“Does life begin at conception?” Ask this question at a modern American dinner table, and you’re unlikely to leave in one piece. Pro-life supporters will answer with a firm affirmative, while pro-choice supporters will likely place the beginning of life somewhere later in fetal development or even potentially at birth. Regardless, in order to define when life begins, one must also determine what life means, and a question with such intersections between science, philosophy, and faith can never be settled easily, if at all. Despite this being a largely unanswerable and futile question, it fuels the divisiveness, chaos, and stubborn extremism of the modern abortion debate in this country and even contributes to the intense polarization of the American political climate at large. Yet, this was not always such an impassioned debate. While of fascination to scholars as far back as Plato and Aristotle, the concept of fetal personhood evolved into its current divisive state over a considerable length of time, turning from a philosophical brain teaser to a question so powerfully controversial that it plays a central role in defining the American political landscape. In this essay, I will give an abridged history of the changing ideas surrounding fetal personhood in Western culture.
Considering its chokehold on the pro-life narrative, I will begin with personhood as discussed in the Bible. Throughout the Bible, personhood has varied definitions. In the book of Wisdom,1 life is unembodied and begins prior to conception, making the body, and thus the fetus, merely a container of the all-important and defining soul.2 At other points in the Bible, personhood exists similarly early. In Genesis, after masturbating, Onan is struck down by God.3 Different faiths interpret this act differently, but religious Christians popularly consider it to indicate God’s displeasure with the destruction of potential human life, thus defining life at gametogenesis.4 However, merely a few verses before this, also in the book of Genesis, “breath” is inextricable from life,5 which puts the time stamp on personhood far later in human development. The book of Exodus6 even goes as far as to denote abortion induction as explicitly different from homicide, implying the separation of fetus and personhood. Evidently, the Bible itself, despite extensive reference by the Pro-Life movement, is indecisive on both the question of the beginning of personhood and even on the question of abortion itself.
There is a diversity of opinion on the beginnings of personhood among early philosophers and cultures, as well. Plato adhered to an unembodied soul principle similar to that outlined by the book of Wisdom, and one of his preeminent philosophical works, Phaedo, puzzles this question extensively. Pythagoras believed in the creation of the soul at conception and was thus vehemently opposed to abortion. At the same time, Aristotle's views on progressive ensoulment led him to conclude that the fetus was not a person, at least during the early stages of pregnancy. Thus, he concluded that early abortions were not only unproblematic, but also beneficial to creating a healthily populated country.7 Due to widely variant opinions on the beginnings of the soul, and thus the beginnings of personhood, there were no laws restricting abortion in Ancient Greece, and similarly, none in Ancient Rome.8
However, as Christianity became the predominant religion of the West, and thus Biblical interpretations were translated into law, philosophical ideas of the soul and personhood largely fell out of fashion. Still, Aristotle’s conceptualization of the beginning of human life would actually become the preeminent definition.9 This point is called “quickening,” or the moment where the mother first feels fetal movement. Our current knowledge of fetal development places quickening at around four months gestation. English Common Law recognized quickening as the start of human life as early as the twelfth century, as evidenced by the fact that abortion before quickening was deemed an ecclesiastical offense or a matter of lost/destroyed property of the father. In contrast, English Common Law deliberately defined abortion after quickening as homicidal. Yet, throughout the early modern period, this definition continued to be debated, but not along the lines that one might expect. In fact, in 1557, English judge William Stanford stated that "the thing killed must be in part of the world of physical beings (in rerum natura)” to be considered a homicide, implying that even after quickening, a fetus wouldn’t be regarded as human. Many other English lawmakers of the time echoed this sentiment, including Lord Coke and Sir Matthew Hale.10 And while the law remained unchanged, it is evident that in early-modern Europe, quickening marked the earliest moment when a fetus could be considered a person.11
If we shift our focus to women’s ideas regarding the personhood of their fetus,’ at least at the end of the early modern period, we see a similar trend. In fact, women largely did not even consider themselves pregnant until quickening occurred. Variability of a women’s menstrual cycle caused by both physiological factors and situational elements such as illness or stress would have made a missed period a meaningless symbol. In fact, a missed period signaled a disruption of bodily harmony12 and a symbol of illness for which women in the United States were able to purchase a variety of legal herbal remedies that induced menstruation.13 Without pregnancy tests or knowledge of modern embryology, the only discernible marker of pregnancy and fetal livelihood was the presence of fetal movement (ie. quickening). Even so, to many women, fetal personhood occurred much later. According to a letter written by colonial woman Katherine Garrison Norton in 1898, “little Norton” wouldn’t “become a ‘who’ until December,” thus indicating that she didn’t truly consider her fetus a person until its birth.14 Even after birth, many women swaddled their infants in order to prevent them from crawling, which they believed would cause their children to develop like animals rather than humans. Thus, even after birth, an infant was not necessarily considered a completely realized human being.15
As the medical profession began to gain authority and respect in the mid-to-late 1800s, its opinions gained considerable credibility in the minds of both the general population and those affiliated with the law. Dr. Horatio R. Storer’s well-circulated opinion on the fortitude of women represents much of the popular misogynistic narrative of the time. Storer and other physicians’ applications of these narratives to medicine proved crucial to the sociopolitical positioning of fetal personification. Dr. Storer asserted that women were incapable of making rational decisions, including those that concerned pregnancy. Thus, quickening began to lose its legitimacy as a hallmark of fetal personhood, as it inherently could only be determined by the pregnant woman herself and not by the medical profession.16 This dismantling of female authority, combined with the medical profession’s new and increasing knowledge of the molecular and cellular world, caused personification of the embryo to fill the void created by the loss of quickening as the defining point of fetal personhood.17 This quiet shift in medical ideology occurred concurrently with the first mass wave of abortion criminalizations in the United States, which began in the early 1800s and ended in the early 1900s. While these criminalizations had very little to do with protecting the fetus and focused mainly on protecting the fragile and impressionable female from a dangerous medical procedure, this shift in ideology was the catalyst for future personhood debates to come.
This shift in the conception of fetal personification to the embryonic stage was largely uncomplicated for the first half of the twentieth century, mainly because it had little impact on the lives of everyday people. While abortion was criminalized, many women still sought and received them with little consideration of morality, at least as far as protection of the fetus was concerned.1819 Additionally, with World War I, World War II, the Great Depression, and the fear of communism occupying much of the American political landscape, the public and the government had little time to concern itself with ideas of personhood, let alone fetal personhood. However, this changed in the 1950s and 1960s with the rise of second wave feminism and the civil rights movement, both of which dealt intimately with the question of personhood.20 These movements, coupled with the public’s increased fascination with scientific breakthroughs, once again stirred up conversations of fetal personhood. These conversations gained powerful momentum in April 1965, when photojournalist Lennart Nilson’s photographs of fetal development were published in Life Magazine.21 Thus, by the 1970s, the intellectual flame of fetal personhood was fully lit. However for the first time in this debate’s long history, the conversation was not limited to courts of law, doctor’s offices, houses of worship, or the texts of philosophers. This time, the debate permeated the public sphere.
The history of thought surrounding fetal personhood is a fascinating one, and I have only grazed the surface here. From ancient Greek philosophers to 21st century American politicians, few philosophical questions have persisted with such stubbornness. The scientific, political, philosophical, and religious implications with which this question is imbued further raise the stakes surrounding the debate. Even as modern scientists and politicians attempt to settle this issue once and for all, the question “does life begin at conception” is one that will likely never be answered, perhaps because no clear answer exists.
Endnotes
1. The book of Wisdom aka The Wisdom of Solomon is not considered biblical canon in Protestantism or Judaism. Currently, the book of Wisdom is only canonical to Catholics and Orthodox Christians.
2. Book of Wisdom (8:19-20)
3. Genesis (38: 9-10)
4. Saint Jerome. Against Jovinianus. 1:19 (AD 393)
5. Genesis (2:7)
6. Exodus 21:22–25
7. Horrocks, Alyssa. The Soul and Abortion in Ancient Greek Culture and Jewish Law. The University of North Carolina at Asheville, https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/unca/f/A_Horrocks_Soul_JrnlUngRes_2014.pdf. .
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Carla Spivack, To "Bring Down the Flowers": The Cultural Context of Abortion Law in Early Modern England, 14 Wm. & Mary J. Women & L. 107 (2007), https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/ wmjowl/vol14/iss1/.
11. Ibid.
12. While most of women's history is lost to time due to a lack of recorded personal experience, the idea of a missed period as a hallmark of illness rather than pregnancy is articulated as early as the mid-sixteenth century in Diseases of Women by Trotula of Salerno. My personal estimation is that this idea largely grew out of Humoralism. As established by Hippocrates, Humoralism states that disease is caused by an imbalance of the four bodily “humors,” those being blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. By this criteria, a missed period could easily be viewed as an imbalance of the blood humor. Humoralism was the dominant medical theory from its popularization in Galenic medicine up until the nineteenth century. Thus, the idea of a missed period as an illness could have started as early as the second century c.e., when Galenic medicine became the norm in Western Europe.
13. While undoubtedly, some women would have used this practice to induce early abortions intentionally, these herbal remedies were common and considered responsible medical practice.
14. Withycombe, Shannon. “Oh Joy, Oh Rapture.” Lost: Miscarriage in Nineteenth-Century America, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 2019, p. 38.
15. Freidenfelds, Lara. “Childbearing in Colonial America.” The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: A History of Miscarriage in America, Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2020, p. 14.
16. Gibson, Beth, "The Termination of the Quickening Doctrine: American Law, Society, and the Advent of Professional Medicine in the Nineteenth Century" (1995). Masters Theses & Specialist Projects. Paper 910. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/910
16. Gibson, Beth, "The Termination of the Quickening Doctrine: American Law, Society, and the Advent of Professional Medicine in the Nineteenth Century" (1995). Masters Theses & Specialist Projects. Paper 910. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/910
17. D. Humphrey Storer, "Two Frequent Causes of Uterine Disease," Journal of Gynaecological Society of Boston 6 (March, 1872): 199, originally written in November 1855.
18. For women, abortion was a heavily stigmatized procedure, but mainly because it implied extramartial sexual relations. The social stain of abortion thus had little to do with the fetus involved, and everything to do with gender roles and restrctive views on sex. In fact, up until the 1940s, women were not arrested for getting abortions, rather abortion practitioners were at risk were they to kill or injure a women during the procedure.
19. Reagan, L. J. (1991). "About to Meet Her Maker": Women, Doctors, Dying Declarations, and the State's Investigation of Abortion, Chicago, 1867-1940. The Journal of American History, 77(4), 1240. https://doi.org/10.2307/2078261
20. Abboud, C. (2020, May). A Fetus By Any Other Name: How words shaped the fetal personhood movement in US courts and Society (1884-1973). Arizona State University Library. Retrieved May 10, 2022.
21. Nilsson, L. (1965, April 30). Drama of Life Before Birth. Life Magazine, 58(17), 54–70.