A Practice As Old As Pregnancy: A Brief History Of Abortion Around The World
With the ongoing debate happening in Malta at the present moment, many are losing sight of a crucial fact – abortion has always taken place around the world and quite probably always will.
Abortion is actually one of the oldest medical procedures in the world, and evidence of it can be traced back to Ancient Egypt. In fact, it only first became criminalised in the West in the 19th century.
Let’s take a look back.
Ancient Egypt
According to a University Research Paper by Malcolm Potts and Martha Campbell, the first recorded proof of abortion dates back to Ancient Egypt in 1550 BCE.
It mostly involved physical strenuous labour and herbal drinks to induce an abortion. Some archaeological findings suggest that some surgical abortion was performed, but it is believed to have been uncommon given that there is very little mention of them in ancient documentation.
Greco-Roman World
In Ancient Greece, both Plato and Aristotle believed that abortion could be used as a form of population control, and that human value lies in its social value.
It is thought that the Ancient Greeks attributed neither a soul nor a right to life to a foetus. Plato refers to the ability of midwives who were also gynaecologists to induce abortion.
As with many things, the Romans had the same belief.
They saw the foetus as part of the woman’s body, and that it was not a real person until it is birthed, thus not punishing abortion as murder.
Christianity
The argument slightly shifted when Christianity came about. However, not too much at first… in truth until the 1800s, women healers in Western Europe and the U.S. performed abortions and instructed other women to do so, without any legal consequences or shame.
St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, two of the greatest Christian philosophers, believed that the abortion of a fully developed foetus was murder, but their opinion on earlier-stage abortion was similar to that of the early Greeks.
Their belief was that the foetus only gains its rational soul when the body is fully developed, otherwise it still occupies a vegetative or animal soul.
Abortion was only entirely punishable if done to hide an illicit sex act, for example, having an affair outside of marriage.
Today the Roman-Catholic fate opposes abortion from conception.
Criminalisation
Although the 19th century saw a lot of advancements in the medical field, societal views on abortion took a drastic turn.
Countries started banning abortion by law in the late 1800s, however it only pushed it underground. In fact, one out of five women in the 19th Century were still having abortions.
In 1847, the American Medical Association (AMA) formed together to fight for the banning of abortion. The AMA was a male-dominated association and lacked both knowledge and expertise on pregnancy and reproductive rights.
Their mission was successful, and as abortion became criminalised, the stigma around it grew.
Sadly, illegal abortions led to a high death toll.
This is parallel to what was happening in Europe, with both legal and religious condemnation becoming prominent in the 1860s. Abortion was considered a criminal act in most of Western Europe, through the 1810 Napoleonic legal code.
With Pope Pius IX declaring the foetus to have a soul from the minute of conception in 1869, many Catholics started to support the AMA’s anti-abortion views and campaigns.
The Re-Legalisation of Abortion
Many women started to take action in the 60s and 70s to make abortion legal again. One could not avoid the statistical number of women facing abortion-related complications due to the criminalisation of it.
Many feminists wanted to have autonomy over their body.
To this day, many European countries restrict abortion to the first trimester, and it is simply a service provided by the healthcare system. Malta however is still awfully behind.
History has shown that criminalising abortion doesn’t stop many women from getting one but rather pushes it underground. Therefore, in practice, the question is whether abortions should take place legally in a safe environment or illegally in an unsafe one.
As defined by the World Health Organisation, an unsafe abortion is “a procedure for terminating an unwanted pregnancy either by people lacking the necessary skills, or in an environment lacking minimal medical standards, or both.”
In this sense, the legal status of abortion will not determine whether a woman will abort an unwanted pregnancy but rather whether she will have access to safe abortion services.
What do you make of all of this?
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