In this post, I'll talk some about Kristin Luker's narrative about historical perceptions of abortion in her 1984 book, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood.
Luker
goes back to the difference of opinion between the Pythagoreans of
ancient Greece and the Stoics. According to Luker, the Pythagoreans
held that "abortion is wrong because the embryo is the moral equivalent
of the child it will become" (page 11). The Stoics, however, did not
think that abortion was "tantamount to murder", although they
acknowledged that embryos had "some of the rights of already-born
children (and these rights may increase over the course of the
pregnancy)" (page 11). So, even in ancient times, there was reflection
about the extent to which an embryo was a full human being, with human
rights.
Luker also looks at ancient and medieval Christianity. While
she acknowledges that early Christianity opposed abortion and other
"barriers to procreation" (i.e., contraception, homosexuality), she
states that "the church's sanctions against abortion were almost never
as severe as the penalties for the murder of an adult person" (page 3).
For years, a prominent idea was that abortion was wrong after
quickening, "the point at which the woman can feel the embryo move
within her, an event that occurs during the fifth or sixth month of
pregnancy" (page 4).
In the nineteenth century, however, doctors
in the United States were attempting to establish their medical
authority, for there were long-standing factors that challenged it: the
lack of a medical guild, the absence of licensing laws, competition in
the field of medicine from the domestic sphere (i.e., home remedies,
midwives), and the fact that medical schools could not restrict their
admissions to the cream of the crop because they needed enough students
who could pay tuition. According to Luker, to establish their
medical authority, a number of physicians claimed that they knew
something that many did not know: that life began at conception, and so
both early and also late abortions were problematic.
Luker
narrates that physicians favored anti-abortion laws, but these laws did
not ban abortion. Rather, they allowed abortion when physicians deemed
it to be necessary to save the life and health of the mother. Some
physicians were strict in their application of this principle, and some
were more liberal. Essentially, the authority of the medical profession
was established and upheld, and, during this time, lawyers,
philosophers, and religious bodies usually did not weigh in on the
abortion issue, for they regarded it as the territory of the medical
profession.
Over time, however, that changed. With medical
advancement, there came to be very few cases in which childbirth would
threaten the physical health of the mother. And yet, there were physicians who allowed abortion when (according to
them) it would help the mother's mental health, and one rationale was
that this would save the mother's life by preventing her from committing
suicide. When mental health became more accepted as a justification
for abortion, others felt free to weigh in on the abortion
issue----churches, for example----perhaps because abortion appeared to
be no longer solely a medical issue.