According to Isidore of Seville, to genuflect was to recall our prenatal existence. The knees (genua) got their name from the cheeks (genae) ‘because in the womb they are opposite the cheeks’. Kneeling was the posture in which people wept because ‘nature wants to remind them of the maternal womb, where they sat as if in darkness before they came into the light’. Early medieval religious culture reverberated with remembrances and representations of fetal existence. Like so many hagiographers, Alcuin began his vita of Willibrord with ‘signs of divine election in his mother's womb’. Through these signs Willibrord emulated the ‘most holy precursor of our lord Jesus Christ, blessed John the Baptist, sanctified by God in his mother's womb’, while liturgies cultivated the memory of the Baptist, ‘who not yet born sensed the voice of the lord's mother and still enclosed in the womb leapt with prophetic elation at the advent of human salvation’. Even more fundamentally, it was the feast of the annunciation, not the feast of the nativity, which marked the central moment in Christian theology. Christ's incarnation began in Mary's womb. When Carolingian theologians debated the nature of the eucharist in the ninth century, they were debating how Christ's body, the same as ‘that flesh created in the womb without seed from the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit’, could be made present each day at mass. These examples only scratch the surface. Medieval Christianity fostered multiple modes of imagining the fetus.

One modern meaning cultivated from medieval discussions of the embryonic Christ is the ‘absolute inviolability of human life from conception … revealed by the Redeemer in the womb’. But did the embryonic Christ and fetal saints hold similar medieval meanings? Perhaps it feels intuitive that they did. A growing body of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural scholarship on conceptualizations of the fetus, however, suggests that what feels like an intuition about the historical relationship between representations of the fetus and perspectives on abortion is more like an unexamined assumption. Scholars have not only increasingly problematized assumed continuities in understandings of what the fetus is, but also understandings of what it has meant to speak about the fetus across different societies and times.