ABSTRACT
Christian ideas about the human being's moral weaknesses and propensity to sin, continued long after Enlightenment science had launched competing theories of human procreation. The majority of Enlightenment scientists subscribed to one of the two dominant theories, namely, epigenesis and preformation. In the epigenesis theory, the law took for a fact that the foetus developed from the father's sperm in the mother's womb and passed through distinctive stages until it was fully formed. According to the competing preformation theory, every new human being was fully formed from the start. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the catholic church and Protestant church held on to Aquinas' theory of procreation. It was epigenesis which was best suited to Aquinas' theology and which formed the basis for abortion in Canon law. Gabriele Falloppio studied the female reproductive organs, including the clitoris, named the vagina, and asserted the existence of the hymen in virgins, a knowledge which traditionally belonged to midwives.
