What Becomes You
The Soul of the Embryo:
An Enquiry into the Status of the Human Embryo
in the Christian Tradition
by David Albert Jones
Continuum, 2004
(270 pages, $23.95, paperback)
reviewed by Anne Barbeau Gardiner
Christian tradition on abortion is misrepresented today, sometimes with invented facts. Some scholars, for example, claim that the early Christians opposed abortion because they feared that infants who died without baptism would go to hell. But according to David Albert Jones, no Christian text in the first millennium connects abortion to infant baptism.
Other, more effective misrepresentations give the facts a meaning they do not bear. Some scholars assert that abortion was not an offense under Catholic canon law until recently, and the Anglican (and pro-choice) bishop of Oxford told the House of Lords that the Catholic Church’s view of the embryo is only two centuries old. As we will see, neither of these facts mean what the pro-abortionists insist they mean.
The Definitive Account
Thankfully, in The Soul of the Embryo, David Albert Jones corrects such misrepresentations with a well-documented, definitive account of Christian tradition from the early Church to the twenty-first century. In a clear, irenic style, Jones, a Dominican theologian who directed the Linacre Centre for Healthcare Ethics in London and now teaches bioethics at the University of Surrey, shows that for two millennia Christians consistently “repudiated abortion at any stage of pregnancy.”
Starting with Jewish and pagan antiquity, Jones shows that in the Old Testament, the embryo was “the subject of God’s invisible informing activity,” the chosen one being called from and molded in the womb. No surprise, then, that the Jews considered deliberate abortion a grave sin against God and nature.
The first Christian text on abortion is in the Didache (first century), which states, “You shall not kill a child by abortion nor kill it after it is born.” The same teaching is found in other works of the second to the fourth centuries, including apocalyptic texts where people face their aborted children at the Judgment. In the fifth century, John Chrysostom calls abortion “something even worse than murder” because it involves killing one’s own flesh and blood.
At the start of the fourth century, Christians began to legislate on abortion: A synod in 305 gave a lifelong sentence for hiding adultery by abortion, but another in 314 reduced the penalty to ten years. Two laws promulgated by Basil the Great about 375 were especially important, since they were incorporated into the canons of the Eastern Church, where abortion, early or late, was termed homicide.
Basil wrote: “The woman who purposely destroys her unborn child is guilty of murder,” whether the child is “formed or unformed,” and those who take or give drugs “to destroy unborn children are murderesses.” Although the 20-year penalty he gave for homicide was twice that for abortion, a point used by some to claim that abortion was not considered murder, Jones calls it “a fallacy to think that where one offence is sometimes punished less severely than another then this act is only relatively offensive and that it may be ethically justified by the right circumstances.”
Opening to Error
Anne Barbeau Gardiner is Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She has published on Dryden, Milton, and Swift, as well as on Catholics of the 17th century.
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