A typical family in ancient Rome was strikingly similar to a typical family in our time. Families often didn’t have more than three children. A whole family would have fit nicely in a modern car. In this chapter, we will take a look at how family planning was done in ancient times.
This blog post is excerpted from Love, Marriage, and Family: Learning from the Early Christians by Erkii Koskenniemi.
Family Planning in Ancient Times
In ancient Greece and Rome, family planning was simple. An unwelcomed child was either killed or exposed. This was apparently a well-known practice for everyone in ancient days, and it appears in mythology (Oedipus, Romulus and Remus) and historical sources.
In general, the life of a person living in the ancient world was divided into two areas. Some things were ruled by the government, and some things were ruled by the individual. The birth of children and the size of the family belonged to the area ruled by the individual. The laws rarely, if ever, limited the exposure of children. Governments often hoped for bigger families, but it was the challenges of everyday life that led people to make their own family decisions. The typical family was quite small because few parents made room for more than two sons and one daughter. Other children born to them outside of marriage were not allowed to join the family. Since child mortality was very high (perhaps about 30 percent or more), we do not know how many children were exposed. Some abandoned children survived, but regrettably, there aren’t any statistics on their number.
Child Exposure
The reasons children were exposed were pretty similar in Greece and Rome. If a child was born under bad omens, from the wrong father, was of the wrong sex, or suffered a disability, he or she was often abandoned. Poor people did not have enough money to feed all of their babies, and wealthy families did not want to divide their property between too many children. When a child was born after the planned number of babies had been born, or when a child was simply not needed, that baby was not welcome, and it was either killed or exposed. The fate of exposed children varied from sunlight to dark shadows: Often, cold, hunger, or beasts ended the tender life during the child’s first days. If the mother knew of a wealthy, childless couple who desperately needed a family member, she might leave her newborn by their door so that they would raise the child as their own. Some exposed babies were brought to brothels to be raised as sex slaves. But most of the children who survived being exposed were probably raised to serve as slaves in neighboring villages.
Exposing children sounds really cruel. But it should be noted that parents didn’t rejoice in exposing or killing their children. It was considered a sad necessity. Greeks and Romans whispered about distant people who never abandoned their children. They greatly honored those people. Some of those people were far enough away to serve as moral examples, and good storytellers added impressive tales about their manners.
Jewish Views on Infanticide
But Greeks and Romans also knew of a group of people living in their midst who did not abandon their children. For Jews, abandoning children was strictly forbidden. They viewed it as one of the sins they were never allowed to commit. Exposing babies is not explicitly addressed or unequivocally banned in the Mosaic Law, but early Jewish teachers clearly forbade it. The ban was included in several summaries of the Mosaic Law in the first century AD, especially by Philo, Josephus, and Pseudo-Phocylides.
Of course, banning something doesn’t always prevent people from doing it. Sometimes, a newborn child was found abandoned in a Jewish town. That always raised the question, Is this child a Jew or not? Teachers might say that she or he was, provided that the majority of inhabitants in that town were Jews. However, Rabbi Judah, an influential teacher from the second century AD, said that the child belonged to the majority of those who abandoned babies. In other words, the child was a Gentile because Jewish parents did not abandon their children (Mishna, Makhshirin 2:7).
Early Christian Views on Infanticide
Even though a clear ban on exposure is not included in either the Old or New Testament, the early church adopted Jewish customs very quickly. Soon after the New Testament was written, the first Christian works followed, word for word, part of a Jewish moral summary now lost. The Epistle of Barnabas, written soon after AD 100, and the Didache, written only some decades later, use identical words:
You shall not abort a child nor, again, commit infanticide. (Epistle of Barnabas 19:5)
You shall not abort a child or commit infanticide. (Didache 2:2)
The earliest Christian writings make it clear that the Jews had gotten this one right. The first Christians followed the Jewish teachings for centuries, both in the East and in the West. Two of the most influential teachers, Basil the Great in the East (AD 330–379) and Augustine of Hippo in the West (AD 354–430), finally also made it part of Christian doctrine almost unanimously honored to our day. Basil, who defended weak and poor people, was adamant and ruled that parents who had exposed their child had to repent for no less than twenty years before they could be admitted to Holy Communion. Only extreme poverty shifted the guilt to wealthy people. After all, if poor people had to expose their children because they could not feed them, their rich neighbors should have had compassion and helped them (Epistle of Basil the Great, 217:56). In the fourth century, Christians were known for saving and raising exposed children.
The first Christians adopted almost all of the arguments from their Jewish predecessors. It was easy to describe the terrible fate of abandoned babies: Hunger and cold killed many, and some were eaten by wild animals who regularly visited the dung heaps where the babies were left. Christian writers helped the parents picture how their abandoned offspring became slaves or were mutilated by their masters so they would get more money when begging on the streets. The worst part of their terrible vision included the thought of a father visiting brothels and unknowingly going into his own daughter or son whom he had abandoned as a child. But the most important argument was the Fifth Commandment, “You shall not murder,” which prevented killing newborns. This teaching was conventional among Jews in Jesus’ time. We may call it “a tradition of the elders.” Christians immediately learned to equate exposure of infants with killing. Almighty God has created every human being, and that means that every child has the right to live.
Blog post excerpted from pages 7–11 of Love, Marriage, and Family: Learning from the Early Christians © 2025 Erkii Koskenniemi, published by Concordia Publishing House. All rights reserved.
Read more about life as a Christian in ancient times and how that influences our lives today in Love, Marriage, and Family.
