Today, we look at the five camps of abortion belief, and the history of abortion since
1500 before Christ, and how abortion went from not mentioned at all in the United States
to illegal in the United States.
And that is next.
Hey, welcome back to the Barry Ferris Show.
Today, we're going to look at the five camps of abortion belief, the history of abortion,
and how abortion became illegal.
You know, abortion was a controversy way before this 1973 decision.
There are basically five camps.
The first camp believes that abortion is always morally wrong, unless to prevent the death
of the mother.
Otherwise, this camp believes it's the taking of innocent life.
Many in this camp believe contraception is fine, but elective abortion is morally wrong.
The second camp believes that it's mostly morally wrong, but that when competing with
other bad outcomes, an abortion is the lesser of two evils.
For example, they add the rare instances of rape or incest causing a pregnancy, in addition
to the instance of the life of the mother being at risk.
Like the first camp, though, this second camp does believe that abortion is wrong as a means
of birth control, family planning, sex selection, or convenience.
The third camp believes that abortion is mostly morally okay, up to about the midpoint
in the pregnancy.
This camp allows for exceptions beyond rape, incest, and the life of the mother.
For example, this camp believes abortion is acceptable after considering the mental and
the physical condition of the birth mother, her economic situation, potential disabilities,
and most controversially, as a backup to failed contraception.
The fourth camp does not believe that abortion on demand is morally wrong almost all the
time.
This camp believes that as long as the baby is not living on its own outside of the womb,
it's okay to abort for any reason.
Many of the people in this camp have shifted to the second or the third camp with modern
high-definition ultrasound technology.
When you see the fingers moving, it affects you.
But the believers in this camp believe abortion is not morally wrong until it's likely that
the baby would survive outside of the womb naturally.
The fifth camp believes that abortion is not morally wrong at all, under any circumstances.
In fact, upon demand, abortion is good under any circumstances.
In fact, upon the demand of the mother, it's morally right.
This camp believes that abortion on demand solves problems like overpopulation, disability,
and poverty, so it's good.
This camp includes abortion at partial birth.
Some people in this camp believe abortion on demand is morally right even immediately
after the baby is already fully born, past partial birth.
So these five camps have, in round numbers, explained the source of the controversy around
abortion.
For the most part, everyone is in one of those camps of belief when it comes to abortion.
Abortion is not new.
Historically, we know that abortions were performed since at least 1500 BC.
They induced the abortion in a variety of ways, with herbs, lying on a coconut shell,
tightening the girdle, strenuous physical activity, all kinds of things.
Asia used a type of massage and an herbal mix to induce abortion.
Native New Zealanders formulated a mix of herbs.
By around 450 BC, the West used some form of pessary.
That's a removable device.
It's kind of like a tampon.
They would soak it in what was allegedly an effective miscarriage-inducing herb.
Midwives were the primary abortion clinic in ancient Greece.
They used the herb, solithium.
Apparently, it was very effective.
This was really popular with the Cyrenes.
Other concoctions of rue, egg, and dill were popular.
You know, rue does contain some abortive compounds, according to modern scientific studies.
So going back in time, Aristotle, the Greek philosopher who lived from 384 to 322 BC,
thought abortion in the early days of the pregnancy was less cruel than exposing unwanted
infants to the elements.
He further explains his position on the procedure.
When couples have children in excess, this is his quote, let abortion be procured before
sense and life have begun.
What may or may not be lawfully done in these cases depends on the question of life and
sensation.
In other words, Aristotle believed that up until the baby was alive and felt pain that
abortion would be okay.
He believed that in the early days of the pregnancy, the baby couldn't feel anything
and wasn't really fully alive.
And in this instance, if the family couldn't afford another kid...
go ahead with the abortion. He would sort of be in Camp 3.
Yet, his predecessor by a hundred years,
Hippocrates, was clearly in the first camp.
Now we think of the Hippocratic Oath of do
no harm, but the actual quote
condemns abortion. Here it is,
I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel,
and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce
abortion. With purity and holiness
I will pass my life and practice my
art. So, Hippocrates believed it was wrong for a medical doctor
to help induce abortions. Augustine, the Christian scholar, declared that
abortion was not a homicide, but it was a sin. He was sort of in the second camp.
Many Christian denominations today are in that second camp.
But the man whose namesake the Lutheran Church was established, Martin Luther,
said, and this is his quote, the God who declares that we are to be fruitful and
multiply
regards it as a great evil when human beings destroy their offspring.
He also condemned the practice where women would apparently jump on another
pregnant woman's belly to induce an abortion. Apparently those
Germans didn't know about the herbs used years before by the Syrenes.
John Calvin was clearly in the first camp. He wrote in his commentary
the following, the unborn though enclosed in the womb of his mother is already
a human being and it's almost monstrous
of a crime to rob it of life
which it has not yet begun to enjoy. Now
he was on pretty solid footing. The Old Testament laid out two arguments against
abortion.
The first argument against abortion in the Old Testament was that life was from
God.
He created the life in the womb uniquely and in his image.
The second was property. This argument was a bit complicated but it acknowledged
that accidents happen.
So if someone accidentally injured a woman while she was pregnant
and that caused a miscarriage, that person
would be required to pay a fine to help cover the cost
and the grief of the miscarriage. You don't grieve
for an it, you grieve for a person. So in the early centuries AD most to the West
allowed
for abortion before quickening. Now quickening is roughly defined
as the first time the mother can feel the cute little baby
kick. So this belief was that the life was not formed until somewhere between
14 and 26 weeks
into the pregnancy. The concept here was that God might have set things in motion
to form some of the physical aspects of the fetus but the fetus
was not a living breathing life with a soul
until about midterm or about 18 to 20 weeks on average.
So even the people of faith until
until really about the 1800s it was not a moral problem to destroy the fetus
for the Westerners up to the quickening. Before the quickening
the fetus was not considered a life yet. Science had not yet proven
that after the egg attaches to the uterus some cells become
the placenta while others become the embryo. They had no idea that the heart
begins beating during week
five. They didn't know that the brain spinal cord and other
organs are beginning to form at the same time. They had no idea that a high
visibility picture
at week eight shows a small but fully formed
fetus. They had no idea that the fetus was growing and developing on its own in
a protective womb.
So abortion up to the time of quickening
was viewed as no greater ethical problem up through the 1800s
than just some form of surgery. Now at this time
England was actually much more strict than the US.
In England up until 1803 abortion was defined as a crime
after quickening. So they had that same concept of quickening
and you could get the death penalty for having an abortion past midterm.
Before then it was allowed. In 1837 English law abolished both
the significance of quickening weakened the definition
and the death penalty for abortion was out the window. By the 1920s
English law added an exception for preserving the life of the mother
and in 1938 England expanded the life of the mother to include potential mental
anguish. And this really broadened things. It came from a rape case of a
poor little 14-year-old girl. So the judge argued that the continuance of the
pregnancy
could cause the mother to be a physical or mental wreck. Those were his words.
And as such the jury can expand and broaden the definition of preserving the
life of the mother.
Now back in America abortion was common in colonial times.
So before we were a country they used black root
and cedar root as well as other methods. In the British colonies
in the US abortions were legal if they were performed before
quickening. That was the time frame when they thought life started.
They were illegal in Spanish and Portuguese colonies
pretty much all the time.
The French colonies allowed abortions even though they were technically illegal, they just kind of looked the other way.
There is evidence of legal and medical records of abortions dating all the way back into that colonial period.
In some instances it was kept hush-hush, but that was more due to the stigma of unmarried sex.
It was not really kept hush-hush due to the belief that you were potentially killing a child.
As long as the abortion was performed before quickening, it was believed that the fetus was not alive yet and it was allowed.
Now, in the United States after the Declaration of Independence, which was in 1776, as you know,
until the mid-1800s abortion was viewed as socially unacceptable but not illegal in most states.
During the 1860s a whole bunch of states started passing laws outlawing abortion, but they were ambiguous and pretty hard to enforce.
After 1860, stronger laws against abortion were passed and these laws were more vigorously enforced.
As a result, many women began utilizing underground abortion services. They were all over the place, lots of midwives.
While England was liberalizing their abortion laws, the United States was going in the opposite direction in those 1800s.
Theories abound on why that's the case, but the most likely answer to the question why
is the impact of two famous preachers who crisscrossed the country and the campaign of the Catholic Church.
The famous preacher and founder of the Methodist Church, John Wesley, emphasized spreading the gospel and renewing the church.
Abortion itself wasn't a big public issue for him. However, he opposed slavery and he made a detailed case for the government to put a stop to it.
He systematically and methodically, like he always did, he was a methodical Methodist, made an argument for the sacredness of human life.
He communicated how all people are created by God and they all have equal value.
Now Wesley died in 1791, just after we became a country and had our constitution ratified.
But he made a powerful point that had an impact on the state legislators later.
He argued against the libertarian notion that morals cannot be implemented at all through government.
He largely agreed that matters of the soul should be left to preachers and the free choice of people.
But Wesley made the case that it does help the nation to have some government guardrails to protect the innocent.
And he argued that slaves were innocent and they needed protecting.
This argument, along with Charles Finney, set the Catholics up for their concerted campaign
to make a moral equivalency argument between abortion and slavery.
They were both significant human rights violations.
So Charles Finney comes along and he was born a year after Wesley died, so he kind of carries you through the 1800s.
He was another real famous revival preacher that made his way across the United States.
He died in 1875.
Like many Protestants, he was a staunch opponent of slavery.
He helped slaves escape in the Underground Railroad.
And he would not serve communion to anyone who was involved in the slave trade.
He scolded churches in the South that did not take the right position on this abundantly clear human rights issue.
And he said that Christians who had slaves were absolutely living in sin.
And they needed to repent and change.
In churches that ignored the horror of slavery, he said they were complicit.
And by their silence, they were also part of the sin of slavery.
He said that slavery was a massive social wrong.
It was against God's principles and the church had better change
or the country was going to find itself in a bloody war.
Unfortunately, he was right about the bloody war.
But the Catholic Church took note.
The arguments he made against slavery were absolute arguments against slavery.
And to them, the same case could be made for the argument against abortion.
These are innocent people and they should be protected.
Slaves are innocent, worthy of freedom, dignity, and equal treatment.
The lives of the unborn are the most innocent of all.
They also deserve legal protection.
So in the mid-1800s, the Catholics led the charge to make those abortion laws that were kind of opaque more explicit.
An interesting partner for the Catholics in the mid-1800s was the medical profession.
It appears that they just wanted the midwives out of the business, that the doctors wanted control.
And they made the case that abortions were unsafe unless they were conducting them.
Never mind that these midwives had done it for years.
The Catholic Church allowed for this questionable partner to come along board because it added heft.
But the Catholic Church really, they're the ones that built the logical and the spiritual case for life.
Now their logical case kind of went like this.
The fetus cannot be understood to be a part of the mother's body in the same way of another organ or tissue.
The womb creates an environment for the fetus to grow and develop.
Out, it's either a boy or a girl.
The mom has no male genitalia.
She doesn't have any of that to give.
Therefore, the developing baby cannot be part of her body.
The womb in her body is a protective place
where both the sperm and the egg combine and develop.
Now, they didn't know empirically like we do
that when the sperm penetrates the egg
that the surface of the egg changes
so that no other sperm can enter.
And I don't think they knew scientifically like we do
that at that moment of fertilization,
the baby's genetic makeup is totally complete,
including whether it's a boy or girl,
but they made a pretty compelling logical case.
Now, their spiritual case started with,
thou shalt not murder.
The Bible defines murder as a killing for convenience.
In other words, all killings that are not in self-defense
or in a justified war.
Taking the life of innocent beings qualifies.
They continued their argument with Genesis 127,
where God said, let us make both male and female
in our image.
And they noted that it's the only special creation event
where God identifies himself as us.
In other words, all the other creation events are important,
but this is the one where we, the Trinity,
engage in creating people.
It's special.
And it always results in a boy or a girl
created in God's image.
They continued with Psalm 139,
where we're told that God fashions each child
together in the womb.
And in Jeremiah, where we find that God actually knows us
before we're born.
And that makes sense since God's all knowing.
And that validates that there's someone to know.
It's a person.
Then the Catholic Church demonstrated
in many places in scripture,
where God is against the shedding of innocent blood.
And that since God's the giver of life,
we should not intervene, especially with the innocent.
The campaign by the Catholic Church
was a very effective campaign.
And by 1910, abortion was illegal in all of the USA
with only one exception, to save the life of the mother.
But there was a counterforce developing.
This is how abortions became illegal in the first place.
But next time, we're gonna look at how the stage was set
for abortion to become legal
in the whole United States by 1973.
Until then, to your freedom.
Hi, I'm David Farah.
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The Barry Farah Show, Culture Shift.
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