Godišnjak (Dec 2015)
Канони Светих Отаца као путоказ савременој правној науци и државном законодавству
Abstract
In the 21st canon of the Council of Ankira, the Fathers of the Church had condemned as murderers all who give poison herbs to the women in order to induce abortion, as well as the women who willingly undergo such procedure. In his 2nd and 8th canons, Saint Basil the Great condemned such women as murderers and ordered them to undergo the same penance as the killers. The 96th canon of the Sixth Ecumenical Council also condemns as murderers all women who distribute or consume the medications for inducing abortion. Saint Sava accepted these canons in his Zakonopravilo, thus incorporating them into Serbian Church and Serbian state. „The child-killing medicine“ is a term that Saint Sava had used, so in the laws of the Nemanjic dynasty it was no longer questioned if the fetus is a real child or not. Since the second half of the 20th century, the state laws moved away from the Saint Sava’s traditions, denying the child in mother’s womb constitutional protection in the process, and acknowledging its subjectivity only after birth. The medical science has a notion of pre-natal period of child’s life, while the pre-natal psychology emphasizes child’s feelings and memories. In this paper, the author shows that the pre-natal psychology in the 21st century has proven all the facts brought out by the Fathers of the Church in the 4th century. Since the Canon Law of the 4th century equates penances for the murder of a born or yet unborn child, it is unacceptable for the modern law not to defend the child’s rights and not to propose the same punishment for the abortion as for the other kinds of murder. The modern right of a woman to be the murderer of her own child should be transformed into her right to elevated motherhood.
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