Ethical-anthropological aspects of the abortion in the light of the classical literature of Greece and Rome

Tadeusz Kołosowski

Uniwersytet Kardynała Stefana Wyszyńskiego w Warszawie , Poland


Abstract

In ancient Greece and Rome, though it considered that children constituted God’s blessing and the wealth of the man, and the sterility is fatality and the divine punishment, on the other hand one committed kills of children in the mother’s womb, and even killings from favour of eugenic children already born. Such position took up Plato and Aristotle, despite the view about the ani­mation of the foetus already in the mother’s womb. Stoics who thought that the foetus was only a part of the mother, they did not see the problem, to make the abortion in every moment the maternity period. The abortion was so executed, however to this practice accompanied also and the social condemnation which saw in the abortion the crime worthy of the divine punishment and human, and expression of this are works of Aeschylus, Cicero, Ovid and Juvenal.

Keywords:

abortion, Greece, Rome

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Published
2012-06-15


Kołosowski, T. (2012). Etyczno-antropologiczne aspekty aborcji w świetle klasycznej literatury Grecji i Rzymu. Vox Patrum, 57, 337–349. https://doi.org/10.31743/vp.4135

Tadeusz Kołosowski 
Uniwersytet Kardynała Stefana Wyszyńskiego w Warszawie



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