This shocks me!!

[chefmomster2]

Abortion has always been condemned as sinful. However, from what I understand (please correct me if I am wrong), the science of when and how a human being came into being was lacking until more recent centuries. Based on the science, the timeline for when an abortion would be an act of contraception or an act of murder may have been updated over time as we gained more knowledge about what was actually happening in the womb. Both contraception and murder have always been considered sinful, they just had different penalties.

That may be true from a scientific standpoint, but not from a doctrinal view. Please note the words of Tertullian from c. 150-240 BCE:

Now we allow that life begins with conception because we contend that the soul also begins from conception; life taking its commencement at the same moment and place that the soul does" (De Anime 25, line 27).

The Church Fathers from the very earliest period of the Church taught that life began at conception.

I’m not clear on your statement that “contraception and murder had different penalties”.

Caesarius

Who is he who cannot warn that no woman may take a potion [an oral contraceptive or an abortifacient] so that she is unable to conceive or condemns in herself the nature which God willed to be fecund? As often as she could have conceived or given birth, of that many homicides she will be held guilty, and, unless she undergoes suitable penance, she will be damned by eternal death in hell. If a women does not wish to have children, let her enter into a religious agreement with her husband; for chastity is the sole sterility of a Christian woman (Sermons 1:12 [A.D. 522]).

freerepublic.com/focus/religion/1785564/posts?page=5

Not only did many of the great theologians address abortion and contraception, but so did some councils. The Council of Elvira in Spain (305) decreed two canons forbidding the sacraments to women who committed abortion: “If a woman becomes pregnant by committing adultery, while her husband is absent, and after the act she destroys (the child), it is proper to keep her from Communion until death, because she has doubled her crime”(63).

Canon 68 reads: “If a catechumen should conceive by an adulterer, and should procure the death of the child, she can be baptized only at the end of her life.”
A similar decision was reached at the Council of Ancyra (314): “Concerning women who commit fornication, and destroy that which they have conceived, or who are employed in making drugs for abortion, a former decree excluded them [from Communion] until the hour of death” (29)

Read more: ncregister.com/daily-news/abortion-contraception-and-the-church-fathers#ixzz38UlmnCN3

 

[Michael_Francis]

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