ABSTRACT
Tertullian, himself a master of rhetoric, should not be employed in the rhetoric of today's abortion debate. It is difficult to see Tertullian as a particularly zealous defender of the unborn child. Abortion was not of sufficient concern for Tertullian to devote a treatise solely to the subject. Whatever arguments he made concerning the termination of pregnancy were subsidiary to his greater agenda of proving his thesis. Nor did Tertullian build his case against abortion upon any inflexible convictions concerning either the physical or metaphysical nature of the unborn. The extent of Tertullian's influence upon concurrent and subsequent Christian thinkers remains to be determined. Tertullian was a pioneer in the sense that he provided the first extended exploration of the unborn child in Latin literature, albeit drawing upon precedents found in earlier Christian writing.
