For anyone with a minimum of human sensibility it is clear that one of the most infectious, disastrous, and vile plagues of our society in the midst of the 21st century is abortion. The Catholic Church, as well as most of the churches and ecclesial communities separated from her, condemns without palliatives the annihilation of human beings in the wombs of their mothers. Since the Bible scarcely speaks specifically of abortion, although there are obviously very clear indications that the Scriptures consider the fetus to be a human life (e.g. Judges 16,17; Psalm 22,9-10; Luke 1, 15-16 and 41-44; Galatians 1,15), it is important that we study what the first Christians believed about this subject. Their testimony is unanimous and leaves no room for doubt in its condemnation of abortion. The Didache, which may have been written as early as the first century, is perhaps the first patristic testimony in which such a condemnation is introduced:

“Behold the second precept of the Doctrine: You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not prostitute children, nor lead them into vice; you shall not steal; you shall not give yourself to magic, nor to sorcery; you shall not cause the child conceived in the orgy to be aborted, and after it is born you shall not put it to death.”

(Didajé II)

In the Epistle of Barnabas, written in the third decade of the second century, the fetus in the mother’s womb is called a son, abortion is expressly forbidden, and it is equated with murder:

“You shall not waver as to whether it will be or not. You shall not take the name of God in vain. You shall love your neighbor more than your own life. You shall not slay your child in the mother’s womb, nor, once it is born, shall you take away its life. Do not withdraw your hand from your son or your daughter, but from their youth you shall teach them the fear of the Lord.”

(Ep Bernabé XIX,5)

and “Persecutors of the good, haters of the truth, lovers of the lie, ignorant of the reward of righteousness, who cleave not to the good nor to just judgment, who attend not to the widow and the orphan, who are watchful not for the fear of God but for evil, from whom meekness and patience are far and remote, who love vanity, who pursue reward, who have no compassion on the needy, who suffer not with the afflicted, prone to slander, ignorant of Him who created them, murderers of their children through abortion, destroyers of the work of God, who turn away the needy, who oppress the afflicted, advocates of the rich, unjust judges of the poor, sinners in everything.”

(Ep Bernabé XX, 2)

The first Latin apologist, Minucius Felix, calls abortion parricide in his work Octavius from the end of the second century:

“There are some women who, by drinking medical preparations, extinguish the foundations of the future man in their own entrails, and thus commit parricide before bringing him to birth.”

(Octavius XXXIII)

The Christian apologist Athenagoras is equally emphatic in his consideration of abortion when he wrote to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius:

“We say that women who use medicines to bring about an abortion are committing murder, and that they will have to give an account to God for the abortion… we regard the fetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore as an object of God’s care… and we do not abandon children, for those who expose them are guilty of murdering children”

(Atenágoras, En defensa de los cristianos, XXXV)

The testimonies multiply everywhere. Thus we read in the Epistle to Diognetus that Christians:

“They marry like all other men and beget children; but they do not cast away their offspring (fetuses)”

(Ep a Diogneto V,6)

Tertullian condemns abortion as homicide and recognizes the human identity of the unborn:

“ It is an anticipated homicide to prevent birth; it matters little whether one destroys a soul already born or makes it perish at birth. He who will be a man is already one.”

(Apologeticum IX,8)

As early as the fourth century, Saint Basil goes even further by calling murderers not only the woman who aborts but also those who provide what is necessary to abort, which would be perfectly applicable to those who manufacture or prescribe the abortifacient pill:

“ The women who provide medicines to cause abortion, as well as those who take the potions to destroy the unborn children, are murderers”

(San Basilio, ep 188, VIII)

Saint Jerome addresses the situation of the woman who dies while trying to abort her child:

“Some, on realizing that they have become pregnant through their sin, take medicines to procure an abortion, and when (as often happens) they die together with their offspring, they enter the underworld laden not only with the guilt of adultery against Christ but also with that of suicide and the murder of children. ”

(San Jerónimo, Carta a Eustoquio)

Perhaps the most dramatic text concerning abortion is a paragraph that appears in the apocryphal book known as the Apocalypse of Peter. The book is surely of Gnostic origin, which means that we should not regard it as being of the same value as the previous quotations, but I have decided to copy this short paragraph as a sign of the extent to which the condemnation of abortion was present even among the heterodox of the first centuries:

“Very near that place I saw another narrow place, where the discharge and the stench of those who were tormented there ran down, and there was formed there something like a lake. And there sat women, sunk in that filth up to their throats; and opposite them, seated and weeping, many children who had been born before their time; and from them there came forth rays as of fire that struck the eyes of the women; these were the ones who had conceived outside of marriage and had procured abortion.”

(Ap Pedro 26)

All these testimonies against abortion have a twofold value for us in the circumstances we are called to live in our own time. On the one hand, they should serve as a warning so that under no circumstances do we accommodate ourselves to a state of opinion in our society that is increasingly favorable to accepting abortion as something normal. To do such a thing would be to go precisely in the opposite direction to the one taken by our ancestors in the faith. They neither kept silent nor were lukewarm when it came to condemning that scourge. On the other hand, we must be honest and acknowledge that we live in a world where a great part of what was most abominable in ancient paganism, abortion and the profusion of every kind of sexual immorality, has not only resurged forcefully but has managed to “legitimize” itself socially, taking root even in the legislation of our countries. The Church, today just as yesterday, raises her voice against this infamy. It could be said that John Paul II, champion of the culture of life and therefore declared enemy of the culture of death that prevails in our society, has raised the condemnation of abortion almost to the level of a dogma of faith in the encyclical Evangelium Vitae:

“Therefore, by the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors, in communion with the Bishops-who on various occasions have condemned abortion and who in the aforementioned consultation, albeit dispersed throughout the world, have shown unanimous agreement concerning this doctrine-I declare that direct abortion, that is, abortion willed as an end or as a means, always constitutes a grave moral disorder, since it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. This doctrine is based upon the natural law and upon the written Word of God, is transmitted by the Church’s Tradition and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.”

No one, then, who prides himself on bearing the name of Christian and the surname of Catholic can justify, approve, legislate, or collaborate, actively or passively, with abortion. It is our duty as Christians to fight in the war to save millions of innocents. They have no voice, they have no strength to oppose those who wish to murder them. Let us be the voice and the strength that, as in the past, wins the battle for life, for hope, and for love toward every human creature from its conception.

Author: Luis Fernando Pérez