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Jesus never talks about abortion, as it is recorded in the Bible. Yet most modern Christians, particularly Fundamentalists, seem to labor under the misapprehension that the Christian Church has always condemned abortion as murder. Did you know that until 1869, abortion in the first trimester was pretty much OK with the Catholics? They didn't officially think that the 'soul' entered the embryo until later in the pregnancy. A very strange idea arose fairly recently, historically speaking, that said that God throws newly made infant souls down into bodies at conception, when there are only two cells in the body, and if they are not born and don't get to hear about Jesus, then they have to hang out in Limbo for all eternity. This is a sort of comic book version of Christianity and totally perverts the merciful and loving God that Jesus talks about, into a sort of demonic god who arbitrarily condemns little babies for something someone else does. Comic book Christianity. The people who believe that particular superstition don't seem to have actually understood the 'good news' that Jesus taught - the truth that we are all deathless spirit, and that, in our essence, we are all children of that divine spirit, sometimes called God, that is the true being at the heart of everything,. No 'soul' is ever lost through the death of a body. Most cultures, including our own until just recently, have believed that the divine spark unites with the physical body at birth or late in the pregnancy. Most of the wisdom teachings of the world say that souls are old and wise, not newly created whenever a sperm cell happens to meet an egg, and that they don't have to associate with a body that isn't going to come to term. In any case, 'souls' don't die with the death of the body. A tissue cluster the size of your fingernail may be a potential vehicle for a human birth but no one is in the vehicle yet so when one of these zygotes is aborted, no one has been "murdered", as the comic book christians so hysterically claim. Did you know that a large percentage, perhaps more than half, of all fertilized human eggs, all potential human bodies, are spontaneously and naturally aborted and flushed from the womb? Does that make Mother Nature (or God) the biggest abortionist of all? This whole current controversy over abortion is based on bad, politically motivated theology and is being hyped by political power trippers who manipulate the credulous and ignorant among us by claiming that "babies are being murdered". The same people who seem so fierce to protect the "lives of the unborn" are also the ones supporting Bush's illegal war which has killed tens of thousands of innocent women and children in Iraq. Which shows just how much they really care about "right to life". Their whole position stinks of hypocrisy. They are against abortion but they are also against sex education and availability of birth control, two things that reduce the need for abortions. The truth is that, apart from their befuddled belief that a soul is "lost" whenever a fetus doesn't come to term, most abortion opponents are sucked into that position, not because of some great concern for life, but because they were subjected to enormous sexual repression when they were growing up. So now anything to do with sex produces a negative reaction and they are easily manipulated by those politicians who know how to push their hot buttons. Subconsciously they feel that if a woman gets pregnant, indicating that she had sex, then she is guilty and SHOULD be punished by forcing her to bear the child, even, for many of these misguided nutjobs, in the cases of rape and incest.
Here is a short, partial history of abortion.
"In ancient times, the "delayed ensoulment" belief of Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was widely accepted in Pagan Greece and Rome. He taught that a fetus originally has a vegetable soul. This evolves into an animal soul later in gestation. Finally the fetus is "animated" with a human soul. This latter event, called "ensoulment," was believed to occur at 40 days after conception for male fetuses, and 90 days after conception for female fetuses. The difference was of little consequence, because in those days, the gender of a fetus could not be determined visually until about 90 days from conception, and no genetic tests existed to determine gender. Ultrasound devices were millennia in the future. Thus contraception and abortion were not condemned if performed early in gestation. It is only if the abortion is done later in pregnancy that a human soul is destroyed. By coincidence, this 90 day limit happens to be approximately equal to the end of the first trimester, the point at which the US Supreme Court decided that states could begin to restrict a woman's access to abortion.
There were three main movements within early Christianity. Two did not succeed: Jewish Christianity and Gnostic Christianity. The third, Pauline Christianity, flourished and evolved into the Christian Church. It was surrounded by a mosaic of other competing religions within the Roman Empire, including Judaism, the Greek state religion, Mithraism, the Roman state religion, and various Mystery religions. With the exception of Judaism, most or all of the competing religions allowed women to have abortions and allowed parents to strangle or expose (abandon) new-born babies as methods of population control. There are many writings, letters and petitions of early Christian philosophers and Church Fathers which equated abortion with infanticide and condemned both as murder.
St. Augustine (354-430 CE) reversed centuries of Christian teaching in Western Europe, and returned to the Aristotelian concept of "delayed ensoulment." He wrote 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.
Early in the 13th century, Pope Innocent III 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 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 revoked the Papal bull shortly after taking office in 1591. He reinstated the "quickening" test, which he said happened 116 days into pregnancy (16½ weeks).
In the 17th century, the concept of "simultaneous animation" gained acceptance within the medical and church communities in Western Europe. 9 This is the belief that an embryo acquires a soul at conception, not at 40 or 80 days into gestation as the church was teaching. In 1658 Hieronymus Florentinius, a Franciscan, asserted that all embryos or fetuses, regardless of its gestational age, which were in danger of death must be baptized. However, his opinion did not change the status of abortion as seen by the church.
Pope Pius IX reversed the stance of the Roman Catholic church once more. He dropped the distinction between the "fetus animatus" and "fetus inanimatus" in 1869. Canon law was revised in 1917 and 1983 and to refer simply to "the fetus." The tolerant approach to abortion which had prevailed in the Roman Catholic Church for centuries ended. The church requires excommunication for abortions at any stage of pregnancy."
http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_hist.htm
Copyright © 1997 to 2004 incl. by Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance
Author: B.A. Robinson
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Here is a short, partial history of abortion.
"In ancient times, the "delayed ensoulment" belief of Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was widely accepted in Pagan Greece and Rome. He taught that a fetus originally has a vegetable soul. This evolves into an animal soul later in gestation. Finally the fetus is "animated" with a human soul. This latter event, called "ensoulment," was believed to occur at 40 days after conception for male fetuses, and 90 days after conception for female fetuses. The difference was of little consequence, because in those days, the gender of a fetus could not be determined visually until about 90 days from conception, and no genetic tests existed to determine gender. Ultrasound devices were millennia in the future. Thus contraception and abortion were not condemned if performed early in gestation. It is only if the abortion is done later in pregnancy that a human soul is destroyed. By coincidence, this 90 day limit happens to be approximately equal to the end of the first trimester, the point at which the US Supreme Court decided that states could begin to restrict a woman's access to abortion.
There were three main movements within early Christianity. Two did not succeed: Jewish Christianity and Gnostic Christianity. The third, Pauline Christianity, flourished and evolved into the Christian Church. It was surrounded by a mosaic of other competing religions within the Roman Empire, including Judaism, the Greek state religion, Mithraism, the Roman state religion, and various Mystery religions. With the exception of Judaism, most or all of the competing religions allowed women to have abortions and allowed parents to strangle or expose (abandon) new-born babies as methods of population control. There are many writings, letters and petitions of early Christian philosophers and Church Fathers which equated abortion with infanticide and condemned both as murder.
St. Augustine (354-430 CE) reversed centuries of Christian teaching in Western Europe, and returned to the Aristotelian concept of "delayed ensoulment." He wrote 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.
Early in the 13th century, Pope Innocent III 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 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 revoked the Papal bull shortly after taking office in 1591. He reinstated the "quickening" test, which he said happened 116 days into pregnancy (16½ weeks).
In the 17th century, the concept of "simultaneous animation" gained acceptance within the medical and church communities in Western Europe. 9 This is the belief that an embryo acquires a soul at conception, not at 40 or 80 days into gestation as the church was teaching. In 1658 Hieronymus Florentinius, a Franciscan, asserted that all embryos or fetuses, regardless of its gestational age, which were in danger of death must be baptized. However, his opinion did not change the status of abortion as seen by the church.
Pope Pius IX reversed the stance of the Roman Catholic church once more. He dropped the distinction between the "fetus animatus" and "fetus inanimatus" in 1869. Canon law was revised in 1917 and 1983 and to refer simply to "the fetus." The tolerant approach to abortion which had prevailed in the Roman Catholic Church for centuries ended. The church requires excommunication for abortions at any stage of pregnancy."
http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_hist.htm
Copyright © 1997 to 2004 incl. by Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance
Author: B.A. Robinson
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
