The Role of Infanticide and Abortion in Pagan Rome’s Decline

by Emmet Scott (October 2012)

What could have caused such a dramatic and sustained demographic collapse? As might be expected, writers of various hues have not been slow to propose answers. These range from the plausible to the bizarre. The best explanations however have kept an eye both on archaeology and on the written sources, and what has emerged over the past fifty years is a picture of a Roman Empire unfamiliar to most students of classical civilization. It is picture of a world immersed in decadence, squalor and brutality.

As might be imagined, deadly epidemics were commonplace, and the failure of the ancients to understand the pathology and spread of infections led to a plethora of pandemics which wiped out millions.

A major and exacerbating factor in the latter was the fact that baby girls seem to have been particularly unwanted. A notorious letter, dating from the first century BC, contains an instruction from a husband to his wife to kill their newborn child, if it turns out to be a girl:

In addition to infanticide the Romans also practiced very effective forms of birth control. Abortion too was commonplace, and caused the deaths of large numbers of women, as well as infertility in a great many others, and it has become increasingly evident that the city of Rome never, at any stage in her history, had a self-sustaining population, and numbers had continuously to be replenished by new arrivals from the countryside. (For a discussion, see Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Harper Collins, 1996), pp. 95-128)

Quite possibly, by the end of the first century, the only groups in the Empire that was increasing by normal demographic process were the Christians and the Jews, and these two were virtually immune from the contagion of Roman attitudes.

It has became increasingly clear over the past half century that much more of the heritage of Rome survived than had hitherto been imagined, and that, under the influence of Christianity, Roman civilization flourished both in the East and in the West during the sixth and early seventh centuries.

How the heritage of Rome was ultimately destroyed is another story entirely, but it occurred in the first half of the seventh century and was directly related to the rise of Islam.

Emmet Scott is the author of Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (New English Review Press, 2012)

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