There is nothing new under the sun. It was here already, long ago.
Ecclesiastes 1:9-10

The early Christians lived in a thoroughly pagan world. Human life was cheap. Abortion and infanticide were universal. The Roman economy was based on slavery, and Rome's most popular form of entertainment was the public exhibition of torture and murder. (Rome didn't have our technical ability to feign perpetual torture and death on movie and television screens.)

But there was one comer of the Roman empire where human life was sacred. Roman cruelty was abhorred in little Judea, and slavery (though sometimes practiced) was forbidden by Jewish law. For Jews, a child was God's greatest gift. As Flavius Josephus, a first-century Jewish historian, wrote:

The law has commanded us to raise all children and prohibited women from aborting or destroying seed; a woman who does so shall be judged a murderess of children, for she has caused a soul to be lost and the family of man to be diminished.

"To prevent birth is anticipated murder," wrote the famous Christian apologist Tertullian. "It makes little difference whether one destroys a life already born or does away with it in its nascent stage." He described an instrument used in abortions (the enbruosphaktes, literally "baby killer," similar to a curette) as "a needle by which the actual death is managed in this furtive robbery of life."

St. Justin Martyr, speaking before the emperor, used Christian condemnation of abortion and infanticide to illustrate how Christians differed from pagans. (Unfortunately, as would be true today, that didn't win the emperor's sympathy or save Justin from martyrdom.) Athenagoras, Hippolytus, Clement, Origen - the Councils of Elvira, Ancyra, Lerida, Braga - the list goes on and on of Church Fathers and Church councils that condemned abortion in the Roman world.

Early Christians considered abortion to be worse than other murder. Not only was the baby deprived of life on earth, but without baptism he was thought to be deprived of Heaven. (Today the Church offers hope that through Our Lord's infinite mercy aborted babies, although deprived of baptism, may enter Heaven.) Consequently, in the early centuries of the Church, when penances, were long and severe, lifetime penance was assigned to those guilty of abortion or infanticide. In fact, throughout the Middle Ages and up to the present time, absolution for abortion has been reserved under canon law to the bishop, though in recent times most bishops have extended that privilege to their priests.

The Catholic Church, of course, has not been alone in condemning abortion. Until recently all Protestant denominations condemned abortion, as did all Jews. Jewish tradition is well summarized by the 13th-century Zohar. "A person who kills the fetus ... desecrates that which was built by the Holy One and His craftsmanship."

Early feminists also condemned abortion, for they recognized that the mother is also a victim. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, organizer of the 1848 women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, wrote: "When you consider that women have been treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit." Pointing to the grave injury abortion does to mothers while the father is freed from responsibility, Susan B. Anthony wrote:

No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life; it will burden her soul in death; but oh, thrice guilty is he ... who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime.

When did the modem world begin to relearn the old, outlawed pagan vices? Appropriately enough, it was the man who gave his name to sadism, the Marquis de Sade, who in 1795 first proposed legalizing abortion in La Philosophie dans le Boudoir. De Sade's proposal festered for a century until Friedrich Engels, collaborator of Karl Marx, incorporated into Communism the promotion of abortion. Since the civilized world and above all the Christian world abhorred both de Sade and Engels, neither had much influence until this century, when Communism infected Russia. One of Lenin's first decrees legalized abortion. From Russia the abortion infection then metastasized into social democratic and other political parties.

Even the Christian churches began to show symptoms. In 1930, at the Lambeth Conference, Anglicans voted to allow artificial contraception "for serious reasons." It was a momentous decision, a foreshadowing (might we say a "penumbra"?) of things to come. A dissenting member wrote prophetically at the time that this decision would "stimulate the general advocacy of easier divorce and easier marriage laws." Equally farsighted was a letter to The Church 7Ymes, an Anglican publication:

Perhaps, too, our children - if we decide to have any - may read in 1980 that the Bishops at Lambeth have agreed to condone, in some cases, the practice of abortion, and that "liberal" Catholics applaud their courageous decision.

Recently Episcopal priestess Katherine Ragsdale, president of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, said on television's.FYiing Line: "We do support a woman's ... not only constitutionally given right but God-given responsibility ... to choose an abortion if that's what seems best."

Truly, we have returned to the degradation and barbarities of ancient Rome, about which Livy, the historian of Rome who died shortly before the crucifixion of Christ, observed: "We can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them."

Joseph Collison
Joseph Collison is the Director of the Office of Pro Life Activities for the Diocese of Norwich, Connecticut, and Chairman of the Board of the Caring Families Crisis Pregnancy Center.

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