What Do Others Say about Abortion?

                                                                                                                           Vol. VI, No. 2, March 1993

It is important that each of us determines how God views abortion. However, it can be helpful to investigate what others have said about abortion through time. As we are told in Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun, not even abortion.

Hippocrates lived in the 4th Century BC. We know him as the author of the "Hippocratic Oath," a code of medical ethics which most doctors recite as they begin medical practice. On the issue of abortion, Hippocrates said, "I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with the view to injury and wrong-doing. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly, I will not give to a woman a pessary [something introduced into the womb] to cause an abortion."

In 1859 the American Medical Association drafted the following resolution, "Physicians have now arrived at the unanimous opinion, that the fetus in utero is alive from the moment of conception.... The willful killing of a human being, at any stage of its existence, is murder.... Abortion is in reality a crime against the infant, its mother, the family circle, and society."

Clement of Alexandria, a church leader in the second century, said, "But our world's life would proceed in keeping with nature, if we would but control our desires at the outset and refrain from taking away by oils and vicious techniques the human progeny born by the Providence of God. For those women who conceal sexual wantonness by taking stimulating drugs to bring on an abortion wholly lose their own humanity along with the fetus."

Basil the Great, one of the greatest Eastern Christian fathers, said, "Whoever purposely destroys a fetus incurs the penalty of murder. We do not ask precisely whether it is formed or not formed. For here not only that which would have been born is vindicated, but the woman herself who prepared her own destruction, since often time women die in such attempts. But to this the fetus destroyed adds another killing."

John Calvin wrote, "If it seems more disgraceful that a man be killed in his own home than in his field – since for every man his home is his sanctuary – how much more abominable it is to be considered to kill a fetus in the womb who has not yet been brought into the light."

“'Thou shalt not kill' refers to poisoners and so to those who purposely endeavor to destroy the life of a child in the womb, whether the woman herself, or another does it."– Benjamin Wadsworth, an American Protestant in the 1700's.

Dietrich Bonhoffer, hung by the Nazis in April 1945, wrote, "Destruction of the embryo in the mother's womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of life. And that is nothing but murder."...

We side with the Apostle Paul who said, "Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ." Galatians 1:10.

[The above is slightly condensed from a report of the Social Action Committee of Montrose Baptist Church, Rockville, MD, as printed in the Montrose Messenger of July-August 1991.]