Every once in a while, like lately, I read the bible. Since it's on-line it's easy to do. Whether you take it at face value, a text written over a few centuries by many different unknown authors, or even as a historical document, I don't see where any religious leaders Catholic or not, can take a forced birth position, based on biblical teaching. There isn't much there. Any Genocide or slaughter in the bible made no exception for pregnancy.
Now later in the church, we have things like this
Athenagoras: "We say that women who induce abortions are murderers, and will have to give account of it to God. For the same person, would not regard the child in the womb as a living being and therefore an object of God's care and then kill it.... But we are altogether consistent in our conduct. We obey reason and do not override it." Petition to Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE), circa 150 CE
Clement of Alexandria: (circa 150 - 215 CE) "Our whole life can go on in observation of the laws of nature, if we gain dominion over our desires from the beginning and if we do not kill, by various means of a perverse art, the human offspring, born according to the designs of divine providence; for these women who, if order to hide their immorality, use abortive drugs which expel the child completely dead, abort at the same time their own human feelings." Paedagogus 2
Tertullian (circa 155 - 225 CE): "...we are not permitted, since murder has been prohibited to us once and for all, even to destroy ...the fetus in the womb. It makes no difference whether one destroys a life that has already been born or one that is in the process of birth." 4
St. Hippolytus (circa 170-236 CE): "Reputed believes began to resort to drugs for producing Sterility and to gird themselves round, so as to expel what was conceived on account of their not wanting to have a child either by a slave or by any paltry fellow, for the sake of their family and excessive wealth. Behold, into how great impiety that lawless one has proceeded, by inculcating adultery and murder at the same time." From "Refutation of all Heresies"
http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_hist.htmNONE of which takes into account the status or rights of women, which were non-exsistant at the time. Abortion in the church, remained a male opinion. Multiple births, health, rape, age, none of it mattered. Woman were not citizens, merely property and in the mind of certain leaders, barely human at all.
Church leaders and commentators, prior to the 20th century:
St. Tertullian (about 155 to 225 CE):
"Do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the Devil's gateway: You are the unsealer of the forbidden tree: You are the first deserter of the divine law: You are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image, man. On account of your desert even the Son of God had to die." 1,2
St. Augustine of Hippo (354 to 430 CE). He wrote to a friend:
"What is the difference whether it is in a wife or a mother, it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman......I fail to see what use woman can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children." 10
St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 to 1274 CE): (One of the "great minds" of history Gawd.)
"As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from a defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence."
Martin Luther (1483 to 1546):
"If they
become tired or even die, that does not matter. Let them die in childbirth, that's why they are there." 9
http://www.religioustolerance.org/lfe_bibl.htm
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