ABSTRACT
Tertullian often constructed abortion as an immoral practice in which pagans habitually indulged, and from which Christians abstained. Modern scholarship dealing with Tertullian's attitude to the unborn child often carries an assumption, tacit or otherwise, that the Romans not only condoned but regularly participated in abortion, and that Tertullian's views represented a strong departure from the dominant culture of Rome. The separation of early Christian attitudes from Roman may be considered a false dichotomy fuelled by selective and uncritical use of evidence. Outside of the corpus of Christian works, it was very rare for a Latin writer to describe the child in the womb as a homo, a 'human'. As Tertullian wrote in Latin, it was perhaps inevitable that the same ambiguity in terminology denoting the foetus and embryo was reflected in his work. Burial practices also suggest a degree of vagueness in Roman views concerning newborn babies, which likely also applied to the unborn.
