Abortion in Greece

The modern Greek state and its penal system were created in the 1830s based on Bavarian laws. The system was designed by Georg Ludwig von Maurer and came into effect in 1835. Articles 303-305 addressed abortion, either performed by a pregnant woman or a third party.

Article 303-304:

If the mother who gave birth to a premature or dead infant used prior to that, knowingly, alone or with someone else, internal or external means, [means that] can cause a premature delivery or the death of the fetus in the mother's abdomen, she is punished with imprisonment. The same penalty is imposed on the midwives or pharmacists or others in the medical service who cause abortion with the consent of the pregnant woman or by recommending or by providing the means for performing such a felony.

These sentences carried a maximum punishment of ten years for both the pregnant woman committing the act herself, as well as for any third party assistants. This law, although amended in the 20th century, remained effectively unchanged and enforced for 90 years.[6] Nikolaos Kostes, the first professor of obstetrics at Athens University, distinguished between a emvyro (fetus), a vrefos (infant), and a kyema (literally, 'that which is conceived'). Kostes stated the fetal body parts could be discerned around the sixth week of pregnancy, and referred to the first three months of fertilized ova as 'the egg'. Historian Violetta Hionidou notes that academics like Kostes as well as laypeople did not consider early pregnancy to be a fetus. Therefore if a woman was pregnant in the early months of gestation was not considered a fetus, any action taken to terminate a pregnancy could not be punishable by law. In a 1905 Supreme Court case, a judge ruled that a necessary element of article 303 was that 'the mother gave birth to a dead or premature fetus'. The judge, N. Momferatos, ruled that without this evidence, the law could not be applied.

However in 1927, a court case ruled that it was 'not necessary for the court to have knowledge that the fetus was alive before the attempted abortion'. The judge specifically clarified that article 303 applied "even when the conception is recent and the fetus had not started giving signs of life yet".[7] Contradictorily, article 106 of the penal code specified that 'a person who undertook an illegal act in order to urgently protect their own or someone else's life' should not be punished.[8] This clause was applied in abortion-related arguments as early as 1872.[9]