John M. Riddle

Rough draft of a review going on here...

pp 20-21: As most of the Greek and Latin church fathers used Jewish scholars' interpretations of the Septuagint when it came to questions about souls and 'when life begins' (see Exodus 21:22), many of them (including St Augustine) made a distinction between 'formed' and 'unformed' fetuses and agreed that it should not be considered homicide or punishable as such if an 'unformed' fetus were intentionally aborted. Gregory of Nissa agreed too, writing that unformed embryos could not even be considered human. (See Gregory's Adversus Macedonianos.)

p 23: Riddle goes back to the Jewish tradition, pointing out that Hebrew religious law upheld the belief that there's a 30-40 day gap between conception and 'quickening', so that a woman couldn't even be rightly considered pregnant during the first 40 days.

Of course, as Riddle explains later, the key concern for most of these church fathers, scholars et cetera, and in Greek and Roman law, was *not* to make stands on abortion and contraception in terms of their religious morality or immorality (or in terms of women at all) but rather to ensure the rights of the fathers/husbands to their heirs. Riddle cites an oration by the Greek parodist Sopater, as well as that well-known Roman, Cicero. He then begins to explore where and when and how the Church's views on abortion began to change, such as illustrated in the ruling of the Roman judge Septimus Severus (AD/CE 193-211) that a woman accused of aborting her estranged husband's child should be punished by exile "for it would appear shameful that she could with impunity deprive her husband of children" (Riddle 63). Even here, Riddle notes, it was still not a question of life being sacred or of protecting the rights of the unborn, but rather of protecting the right of the father.

The church was also concerned with outlawing contraceptives *not* initially because they ended a pregnancy but, like the Romans, because the potions, herbs and ointments used to do so were considered 'witchcraft'. Thus you find plenty of cases against people accused of supplying an herbal/chemical means of abortion (especially if the woman died as a result of an overdose or poisoning or such) but few charges against those who used nonchemical means.

However, by the tail end of the 4th century AD/CE, Roman physicians were beginning to stipulate when abortion was or wasn't religiously (not legally, but expressly religiously) 'fas' or right. The physician Theodorus Priscianus, whose works on gynecology were still being copied and cited in the Middle Ages, stated for instance that it was not 'fas' to abort a fetus...unless the woman was too young or had too small a womb -- an early 'health of the mother' concession. So here we have a well-regarded source on women's health, still popular in the Middle Ages, in which the author provides not only information about how to have an abortion, "but, accompanying it, a moral justification: to save lives" (Riddle 92).

Riddle also finds, in the Middle Ages, numerous examples of church/secular disagreement about whether abortion was right or wrong, acceptable or a crime. Germanic, Allemanian, Bavarian and Ostrogoth law codes began to set specific punishments, from fines to lashes, for women found guilty of abortion or contraception use (109-10). Here too the Catholic church began narrowing down its positions on when the fetus gets a soul and becomes a protected quantity; Riddle cites bishop Caesarius of Arles, Columban, and Martin of Braga on things like the punishment/penance assigned for the sin of homicide by means of witchcraft (again, usually herbs). But even then the punishments were lesser if the abortion happened during the first 40 days. Apparently it was only in the 11th and 12th centuries, according to Riddle, as the church began really exerting its influence over western Europe politically, that the church started to really sharpen its stance. The message was hardly a unified one though; even the musician and abbess Hildegard of Bingen wrote on which herbs were best to 'regulate' a menstrual cycle, and which plants could be used to induce a miscarriage.

To be continued...… (más)