What Becomes You by Anne Barbeau Gardiner

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.

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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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