This Timeline of Pro-Life History is my humble attempt to document those events relevant to the rights, welfare and cause of the unborn.
Every other human group seems to have a history dedicated to it, it seems that it's about time for the unborn to have history written about them as well.
In this timeline, I focused on events. So it doesn't give the whole picture: not the trends, or statistics, or general practices. I simply wanted to give people an idea of what a history of the unborn could look like; what type of events, ideas and discoveries contributed to the situation of the unborn today. One might think that the history of the unborn would focus solely on abortion. I have found that to be untrue. There is a lot to write about the unborn, and a lot left to be studied and written.
Rather than write a book, I thought it was more useful and expedient to write an accessible and searchable survey of the history of the unborn. I started from the Christian era because when one writes a chronology, dating is very important, and dates can be very uncertain in the Ancient period. There is a lack of information for late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. I mostly focused on those periods for which I knew I could get information easily: The late Middle Ages, the Early Modern and Modern periods and especially contemporary history.
I scanned a number of academic (and non-academic) sources to cull these dates. But my most important source was the archives of LifeSiteNews.com. I scanned every headline page from 1998 to 2016 (up to the election of Donald Trump.) I tried to focus on the important events, the ones that have an impact on either the legal or cultural situation of the unborn.
If you like my Timeline, please share it. I also encourage you to blog about pro-life history. In the 1980's it was often said: If abortion is murder, act like it! Well, we can't stop abortion right now. I would simply like to rephrase that and say: If the unborn are human, act like it! Write their history! I promise you right now there is a historiographical effort to denigrate the unborn and their rights. If we can't have the unborn respected through politics or popular culture, we can do it through history.
