The Ancients on Abortion

Teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy last semester, I hopedto cruise through the Purgatorio to make sure we completed the Paradisoby semester’s end. But my students wouldn’t let me skip canto 25—they stoppedthere, awestruck. I think we spent longer in the seventh cornice on the mountof purgatory than Dante did.

There Statius explains to Dante the generation of theembryo, and how the embryo passes through various stages before it can beconsidered a rational human: “This active power,” reads Robert M. Durling’stranslation, “having become a soul like that of a plant, but different in sofar as it is still under way, while the other is already in port,”

next works until it moves and has feeling like a seasponge, and then it undertakes to shape organs for the faculties of which it isthe seed
. . . as soon as in the foetus the articulation of the brainhas been completed,
the first Mover turns to it, rejoicing over the greatness ofNature’s art, and breathes into it a new spirit, replete with power,
that . . . becomes one single soul, that lives and feels andturns itself back to itself.

My Catholic, pro-life students peppered me with questions:“Does Dante not believe that the embryo is initially a person? WouldDante have supported abortion?” The most pressing question, was, perhaps: “IfDante had the scientific information we have now, would he still think thefetus was more plant-like before it became a human?”

This last question gets at how Dante—and the ancients—treatscience. Dante’s understanding of embryology was based on the most up-to-datemedical information of his day, but it was only up-to-date in the most limitedsense. It was based upon the views of the fetus espoused by the fifth- orfourth-century b.c. Hippocraticcorpus and Aristotle’s fourth-century b.c.On the Generation of Animals.

The debate over when life begins is not a modern phenomenon,but one the ancients understood and considered crucial. Before there werepro-life and pro-choice blogs and op-eds, there were treatises on the embryo,and they were written in Greek.

The people who began this debate were not Christian; theywere Hellenic philosophers who also considered themselves what we moderns wouldterm “scientists.” While many did not lay claim to an absolute protection forthe human embryo from the beginning, they did, as philosophers and scientistsboth, ruminate on the beginnings of embryonic ensoulment: whether the embryocould be said to be bereft of a soul until the moment of its first breath(which is to say, at birth), or whether it attained a soul gradually during itsdevelopment in utero, or whether it had a soul at the moment of conception.

The ancients based their opinions on data gathered fromstudies of the pregnant mother or through the dissection and vivisection ofpregnant animals. While the arguments on the nature of the embryo were complicatedand far-ranging, differing from author to author, their ideas of whether anembryo had a soul were based on the limited evidence available. Likely theiropinions would have been quite different with the knowledge modern technologyaffords us.

The “at first breath” argument is offered mostcomprehensively in To Gaurus: On How Embryos are Ensouled, a textbelieved to have been written by Porphyry, a third-century student of the“founder” of Neoplatonism, Plotinus. He argues that the fetus, rooted andplant-like, does not receive a soul and hence is not a human person until itsfirst breath.

In the introduction, Porphyry suggests that thosespeculating on the nature of the embryo can be divided into four campsaccording to their views on the moment of ensoulment: with the creation andrelease of semen; when the embryo is first formed (between the first thirty andforty-two days of pregnancy); when the embryo first moves (between the firstthree and four months of pregnancy); and, finally, at birth.

The first group he treats believes the embryo is ensouledwhen the semen is released into the womb. While the prevailing view on ancientembryology held that the fetus was ensouled at some point during development,many Stoic philosophers interpreted Plato’s Timaeus and Laws asdescribing the ensoulment of the embryo at the time of conception.

Christian theologians held a version of this position. Some,like Tertullian in his Apologia, argued that it is unlawful to destroythe soul even while it is coming into birth, for “he is a man who is to be aman,” because “the fruit is always present in the seed.” Basil of Caesarea, inhis letters to Amphilochius, charges the woman who engages in abortion withmurder and states that it is not permissible for men to make any distinctionbetween whether a person is formed or unformed.

The second and third groups Porphyry delineates can becollected into one: those who believe the embryo attains a soul at some pointduring its development. Those adhering to the gradual process of ensoulmentinclude Aristotle, who in his On the Generation of Animals attributes tothe earliest embryo a vegetative existence animated or informed by a nutritivesoul; to the later embryo, resembling a little animal, a “sensitive soul”; andto the formed fetus, recognizably human, a rational or intellectual soul thatencapsulates but does not replace the other two.

The Hippocratic Nature of the Child likewise held agradualist view of the development of the fetus. As the time for birth drewnear, the fetus moved from the animal-like embryo to the human child.

In his Formation of the Fetus, Galen says that thefetus gradually moves from a plant-like state until in the final period itacquires the capacity for the heat of a warm-blooded creature, its heart beginsto beat, and it moves on its own. Although a gradualist in his determinationson fetal development, he criticizes the Hippocratic opinion, which denied thatthe fetus moves on its own and attributed the apparent motion to a swaying ofthe uterus. He insists that the fetus moves by impulse—an important attribute ofthe animal, as opposed to the plant.

In To Gaurus, Porphyry’s main concern is to establishthe plant-like nature of the embryo over and above its animal-like qualities.To do so, he defines the psychological features of animals as includingsensation, impulse, and movement, qualities he denies a growing fetuspossesses. He argues that just as plants nourish themselves through theirroots, so the fetus nourishes itself through its “stalk-like” umbilical cord,while the newborn baby eats through its mouth like an animal.

He further denies the animal soul to the developing fetus,describing how both plants and fetuses experience passive motion, while animalsand newborn babies move themselves. He also argues that the fetus lackssensation, as is apparent in its lack of self-motion and silence.

Porphyry reserves the moment of ensoulment for the time ofbirth. At the moment of birth, the self-moving individual soul arrives into thebody of the newborn in an ensouling process controlled by a metaphysical entitycalled “the World Soul.”

In all these descriptions, we see two motivations at work: ascientific one and an ideological one. What the ancient debates on the questionof the embryo have in common is a scientific adherence to what is empiricallyknown about the embryo. But other concerns affected their scientific determinations.

Platonist metaphysics drives many of Porphyry’s views in ToGaurus. He must maintain the structure of the Neoplatonic cosmos in hisunderstanding of when a body receives a soul. In order for the World Soul tohave power over the individual soul, the body can only receive a soul at thetime of birth. This should lead the reader to question his science (alreadyquestionable given the limitations of medical observation in the fourth centurya.d.).

Ultimately, however, the ancient philosophers contemplatingembryology thought of themselves as scientists. That the science—and presumablychanges in it—could so explicitly shape their philosophical conclusions is theprimary difference between the ancient debates on embryology and the modernone. In our world, the question driving the debate is not how an embryodevelops but whether the liberty of one life (the mother) trumps the existenceof another. Hence, in the modern debates, we see figures like Peter Singertying themselves up in philosophical knots to show that even a school-aged childshould not be considered a rational person.

In the ancient debates, scientists and philosophers usedcriteria such as reaction to stimuli, modes of nutrition, and origin of motionto determine when the embryo receives a soul and can be considered a person.Knowing what we know today, Hippocrates, Galen, Porphyry, and Aristotle wouldbe required to admit that the fetus reacts to stimuli, such as light and sound,and is self-moving—traits far from “plant-like.”

For all of their idiosyncratic talk of plant and animalsouls, the ancients at least would have recognized a twelve-week-old babymoving in his mother’s womb as a person with a soul. In the journey to protectthe unborn, O Statius, we still have a long way to go before we reachParadise.

Sarah Klitenic Wear is associate professor of classics atFranciscan University of Steubenville.

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