What are we to think of abortion?
From the beginning, the Church has confessed that human life is God’s gift from conception: “You formed my inward parts; You knitted me together in my mother’s womb… Your eyes beheld my unformed substance” (Psa 139:13–16); “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jer 1:5); “Did not he who made me in the womb make him? And did not one fashion us in the womb?” (Job 31:15). The Scriptures speak of the unborn not as a possibility but as a person under God’s care and calling, Jacob and Esau striving in Rebekah’s womb (Gen 25:22–23), Samson consecrated “from the womb” (Jdg 13:5), the Servant and the Apostle called and set apart from their mothers’ wombs (Isa 49:1; Gal 1:15), and the Gospel seals this with an encounter: the unborn Forerunner, six months in Elizabeth’s womb, leaped for joy at the approach of the unborn Lord, days conceived in Mary’s (Luk 1:41–44; see Q542). The Incarnation itself is the final word: the eternal Son took our nature not as an infant at Bethlehem but as an embryo at Nazareth, the Annunciation, not the Nativity, is the feast of the Word made flesh, so that every stage of life in the womb has been assumed, sanctified, and forever dignified by God himself. What God has personally inhabited, no one may call disposable tissue.
The apostolic Church therefore condemned abortion from her first generation, in an ancient world where it was common and lawful. The most ancient Christian instruction commands: “you shall not murder a child by abortion, nor kill one that has been born” (Didache, 2.2; likewise Epistle of Barnabas 19.5); Athenagoras testified to the emperor that Christians “call abortionists murderers, and say that they will have to give account to God” (Athenagoras, Plea for the Christians 35); and Tertullian gave the principle its lasting form: “to hinder a birth is merely a speedier man-killing; he also is a man who is about to be one: the whole fruit is already in the seed” (Tertullian, Apology, 9). When later speculation sought refuge in distinctions about the fetus’s stage of development, St Basil closed the door: “she who deliberately destroys the fetus is answerable for murder; and any fine distinction as to whether it was formed or unformed is not admitted among us” (St Basil the Great, canon 2; see Q017, Q024), a canon ratified by the Council in Trullo (canon 91), which decrees the penance of murder alike for those who procure abortions and for those who supply the means. The Orthodox Churches teach the same today without wavering: “the Church regards abortion as a grave sin… the deliberate termination of pregnancy17 is equivalent to murder” (Basis of the Social Concept, XII.2), a judgment that falls not on the mother alone, and often not on her chiefly: the same teaching names the responsibility of the father, of family and physicians who counsel or pressure toward the act, and of a society that abandons women to choose between poverty and their child; for the child’s blood cries out also against every hand and voice that opened the way (cf. Gen 4:10; see Q577). Responsibility, moreover, begins before conception. A man and a woman who freely unite in the act that can give life accept, by that very act, responsibility for the life that may come of it: a child so conceived is not an accident to be undone but a person entrusted to them both. For this reason, the Church calls her children to keep the union of the body for the covenant of marriage, where a child can be received in love (Heb 13:4; see Q584), and she asks the father, no less than the mother, to bear the consequences of his act with fidelity and care, as the Law already required of the man who seduced a woman (Exo 22:16) and as the Apostle requires of all who would provide for their own (1Ti 5:8). The Christian community is thereby bound to the positive duty its confession implies: to make the choice for life bearable, surrounding mothers in crisis with material help, adoption, and honor rather than shame (Jas 1:27; 2:15–16; see Q055, Q252).
The same document provides for the tragic case in which the continuation of a pregnancy directly threatens the life of the mother, especially when she has other children: the Church then calls for pastoral wisdom, and a woman who has ended her pregnancy in such a situation is not excluded from Communion (Basis of the Social Concept, XII.2). Medical treatment necessary to save the mother’s life where the child cannot survive, as in an ectopic pregnancy, is not to be confused with abortion.
Yet, the same canons that name the sin also appoint the medicine of repentance, and the Church’s severity toward the act is matched by her tenderness toward the penitent. St Basil himself, having named the sin murder, immediately moderated its penance, directing that its measure be set “not by time but by the manner of repentance” (Basil, canons 2 and 8; see Q017, Q024); and the Church knows well that many who mourn an abortion were themselves frightened, deceived, or coerced. She therefore receives with pastoral love all who repent, mothers, fathers, and all who took part, and leads them through confession to the full forgiveness and healing of Christ: “if we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous so that he will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1Jo 1:9; see Q234). No sin sincerely repented places a soul beyond the blood of Christ (Isa 1:18; 1Ti 1:15–16; see Q055, Q153); the child is in the hands of a merciful God; and the woman who grieves is not the Church’s outcast but her daughter, called, like the sinful woman who loved much, to hear the Lord’s own verdict: “your sins are forgiven… go in peace” (Luk 7:47–50).
For instance, in Eusebius (circa 315): “Since I have mentioned this city [Caesarea Philippi / Paneas], I do not think it proper to omit an account which is worthy of record for posterity. The people there say that the woman with an issue of blood [Luk 8:43–48] came from this place, and that her house is shown in the city. Remarkable memorials of the kindness of the Saviour to her remain there, or there stands upon an elevated stone, by the gates of her house, a brazen image of a woman kneeling, with her hands stretched out, as if she were praying. Opposite this is another upright image of a man, made of the same material, clothed decently in a double cloak, and extending his hand toward the woman. At his feet, beside the statue itself, is a certain strange plant, which climbs up to the hem of the brazen cloak, and is a remedy for all kinds of diseases. They say that this statue is an image of Jesus. It has remained to our day, so that we ourselves also saw it when we were staying in the city. Nor is it strange that those of the Gentiles who, of old, were benefited by our Saviour, should have done such things, since we have learned also that the likenesses of his apostles Paul and Peter, and of Christ himself, are preserved in paintings, the ancients being accustomed, as it is likely, according to a habit of the Gentiles, to pay this kind of honor indiscriminately to those they consider as deliverers.” (Ecclesiastical History, Book 7, Chapter 18)
