How did the Catholic Church “position” on abortion and contraception come about? Many would point to “Humanae Vitae,” the encyclical issued during the papacy of Pope Paul VI, and whose 40th anniversary is to be observed this week, as the source of that “position.”
But it turns out that Catholics and Christians have been grappling with these issues—and terms clustered around them like sex, marriage, fertility, choice and self-determination—long before Paul VI put his signature on “Humanae Vitae.”
The source of our discussion is a book called “Sacred Choices: The Right to Contraception and Abortion in Ten World Religions,” written by Daniel Maguire, professor of ethics in the theology department of Marquette University (Fortress Press, 2001), and the discussion of the “Catholic story” in this matter is based in large part on studies by Christine Gudorf, a theologian and laywoman.
Christianity, points out Gudorf, “was born in a world in which contraception and abortion were both known and practiced.” Egyptians, Jews, Greeks and Romans used a variety of contraception methods, including coitus interruptus, pessaries, potions, and condoms; and abortion was believed to be widely practiced. But even before the coming of Christianity, abortion and contraception were not the only, or primary, means of limiting fertility in Europe. Infanticide was.
Gudorf cites records showing the high incidence of “accidental” infant deaths caused by “rolling over” or smothering of infants, or deaths reported as “stillborn.” During the Middle Ages, however, “infanticide was much less common than abandonment,” with infants left at crossroads, on doorsteps or in marketplaces in hopes that the babies would find adoptive parents.
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Alarmed by the number of abandoned babies, the Catholic Church provided for “oblation,” in which abandoned babies were “offered up” to the Church, raised in religious monasteries where many eventually became nuns and monks.
Coupled with this was the establishment of foundling hospitals, where an infant could be placed inside a rotating cradle anonymously, “surrendered” to the caring personnel inside. (A version of this may still be in use at the Hospicio de San Jose in Manila.) But Gudorf notes that the majority of abandoned babies were dead within a few months. “The primary pastoral battles in the first millennium were around infanticide, the banning of which undoubtedly raised the incidence of abandonment,” writes Gudorf.
“Catholic teaching on contraception and abortion has been anything but consistent,” notes Maguire. Before the issuance of the 1930 encyclical “Casti Connubii” of Pope Pius XI, through which the Pope hoped to “tidy up” the many traditions and beliefs on the issue, Church teaching was a “mixed bag.”
Writes Maguire: “Although it is virtually unknown in much public international discourse, the Roman Catholic position on abortion is pluralistic… The hierarchical attempt to portray the Catholic position as univocal, an unchanging negative wafting through 20 centuries of untroubled consensus, is untrue.”
“Ensoulment,” or when a fetus acquired a soul, was an issue for many theologians in the early years of the Church. Gudorf writes that “the common pastoral view was that ensoulment occurred at quickening, when the fetus could first be felt moving in the mother’s womb… Before ensoulment, the fetus was not understood as a human person. This was the reason the Catholic Church did not baptize miscarriages or stillbirths.”
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In the 15th century, Antoninus, the archbishop of Florence, did extensive work on abortion. “He approved of early abortions to save the life of the woman … and this became common teaching. He was not criticized by the Vatican for this. Indeed, he was later canonized as a saint and thus a model for all Catholics. Many Catholics do not know that there exists a pro-choice Catholic saint who was also an archbishop and a Dominican.”
In the 16th century, Antoninus de Corduba said that medicine that was also abortifacient could be taken even later in a pregnancy if the mother’s health required it. “The mother, he insisted, had a jus prius, or prior right. Some of the maladies he discussed do not seem to have been matters of life and death for the women, and yet he allowed that abortifacient medicine was morally permissible, even in these cases.”
In 1869, the Vatican was invited to enter a debate on a very late-term abortion requiring dismemberment of a formed fetus in order to save the woman’s life. The Vatican refused to issue a judgment, referring the questioner instead to the teaching of theologians on the issue. “It was, in other words, the business of the theologians to discuss it freely and arrive at a conclusion. It was not for the Vatican to decide. This appropriate modesty and disinclination to intervene is an older and wiser Catholic model,” comments Maguire.
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This short review of Catholic Church teaching on abortion and contraception, says Maguire, shows that a “pro-choice” position coexists alongside a “no choice” position in Catholic tradition and history.
Gudorf says that the Catholic position on abortion is “undeveloped,” with no coherent Catholic teaching on the matter. “Abortion was not the birth limitation of choice because it was, until well into the 20th century, so extremely dangerous to the mother.” Some Catholic scholars say all direct abortions are wrong, others assert that some exceptions exist, such as danger to the mother, rape, detected genetic abnormalities, etc. Gudorf, ever sensible, puts it this way: “The best evidence is that the Catholic position is not set in stone and is rather in development.”
