Living beings are born from each other from seed, and birth from earth is impossible. The seed is a drop of brain containing hot steam inside. When it is deposited in the uterus, ichor and nerves and bones and hair and the entire body is composed. Soul and sense and produced from steam.
This notion of forty days is important because followers of this thought believed that abortion was fine in the sense that if the fetus was aborted before 40 days then a human life wasn’t being aborted, but after 40 days, it was considered to be a human being and shared all the rights that are associated with living, breathing human beings. However, those who believed that a human was formed at the moment of conception obviously abhor the idea of abortion because no matter the time period of gestation, a human being is formed when the paternal sperm and maternal egg unite. It was also interesting to see that this idea was attributed to Plato and his school by Galen and the unknown author of Whether what is carried in the womb is a living being. The second school of thought believed that human life beings at birth and while it was a visible minority, it really took off during the period of Hellenistic medicine and was promoted by the stoics (Kapparis p.42). It was attributed to Empedocles (490 BC) who denied the notion that an embryo was a living being. “Empedocles (said) that the embryo is not a living being, but (accepted) that it breathes in the womb, however, it breathes like a living being only after birth” (Kapparis p.41) This idea is interesting because in order to believe that life occurs at birth, then the air has to physically infuse the body with a soul in order to make it alive. Kapparis also notes that while these philosophers believed that the embryo wasn’t a human being, the issue of abortion was still not completely black and white. While they did not believe it was homicide, it wasn’t a justifiable practice either.
The last school of thought believed that the human life begins while the fetus is growing (gradualist view) and was mostly championed by Galen and Hippocratic writers. The analogy most used in the texts and articles that I read compared the growing fetus to a seed. These ancients believed that as time passed, the womb would expand due to the growth of the fetus. As Hanson describes in “The Gradualist View of Fetal Development”, “Hippocratic doctors described the physical development of the fetus as happening gradually over the months of pregnancy, culminating in the vigorous animal-like creature who punched its way out from an inert womb at birth.” While these great philosophers were debating the issue of life, their writings had great impact on religious practices for centuries and continue to do so as I observed from reading the writings of Hippocrates. In volume 9, Hippocrates says “Fourty-day periods decide in fetuses first that any one which survives beyond the first fourty days will escape the miscarriages which occur all that time...when this term has passed, fetuses have become stronger and the body is differentiated” (Hippocrates p.91). St. Augustine picked up on this in (354-430 AD) when he claimed in Enchiridion that early abortion is not homicide. “But who is not rather disposed to think that unformed fetuses perish like seeds which have not fructified" (Pennington Law).
As noted above, I kept returning to this notion of 40 days and even Aristotle believed that abortion before a certain point was considered to be just a method of population control. “people have a child as a result of intercourse in contravention of these regulations, abortion must be practised on it before it has developed sensation and life; for the line between lawful and unlawful abortion will be marked by the fact of having sensation and being alive” (Politics book 7, section 1335b). The reason that I focused so much on the gradualist theory in regards to human life is because it is so pertinent today. Many of the laws that deal with abortion in America and other countries come strictly from the notion that the fetus becomes alive sometime during gestation. In the landmark case, Roe v. Wade, “the court ruled that states may not prevent women from having an abortion during the first six months of pregnancy. It did permit a state to forbid abortions during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy, but it added the proviso "except when it is necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother." While the ancients were quick to forgo all ethical and moral dilemmas, regarding abortion when the mother’s life was at stake, some states today do not. Currently in Oklahoma, the state is deciding on a bill which would force women who are considering abortion to view and listen to the fetus through ultrasound technology which has become quite advanced in the last ten years as seen by the picture below.
Another law which is being considered in South Dakota would allow the killing of the physicians who abort fetuses (New York Times). This is quite disturbing because while the issue of abortion has remained constant throughout history, it seems that the modern society is more savage than the ancients.
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