**This is a posting I got off of the American Life League’s website…and they talk about sexual immorality and our early church fathers. **
Sexual immorality
Without question, the most commonly cited reason for procuring abortion in the first few centuries of the church’s existence was to terminate pregnancies resulting from sexual immorality. For example, in his scathing indictment of Callistus (bishop of Rome from 217), Hippolytus asserts that he,
…permitted females, if they were unwedded, and burned with passion at an age at all events unbecoming, or if they were not disposed to overturn their own dignity through a legal marriage, that they might have whomsoever they would choose as a bedfellow, whether a slave or free, and that a woman, though not legally married, might consider such a companion as a husband.[l7]
Hippolytus goes on to say that such women resorted to contraceptive drugs and womb binding to insure that no offspring would issue from these illicit liaisons.
Clement of Alexandria (c.A.D. 15O-22O), maintains that “If we should but control our lusts at the start and if we would not kill off the human race born and developing according to the divine plan, then our whole lives would be lived according to nature.”[18] The Alexandrian theologian goes on to make the very perceptive statement that “women who resort to some sort of deadly abortion drug kill not only the embryo but, along with it, all human kindness.”[19]
Sadly, one does not have to look far today to find corroboration for Clement’s observation. Carol Everett, who herself was pressured into having an abortion by her husband and doctor, became involved in the abortion business in Texas in the 197O’s. There she worked her way “up” from a partnership in four abortion clinics, to the directorship of several clinics of her own where some 55O babies died each month. Everett, whose aborticide activity was ended by her Christian conversion, paints a disturbing picture of what goes on behind the scenes in an abortion clinic. She says of the typical young woman waiting in the abortion chamber:
She’s on the table scared to death, so tense she can’t stand it. The doctor comes in, sometimes says hello sometimes says nothing. The people in the room laugh and joke because you’ve got to remember these people are having trouble with what they’re doing too. If you kill babies for a living, you have to deal with it some way. And they deal with it in different ways-by laughing, joking, turning the radio up so loud in the room so that no one can hear them or think about what’s going on. The nurses dance, the doctors joke-“Here’s looking at you!” when an eye goes through the tube.[20]
The abortion business is not only about killing human beings. As Clement points out, it has much to do with killing human emotions as well.
After Clement, the Council of Elvira (c.A.D. 305) pronounced judgment upon women who aborted their children conceived in adulterous affairs.[21] And the Council of Ancyra (convened in A.D. 314) did the same with regard to “Women who commit fornication, and destroy that which they have conceived.”[22] Then in a powerful sermon on Romans 24, the great fourth-century preacher and bishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, speaks of “the harlot” whose “whoredom” leads to adultery and then “murder.” He expresses shock at the thought that in an effort to make herself physically appealing to her “lovers,” she will resort even to killing her preborn child.[23]
Chrysostom 's contemporary, the great Latin father Jerome (c.A.D. 34O-42O), laments the daily fall of so many virgins which results in loss to the church. He writes:
You may see many women widows before wedded, who try to conceal their miserable fall by a lying garb. Unless they are betrayed by swelling wombs or by the crying of their infants…Some go so far as to take potions, that they may insure barrenness …Some, when they find themselves with child through their sin, use drugs to procure abortion, and when (as often happens) they die with their offspring, they enter the lower world laden with the guilt not only of adultery against Christ but also of suicide and child murder…Yet it is these who say: “…my conscience is sufficient guide for me…”[24]\
Question is: Why haven’t we learned yet from the past?
