Abortion's Connection With Idea Of Evil In History

From a HNN entry of article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Oct. 3, 2004

The moral problem with abortion was not projected onto the screen of human consciousness as a result of Christian influence. In 400 B.C., Hippocrates wrote these words, "I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion." Christianity imbued the pro-life imperative with the vigor of its faith.

Clarity, as well, was granted the church through the teachings of Christ. The earliest followers could not possibly know the genetic makeup and potential of the human embryo. But they knew that they, human beings, were made in the image of God, who was the author of life and gave new life to the world in and through human bodies and human love.

Thus, in the earliest writings, abortion is explicitly spoken of as a violation of the moral law against murder. The constant teaching against abortion is unbroken from the Didache (AD 70) through the writings of Pope John Paul II. Many Christian denominations continue to hold clearly to this teaching.

Both the more reason-based approach of Hippocrates, based in natural law, and the divinely revealed aspects of the moral law led John Paul II to confirm definitively the faith's constant teaching on the evil of abortion, which "is unchanged and unchangeable." (The Gospel of Life, 62).

The identification of the evil of deliberate abortion, while not proclaimed in an extraordinary pronouncement of the church's pastors, by the pope's own words, is an infallible (i.e., unchangeable) moral teaching of the ordinary, universal authority of the church. The teaching protecting human life is well-established, clear and unbroken. Many arguments against the definitive teaching, however, are built upon moral novelties.

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