Abortion: No Sin Without Religion

I was sitting in a class today and somehow we got onto the greatly controversial subject of abortion. This brought out some adamant for and against arguments about women’s rights and labelling it murder, wrong and evil etc. It was pointed out that it has been around throughout history and accepted in many civilisations as an every day occurrence which made me question, what has changed? I know there are many reasons that abortion is considered necessary today ranging from the age of the parent, rape, money to gender preference, but I was more interested in the general attitudes of society. There could many reasons for this subject to become controversial over time including society’s attitudes and tolerance towards violence and murderer, the influence of religion or even the state of the population today.

Looking at history I saw that evidence of infanticide dates back to the Neolithic times where groups used it to control their numbers so the land upon which they lived could support them. In prehistoric times skeletons of cannibalised hominid children were found, one expert estimated that this happened to a rate of 15% – 20% of births. In Palaeolithic times an estimated 50% of female babies were killed, a trend that has survived even today in Asia especially China where there has been a ‘one-child policy’ since 1979. The Incan tribes of Mesoamerica believed in child sacrifice to subdue the wrath of their Gods and this was also practiced by the ancient Babylonians to their goddess Ishtar. Phoenicians, Canaanites and Moabites offered their first-born as a sacrifice. The Pelasgians killed every 10th child giving us the word ‘decimate’ and according to the Old Testament, the Sepharvites burned their children as sacrifices to the sun God Adrammelech. Now child sacrifice is a world away from abortion but most ancient societies disposed of defective and unwanted children in some manner. It was a normal action to murder your child should it have a disability, the mindset of these people is very different to ours today; killing was a part of life, of survival.

Germanic tribes along with the ancient Greeks and Romans practiced a form of abortion called exposure which left a newborn out alone to fend for itself and thus probably die. Roman law insisted that a visibly deformed child be put to death though many perfectly healthy female children were killed as a male was preferred, the Roman patriarch (head male of the family) made this decision. In Sparta the decision to expose a child was given by the city elders or Ephors, any visible deformities or disabilities that would stop the baby from becoming a soldier meant death was imminent. This was true for females also, they could not be impaired; their purpose was to bear future generations of Spartan soldiers. Methods of abortion have been described in ancient Greece by Hippocrates himself and even in the medieval Islamic world. We can see from this that the taking of a child’s life was no more controversial than putting ketchup on chips so what changed?