Abortion: From Ancient Rome to Christian Greece

The people in antiquity who supported abortion almost always also supported infanticide, exposure, or some broader utilitarian management of human life. Plato permits infanticide for the sake of the polis and eugenic purity. Aristotle permits exposure of deformed infants and allows abortion before “sense and life.” The Stoics reduce the fetus (and often the infant) to something morally disposable until rationality emerges. Once moral worth becomes conditional on usefulness, autonomy, cognition, or state utility, the category of the killable keeps expanding. But the groups who possessed a deep reverence for life consistently resisted both abortion and infanticide together. The Pythagoreans opposed abortion because they believed life itself bore divine significance from its earliest beginnings. Philo condemned exposure as murder in a culture where fathers could legally abandon infants to die. Early Christians outright rejected both abortion and infanticide while the surrounding Roman world normalized them. Even figures like Soranus and Scribonius, despite allowing limited procedures in some circumstances, still operated with a framework of medicine as fundamentally ordered toward healing rather than destruction. Contents 1) Greco-Roman Medical and Ethical Perspectives; 1.1 The Merciful Pharmacopoeia; 1.2 Political Controversy Rome and Early Procedures 2) Philo’s Theological Rebellion (against infanticide and abortion); 2.1 Peter Singer and Seneca; 2.2 The Pythagorean Care-for-Life and Embryology 3) Plato and Aristotle; 3.1 Plato’s Political Infanticide; 3.2 Aristotle’s Confusion 4) What have the Christians thought?; 4.1 Patristics to the Medievals; 4.2 Reformation to Today.