Today, conversations around abortion in modern Christianity tend to take as a given the longstanding moral, religious and legal prohibition of the practice. Stereotypes of medical knowledge in the ancient and medieval worlds sustain the misguided notion that abortive and contraceptive pharmaceuticals and surgeries could not have existed in the premodern past.
This could not be further from the truth.
While official legal and religious opinions condemned the practice, often citing the health of women, a wealth of medical treatises produced by and for wealthy Christian women across the Middle Ages betray a radically different history—one in which women had a host of pharmaceutical contraceptives, Various practices for inducing miscarriages, and surgical procedures for the termination of pregnancies. When it came to saving a woman’s life, Christian physicians unhesitatingly recommended these procedures.
Since antiquity, the termination of pregnancies has long been associated with women at the margins of society, such as sex workers, and highlighted not only for the termination of the fetus's life, but for the great danger it posed to women. For instance, in the Hippocratic Oath, Hippocrates refuses to assist in or recommend euthanasia and additionally refuses to give women abortifacients given the danger to which they put the life of the mother.
Religiously, the Church Council of Ancyra in 314 A.D. stated that women found to have committed or attempted an abortion on themselves or others were to be exiled from the Church for 10 years, revising earlier suggestions that they be exiled for life. Yet, in the mid-fourth century, the Church Father Basil the Great revises these decrees, suggesting that time should not be proscriptive but dependent on the repentance of the person. There, however, he focuses not just on the fetus, but again on the danger of these procedures for women, who “usually die from such attempts.”
The laws of the early Christian world generally reflected these prohibitions, outlining exile as the punishment for whomever has performed an abortion or aided in one—or, death if the person dies in the process. Many of these laws were codified in the sixth-century Digest of Justinian, a legal compendium blamed on ancient legislative opinions.
However, these legal opinions betray the real complexity that abortions had in the ancient and medieval worlds. For example, the Digest cites the opinion of the jurist Tryphonius, where a woman was sentenced to death for undertaking an abortion, precisely because she did so with the malicious intent of denying her husband an heir by aborting the unborn inheritor. Legally, we see abortions being intimately associated with a patriarchal control of lineage and reproduction. The Digest clarifies that if a woman undertakes an abortion after a divorce, “so as to avoid giving a son to her husband who is now hateful,” however, she should only be temporarily exiled.