HIST 3323: Unborn Child in Western Tradition

This course explores the history of ideas, attitudes, and practices regarding the unborn child in the Western tradition, with a special focus on the Christian tradition and on America as both an articulation of and a departure from that tradition. After outlining pagan, Jewish, and Christian views of unborn life in the ancient and medieval periods, the course moves to a discussion of the “new embryology” of early modernity and its unfolding in American life and thought from colonial times to the present. Because understandings of unborn life have been so often shaped by the broader social circumstances under which such life has come to be, the course also examines issues of fertility and family formation, women’s identity as mothers, the experience of abortion, and the roles of law and medicine. Catholic teaching forms a normative template throughout the course.