The Church and Abortion
The Orthodox Church was founded by Jesus Christ and the Apostles, and bears witness to that continuous and unbroken faith.
The precepts of the Orthodox Christian Faith mandate the protection of innocent human life, especially that of the unborn child. The Church has always regarded abortion as murder, and as such, takes a very active role in opposing legalized abortion.The personhood of the unborn is considered to exist from conception and has never been questioned in our theology. Indeed, conception has been always recognized as the time when the soul is uniquely brought into being and simultaneously united with the body.
The Christian Church from its inception, to which the Orthodox Church bears living witness, expressed a distinct and fundamental horror of abortion, at whatever stage of pregnancy. It never ceased to regard abortion as abhorrent and an abomination before God, and always considered it to be the killing of a human being. The loss of the life of the unborn child was regretfully tolerated only in cases where the life of the mother was in jeopardy. With the modern advancements we have in medical technology today, this tragic situation is rarely encountered.
In the early centuries of the Church, Her moral teachings were universally embraced, holding sway over almost the whole of Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa; from Hadrian’s Wall to the frontiers of the Persian Empire. Indeed, the Orthodox Church’s teaching can be traced to the earliest Christian document, the Didache (late 1st Century) and was constantly reiterated through the following centuries in Patristic writings and Canon Law. It was finally compiled as the Photian Collection, which was adopted as the official ecclesiastical law book of the Orthodox Church in 883 A.D.
If we turn to the Orthodox liturgical cycle of feasts, the consciousness of the personhood of the unborn is striking. This is manifest in three feasts. The first we shall consider is the celebration of the conception of John the Baptist by St. Elizabeth (September 23). In this feast we sing:
"Rejoice, O barren one, who had not given birth; for behold you have clearly conceived the one who was about to illuminate the whole universe, blighted by blindness. Shout in joy, O Zacharias, crying in favor; truly the one to be born is a prophet of the Most High!"
Although John the Baptist was yet in the womb, he is considered a full person. The second feast to be considered is that of the Conception of the Theotokos by St. Ann (December 9). At this feast the Kondakion proclaims at vespers:
"Behold the promises of the Prophets are realized for the Holy Mountain is planted in the womb, the Divine Ladder is set up, the great Throne of the King is ready, the place for the passage of the Lord is prepared . . ."
There can be no question that although the parents of John the Baptist and the Theotokos (Virgin Mary) had no inkling of God’s Great Plan for Salvation, God was involved in the conception of each; it is notable that both Saints, Elizabeth and Anna were advanced in years and barren. It is a sobering thought of how God’s Plan is being affected by the countless unborn who have been aborted - never to uniquely participate in that Plan.
The quintessential feast that illustrates the consciousness of the Church on the importance of the person from the moment of conception is the Annunciation (March 25). This feast is so important that a Divine Liturgy is to be served even when falls on Great and Holy Friday! The Troparion of the day makes a profound statement:
"Today is the beginning of our salvation, the revelation of the eternal mystery!
The Son of God becomes the Son of the Virgin as Gabriel announces the coming of grace..."
This is a far cry from the present cry, "who knows when life begins" or, ‘it is a blob of tissue" or a "product of conception." At the Great Compline the hymnography states makes this astonishing claim:
" . . .O marvel! God has come among men; He who cannot be contained in a womb;
the timeless One enters time . . . For God empties Himself, takes flesh, and is fashioned as a creature, when the angel tells the pure Virgin of her conception. . . "
This is not sung at the feast of our Lord’s Nativity but at His conception!!! "Viability" and "quickening" are utterly irrelevant. If we further consider the following passage in Luke 1:41 we find another astonishing image of the scriptural consciousness of the personhood of the unborn:
"And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb"
Here we have the image of the unborn John the Baptist recognizing the unborn Messiah - a fetus greeting a fetus! This is more than a literary device as some would have us believe, but illustrates the narrator’s perception, or consciousness of the uniqueness of an unborn human. Although we celebrate the birth of John the Baptist, the Theotokos, and the Lord Jesus himself, we also celebrate their conception which is their entry into time and the physical world - the "fullness of time" as called by St. Paul.
A more profound point to this all is that these feasts, especially the Annunciation, point to the Incarnation. By taking on our humanity from the moment of conception, existing in the pre-natal condition in the womb of the Theotokos, experiencing birth, living through infancy to adulthood, and finally dying, God sanctified every moment of human existence - from conception to death.
There is more to this - God also completely identifies with us in our fallen suffering nature, and by dying for us on the cross, He expresses His solidarity with us: whether we are a zygote, embryo, fetus, infant, child, adolescent, adult, or elderly: human existence is a continuum from conception, and - yes - beyond death to life eternal in the Lord!
The Orthodox Church has had a long history of outspoken condemnation of abortion which dates from Apostolic times. Although the aforementioned feasts did not exist in Apostolic times, they illustrate the Tradition from which Church teaching on the uniqueness and sanctity of human life, born and unborn sprang from - it was no vacuum! We either belong to the Kingdom of God or to the "World" . . .Abortion is not a political issue,but is a moral issue that has become politicized!