tasty, nutritious vegan alternatives.”
That would not work for most people. I am most likely more consciousness than 98% of people about the living conditions of animals that we eat. I would not stop eating meat if I had healthy, tasty, nutritious vegan alternatives. And most people would not stop eating meat in that situation.
On the other hand, if those vegan alternatives were significantly less expensive than meat (say, less than a fifth of the cost of meat) than you would get a very large reduction in the amount of meat consumed eat year.
And Fred, we’re doing our best to make it more expensive, my brother.
Hugo,
I really appreciated your thoughtful and compassionate post.
Thank you for sharing your experience. We don’t often hear the voices of men reflected in our conversations about abortion – something that makes your story even more powerful and important.
In telling your story, I believe that you are contributing to the creation of a safe space to discuss the range of emotions that may occur after an abortion and other reproductive losses. Additionally, I believe that your story models healing for men in particular touched by abortion as well as ways to sensitively dialogue about this emotionally charged issue.
I am also grateful that you mentioned my book Changed and discussed your impressions of the valuable service that Exhale offers. In doing so you voiced a concern that I hold as well – using personal experiences to support abortion agendas. This is something that I cannot – and will not – support. To use someone’s pain to further a personal or political agenda is terribly destructive.
The Abortion Changes You outreach is meant to be a safe place set aside from labels, politics and debate. A place where men and women can come as they are anonymously, while still experiencing community through the knowledge that they aren’t alone. I hope that you will enhance the outreach by submitting your story to the “Explore” section of the Web site.
Michaelene
Michaelene, thank you.
I may well have done you a wrong by suggesting that your book was written as part of a calculated effort to advance a pro-life agenda. I’m guilty of assuming that since the only interviews I have read with you came from journals associated with the pro-life movement, your book and outreach was designed to advance a specific political agenda. I am relieved to learn otherwise, and I will update my post accordingly.
All the best to you.
Sam, I hate to break up the good mood of the thread, but this is despicable. I am very tired of social reactionaries hiding behind my children when it’s politically convenient (”they want to teach your kids about gay marriage!” “They want your daughter to have an abortion without telling you!”) and pretending that only those who agree with them love their own children.
Cathy, I am so sorry for your loss. I think some of those people may be trying to console you by saying that it doesn’t mean you will never have a child, but I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that’s a hollow comfort.
mythago - Thank you for your thought. I am happy to say my husband and I eventually did have a child and we are very happy. My friends are also now parents. We still remember how difficult it was to cope with the loss. A friend of mine did have an abortion and the best I could do was just to be there for her and support her. We were 20 and in college so the thought of having a baby at that time in life was scary. When I think about what she went through, I don’t think I can compare her experience of losing a baby to mine. Her loss was intentional; mine was out of my hands. She had guilt; I did not.
“Sam, I hate to break up the good mood of the thread, but this is despicable. I am very tired of social reactionaries hiding behind my children when it’s politically convenient (”they want to teach your kids about gay marriage!” “They want your daughter to have an abortion without telling you!”) and pretending that only those who agree with them love their own children.”
Thank you, Mythago. That comment rubbed me the wrong way as well. As a devoted mother of two children, I’m positively sick of people trying to imply, or directly state, that being in support of a woman’s right to an abortion means I don’t love children.
What Mythago said.
Also, Sam’s claim doesn’t accord with my experience, or the experience of other generations of my family. Whatever you call the “child valuing” community may support each other privately, but community support in the form of affirming rituals and opportunities to tell the stories and share the grief– that just does not, in our experience, happen.
In fact, parts of the organized anti-choice movement have behaved with horrifically callous disregard to people who have lost pregnancies this way. A decade ago, a fanatical and sadistic wing of the movement started pushing the notion that abortions cause hormonal changes that increased the risk of breast cancer. I happened to see one of their displays (a massive thing imposed on everyone who walked by) that featured a graphic picture of a knife cutting off a breast. I wondered if these people had ever thought of what the gleeful sadism of their display would say to a woman who had lost a wanted pregnancy. I suspect they never thought about it. Probably the person who planned this thing knew very little about human physiology.
Let’s try this:
I’ve written before about the myth of a “right” response to spousal abuse. In that light, I think a campaign to help men (and women) who are suffering from guilt or remorse or depression or emptiness as a result of an abusing is a good thing. I think it’s especially helpful in communities where abuse is seen as sinful. Of course, the worry is that the anti-abuse will take the dangerous tack that the only proper way to heal from abusing is to go beyond expressing pain and regret and actively (perhaps publicly) repent. If repentance (combined with, say, a firm willingness to join the anti-abuse movement) are posited as necessary steps for healing, then a campaign like AbuseChangesYou will surely do more harm than good.
Of course, many men who abuse their spouses don’t experience regret or remorse or sorrow. And just as we ought to honor the feelings and experiences of those who do react negatively to abusing, we must see the feelings and experiences of those who react with relief and even exuberance as equally valid.
_________
When did our response to an action determine its morality? You’re starting in the wrong place Hugo. Your consistent-life fellow travelers in the ‘liberal camp’ are closer to the truth than an effort to determine right response to an action from the responses rather than the the act itself.
Stephen
Stephen, it’s a nice rhetorical trick, but the suggestion that a fetus at ten weeks gestation has the same sentience as an adult woman or thirteen year-old child is absurd. Ask an obstetrician, for goodness’ sakes.
Stephen, as I recall, it’s the people in your camp who tend to approve of a husband being the ‘authority’ over his wife and perhaps enforcing that authority physically if needed.
Hugo:
That’s a pretty thin foundation for determining human value — at best — and doesn’t address the later term abortion.
Stephen
I agree that sentience is trickier with later-term abortion. But in general, I think it’s a fine characteristic with which to define ultimate value, particularly in dialogue between the religious and non-religious alike.
Let me be clear that I have never met a woman who rejoiced at a late-term abortion; the emotional consequences are indeed usually very great — often because of the painfulness of choosing to terminate a Trisomy-18 or similar sort of pregnancy.
Hugo, I think you’re missing the point of my veganism example and Stephen’s spousal-abuse example (hope I’m misrepresenting you here, Stephen)– which was not to compare the relative merits of protecting fetuses, animals, or adult women, but to question the primacy of subjective emotion over interpersonal moral standards in how you evaluate the abortion issue, as compared to other issues you evaluate on this blog. Do you recognize the discrepancy, and if so, can you articulate why we should discuss abortion differently?
Duh, I meant “hope I’m NOT misrepresenting you”…sorry Stephen :)
Sure, Jendi. What a woman does with something that is inextricably linked to her body (a pre-viability fetus) is much more of a private decision than the decision to eat a creature that has a separate existence from any particular human being. Whether or not it is a baby at eight weeks, say, it is also very much part of a woman’s body — that makes it a much more intensely personal decision to abort or not to abort, and it means that whatever the decision made, the woman who makes it is deserving of special understanding and freedom from judgment.
Farmer John slaughters hogs who are not inside of Farmer John. Were they inside of his body, I would be less inclined to judge.
OK, that’s a plausible objective argument, and a good reason not to recriminalize abortion even if one believes the fetus has some sort of personhood–the issue is not conducive to a one-size-fits-all legal regime.
But I still think you weaken your pro-choice case by focusing on whether the woman “feels” regret. I’m uncomfortable with giving a single human being the unilateral power to determine the ethical status of another being.
On a personal level, I think that’s where my discomfort with abortion comes from–imagining that my personhood is dependent on whether my mother wanted me, not an inalienable quality of my own. It comes close to making another human being my creator instead of God.
Jendi, the whole point of the post is that the morality of abortion has zero to do with whether women feel regret or not.
And on a personal level, the “what if my mother had aborted me?” is perhaps the least sophisticated or persuasive reason to take any position on abortion. Using that logic, everything from birth control to rape prevention programs can be seen as ‘wrong’ if their implementation would have meant the arguer would not have been born.
Hugo,
What you don’t appear to get is that there is no room for dissent, for a Christian, on the idea that abortion is wrong. This has been held by all branches of the church from the first century. It is not a new teaching. The authoritative teaching of the Apostles, as codified in the Didache, explicitly forbids abortion. Whether or not the United States Government can and should forbid abortion is one thing, about which we can disagree. But there can be no room for disagreement that the church can and must forbid it, if she is to remain faithful to the teaching of Christ and the Apostles.
That doesn’t make you a bad person, or less of a Christian. God’s mercy is infinite. But you need to acknowledge that you committed a great evil, before God can forgive you. There is no forgiveness without repentance.
Hector, I did ask God for forgiveness — for not having been a better boyfriend, for not having been more responsible. My sins are many! But as for the abortion itself — well, let’s be clear that the “teaching of Christ and the Apostles” is not, for all of us, synonymous with the “teaching of the church.”
The point of the post is that there are a variety of responses to having had an abortion therefore we need to honor that variety. The unstated implication is that abortion is a value neutral act.
Which, clearly, I think is hoooey.
Stephen
“It comes close to making another human being my creator instead of God.”
Jendi,
There are some of us who do not believe in god. There are some of us who do actually believe that the woman, and the woman only, is solely responsible for making the determination as to whether or not a child is brought into this world.
You and everyone else on this planet has the right to your religious beliefs. What you do not have the right to do is to force those beliefs on those of us who do not hold them. Trying to tell a woman that she can not abort a pregnancy because she is not god (a being which no one even knows for sure exists), would be as arrogant as a Buddhist telling you that you must believe in karma and reincarnation simply because they believe in it. If you are going to argue in favor of denying a person their right to bodily autonomy, you must make a rational argument that is not dependent on an entity that may or may not even exist. Or in other words, you must first prove the existence of god and provide prove that god does not want women to abort. The bible, btw, is not proof of the existence of god or god’s will…no matter how much some people would like to believe that it is.
Hugo,
I wasn’t referring specifically to the Catholic church, I was referring to the undivided apostolic church. However far back you go, until the late 20th century there was no Christian body, of any flavor, that tolerated abortion.
The arguments in favor of abortion typically rely on a materialist ontology (”it doesn’t do the things that people do (move, think, talk) so it can’t be human”) which a Christian should recognize as false. We have value because of our human essence, not because of our ‘accidents’.
I don’t see how you, as a Christian, can tolerate abortion. The arguments about bodily autonomy rely on premises from Enlightenment liberalism that a Christian should reject. Have you forgotten “Our bodies are not our own, for Christ bought them at a high price.”
Hector, I refer you to the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice: http://www.rcrc.org. Especially here: http://rcrc.org/about/faq.cfm#faq5
We do indeed have value because of our essence, our participation in the goodness of the created order of things. And the woman who has a non-viable fetus inside of her has an essence that is inextricably linked with that fetus — it cannot have essence without her. Until such time as it can have essence without her, she whose body is indispensable for its existence does have a special and unique right to determine what happens to this potential human being.
I do not think that abortion is harmless. It is, to me, tragic. But the tragedy of compelling a woman to carry a fetus to term against her will is a violation of her God-created dignity, her essence, her worth.
And Fred, we’re doing our best to make it more expensive, my brother.
I’m raising my own.
My beef comes to about $1.85 a pound, and that’s after having it dressed out by a butcher.
OK–comments are open again, and somehow I was less clear than I intended to be.
I wasn’t intending to equate (and don’t, in my head, equate) pro-life and child-valuing. When I say child-valuing, I’m thinking about communities where children are valued more highly, relative to other good things, than is typical. So as individuals, and as families, and as a community, the choices between children and education/status/money/autonomy reflect higher relative value for children than they do in most places. Now–that said–most child-valuing communites are pro-life; most pro-lifers aren’t, IMO, child-valuing.
Does that help?
Er, no, Hugo. Compelling someone- man, woman or child- to respect basic and universal moral laws such as the right to life, is not a violation of anyone’s dignity. It has never been seen as such, from the time of the early church up until modernist ideass started eating away the church from inside.
Look, Hugo, the state and the world will do as they please. As a Christian, I expect better from you. I hope that you will abandon your flatly un-Christian beliefs in animal rights and abortion rights.
Hector, when we gather together on the far side of the Jordan (hopeful but not cocky universalist that I am), we’ll find that neither abortion nor veganism were salvation issues.
We can proof-text until the proverbial cows come home. In the end, what makes us Christian is our faith in Jesus and our commitment to live out the Great Commission and Micah 6:8. There’s room for a multiplicty of views on abortion and animals.
Um, also, there’s clearly a little confusion here about the “early church” and it’s, um, not exactly unchanging views on the “right to life” of the unborn. For example:
5th TO 16th Century CE:
St. Augustine (354-430 CE) reversed centuries of Christian teaching in Western Europe, by returning to the Aristotelian Pagan concept of “delayed ensoulment.” He wrote 7 that a human soul cannot live in an unformed body. Thus, early in pregnancy, an abortion is not murder because no soul is destroyed (or, more accurately, only a vegetable or animal soul is terminated). He wrote extensively on sexual matters, teaching that the original sin of Adam and Eve are passed to each successive generation through the pleasure generated during sexual intercourse. This passed into the church’s canon law. Only abortion of a more fully developed “fetus animatus” (animated fetus) was punished as murder.
Augustine had little influence over the beliefs of Orthodox Christianity. They retained their original anti-abortion stance.
St. Jerome (circa 340 - 420) wrote in a letter to Aglasia:
“The seed gradually takes shape in the uterus, and it [abortion] does not count as killing until the individual elements have acquired their external appearance and their limbs” 8
Starting in the 7th century CE, a series of penitentials were written in the West. These listed an array of sins, with the penance that a person must observe as punishment for the sin. Certain “sins” which prevented conception had particularly heavy penalties. These included:
bullet practicing a particularly ineffective form of birth control, coitus interruptus (withdrawal of the penis prior to ejaculation)
bullet engaging in oral sex or anal sex
bullet becoming sterile by artificial means, such as by consuming sterilizing poisons.
Abortion, on the other hand, required a less serious penance. Theodore, who organized the English church, assembled a penitential about 700 CE. Oral intercourse required from 7 years to a lifetime of penance; an abortion required only 120 days.
Pope Stephen V (served 885-891) wrote in 887 CE: “If he who destroys what is conceived in the womb by abortion is a murderer, how much more is he unable to excuse himself of murder who kills a child even one day old.” “Epistle to Archbishop of Mainz.”
Pope Innocent III (circa 1161-1216):
bullet He wrote a letter which ruled on a case of a Carthusian monk who had arranged for his female lover to obtain an abortion. The Pope decided that the monk was not guilty of homicide if the fetus was not “animated.”
bullet Early in the 13th century he stated that the soul enters the body of the fetus at the time of “quickening” - when the woman first feels movement of the fetus. After ensoulment, abortion was equated with murder; before that time, it was a less serious sin, because it terminated only potential human life, not human life.
St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) also considered only the abortion of an “animated” fetus as murder.
Pope Sixtus V (1471-1484) issued a Papal bull “Effraenatam” in 1588 which threatened those who carried out abortions at any stage of gestation with excommunication and the death penalty.
Pope Gregory XIV (1535-1591) revoked the Papal bull shortly after taking office in 1591. He reinstated the “quickening” test, which he determined happened 116 days into pregnancy (16½ weeks).
http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_hist.htm
Lisa,
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are sincerely mistaken. The fault is with the Religious Tolerance page, which without actually lying is being seriously duplicitous, and also failing to understand the nature of Sacred Tradition and natural reason.
It’s true that early term abortion was not always considered homicide by the Roman Catholic Church. It was always considered a serious sin, though, and the beliefs of the early Christians was that abortion was homicide. See the Didache and the Apocalypse of Peter- these are two non-canonical texts that were popular with the early Church, and while they didn’t make it into the Bible, many viewed them as inspired and they were never considered heretical. Even the authorities you cite, while they differed on whether abortion was homicide, agreed that it was a grave moral evil.
Finally, Augustine and Aquinas didn’t know what we know now about embryology, i.e. that development is a continuous process and that the unique genetic identity of a person begins with the fusion of sperm and egg.
2:2 Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not corrupt youth; thou shalt not commit fornication; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not use soothsaying; thou shalt not practise sorcery; thou shalt not kill a child by abortion, neither shalt thou slay it when born; thou shalt not covet the goods of thy neighbour
Would you consider embryology to be one of those “modernist ideas that is eating away at the church from the inside?” Or does that descriptor only apply to modernist concepts that don’t suit your personal beliefs?
Are you seriously quoting something that includes the statement “thou shall not practice sorcery” as some kind of reasonable behavioral guideline?
Hugo,
Of course abortion isn’t a salvation issue. There’s only one sin that keeps you out of heaven, and abortion isn’t it.
What blasphemy against the Spirit consists in, however, can vary from person to person. If you love money more than God, you are in peril. If you love pleasure more than God, you are in peril. If you love your country, or your family, or your cause more than God, you are in peril. And, yes, if you love the liberal ideals of bodily autonomy, self-ownership, and ‘choice’ more than you love God, then you could be in peril.