'Family Planning' in the Dark Ages
Thinking in the 7th century about family issues could be surprisingly modern and sophisticated.
In 1972, the year before the Supreme Court ruled in Roe V. Wade, the states of Alabama and Mississippi maintained more liberal access to abortion than the states of Vermont and California. (How things change.) New York, in contrast, seemed to have been pushing the envelope on abortion access. Meanwhile, one might recognize this stereotype: Gun rights advocates tend to be abortion foes; advocates for unrestricted access to abortion tend to be enthusiastic advocates for any and all restrictions on access to firearms.
Where people jointly align themselves with respect to access to firearms and abortion might be more nuanced, but in each case the Supreme Court has ruled that the states must maintain some minimum level of access. Heller v. District of Columbia 2008 requires states to provide some level of access to handguns. Heller constitutes the modern interpretation of the Second Amendment. Planned Parenthood v. Casey 1992, the successor to Roe v. Wade, requires states to provide some level of access to abortion. Roe required states to provide access up to the point of the external “viability” of the fetus. Planned Parenthood attempted to elaborate on this point by indicating that state regulations that complicate access “before the fetus attains viability” might yet impose an “undue burden” on women seeking abortions.
The National Firearms Act of 1934 imposed restrictions on access to automatic weapons (“machine guns”) and short-barreled shotguns (“sawed-off shotguns”). Cinematic accounts of Chicago gangsters taking each other out with “Tommy guns” (Thompson submachine guns) come to mind. Think the original Scarface (1932) or the St. Valentines Day Massacre (1929).
Challenges to such restrictions on firearms, if any, haven’t been the subject of news. The Supreme Court, for example, has not been called to rule on access to rocket-propelled grenades. In contrast, challenges to restrictions on “partial birth abortions”—the sawed-off shotgun of abortion debates—have been in and out of the news over the last 20 years. The question here is about pushing access to abortion beyond “viability” to T=0, the time of birth.
In 2012 philosophers Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva created a stir by advocating for “after-birth abortion”—that is, infanticide—in the Journal for Medical Ethics. (“After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?” https://jme.bmj.com/content/39/5/261) I would suggest that a useful aspect of this work is that the authors do what proponents of liberal access to abortion do not do: draw a line and defend it. Giubilini and Minerva drew their line at a T greater than zero. But, according to them, is there some threshold T* > 0 at which a person is vested with rights? Indeed, is the child increasingly vested with rights according to some rolling schedule of T’s all greater than zero?
That may sound all very abstract, but the reality is that societies have long puzzled over what rights to afford to children both before and after birth, and societies have specified their own rolling schedules of rights. This kind of thing is much the subject of Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages (1987). In that book, Frances and Joseph Gies examine extant records from the Roman world through Saxon England and the Frankish continent, and they can report that the authorities have all taken up questions about abortion, infanticide and the rights of children as they come of age. What limits, for example, had there been on parental authority? When could children expect to move out from under the authority of their elders and to make important decisions for themselves? When could they expect to be fully vested with rights?
It may be no surprise that the Church did not condone infanticide, but there is evidence that even the Church recognized mitigating circumstances. The authorities might commit to a schedule of penalties for abortion and infanticide that make some accommodation for economic demands. Crop failures induced famine. War and epidemics may take away the most productive members of a family leaving the others poorly situated to take care of themselves. The Church of the early Middle Ages may have “assessed harsh penalties for infanticide but treated it as a recognized alternative to abortion and contraception… Allowance was made for economic motivation: ‘If a poor woman slays her child, she shall do penance for seven years’ [rather than the penance of ten years usually accorded such things].”
Note the suggestion: the Church of the 7th century in at least some parts of Europe recognized infanticide as “something less than homicide”. So, at what point did infanticide transition into homicide? Meanwhile, the Church recognized mitigating circumstances for infanticide. Some instances of infanticide were not a bad as others, but all of them were worse than an early medieval concept of “late-term abortion”. Specifically, the Church recognized abortion after a certain viability threshold as worse than abortion before viability. At that threshold, “the soul entered the body”. More striking is the fact that the Church recognized an earlier threshold at which point the body first became “animated”. Up to the point of animation, was the body little more than a “clump of cells”? I ask that not to be provocative, but, rather, to illuminate the fact that the Church did take up the hard questions.
Taking up the question of when the body is “animated” or invested with a soul may inflame the sensibilities of many, but I illuminate this point merely to indicate that certain incarnations of the early Church perceived it as a practical matter requiring serious attention. Indeed, the evidence suggests that Dark Age thinking on abortion, “birth control” and the rights of children could be sophisticated and sober-minded—more sophisticated and sober, I would suggest, than the sloganeering that passes for debate in the corporate media and on the steps of the Supreme Court of the United States. This is the same corporate media that dismissed “My Body! My Choice!” when it came to “vaccine” mandates. And it is the same media that uncritically presses irreversible “gender-affirming surgery” and hormone treatments on children.
