Originally posted by Leonhard
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Starting with the New Testament, Luke 1:41, 44 clearly reveals that babies were considered alive and responsive while still in their mother's womb. That means killing them would have been regarded as the same as murder. And that is something repeatedly condemned.
Here is a list of just some of those who condemned abortion early on:
- I Enoch
- Sibylline Oracles
- Pseudo-Phocylides
- Flavius Josephus
- Didache
- Apocalypse of Peter
- Epistle of Barnabas
- Origen
- Athenagoras of Athens
- Tertullian
- Cyprian
- Clement of Alexandria
- Hippolytus of Rome
- Basil the Great
- Jerome
- Apostolic Constitutions
- Synod of Elvira
- Synod Ancyra
- John Chrysostom
- 3rd ecumenical council (Chalcedon)
And they all, in spite of coming from different traditions in Judaism and Christianity, agree that abortion is a sin on par with murder which is was usually associated with if not called a form of it.
Here are a couple of my posts discussing this (although the best stuff was written by Adrift):
Originally posted by rogue06
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And
Originally posted by rogue06
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This tradition that abortion is wrong and sinful was continued into the Protestant Church. For instance, in his commentary on Exodus 21:22, the 16th century Reformation leader John Calvin wrote:
...the unborn, though enclosed in the womb of his mother, is already a human being, and it is an almost monstrous crime to rob it of life which it has not yet begun to enjoy. If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man's house is his most secure place of refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy the unborn in the womb before it has come to light.
Around the same time Martin Luther said
"Surely at such a time (conception), the order of nature established by God in procreation should be followed."
A century later the Church of Scotland minister John Wemyss wrote
"It is a great cruelty to kill the child in the mother's belly, to kill this innocent in his first mansion, which should have been the place of his refuge; the tunicle in which he is wrapped in his mother’s belly is called Shilo, because the young infant should live peaceably in it, in his mother’s womb, as in a place of refuge."
The Presbyterians here in the U.S. were particularly outspoken about it, at a convention in Pittsburgh in 1869 they issued the following statement:
"We regard the destruction by parents of their offspring, before birth, with abhorrence, as a crime against God and against nature."
And in 1962 and reaffirmed in 1965 they issued following statement:
"The fetus is a human life to be protected by the criminal law from the moment when the ovum is fertilized.... [A]s Christians, we believe that this should not be an individual decision on the part of the physician and couple. The decision should be limited and restrained by the larger society."
The Protestant churches in general continued this opposition to abortion until 1970 when some churches -- ironically including Presbyterian Church (USA) -- started becoming pro-abortion. One, the Southern Baptist Convention, supported abortion in 1971 but reversed that decision in 1980 and are now staunchly pro-life.
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