Abortion
Many people, Catholic's included, wonder why the Catholic Church is against abortion. The answer is simple, abortion is the murder of innocent children, which can NEVER be justified under ANY circumstances.
Some pro-abortion advocates try to use the argument that its the woman's body and she can do with it whatever she pleases, but that argument is flawed in two ways:
First, A woman's body is not hers to do with as she pleases. God created all things, therefore all things belong to Him. God created the human body in His image and likeness (Genesis 1:26). 1 Corinthians 6:13 says "The body is...for the Lord". 1 Corinthians 6:19 says "Or know you not that your members are the temple of the Holy Ghost, Who is in you, whom you have from God; and you are not your own?". Romans 14:7-8 says "None of us lives as his own master, and none of us dies as his own master. While we live we are responsible to the Lord, and when we die we die as his servants". We are not our own property, we belong to God. We have no rights against God, He has the right to lay down all the conditions as to how we must use the body He has given us.
Second, an infant in the womb is entirely separate, distinct, and unique from it's mother. It is not a part of it's mother's body, but it is dependent on her body for nutrition and a safe environment in which to grow.
Other abortion supporters claim the Bible doesn't say abortion is wrong, but it does, in Exodus 20:13: "Thou shalt not kill". And also in Genesis 9:5 "...From man in regard to his fellow man I will demand an accounting for human life." As mentioned before, life belongs to God. When we take someone's life we are not only robbing life from that individual, we are also taking a life from God. The science of genetics has shown quite conclusively that human life begins when the egg and sperm unite (conception), therefore, the Catholic Church teaches that human life must be reverenced and protected from the moment of conception.
There are also many passages in Scripture that indicate that the pre-natal individual is to be regarded as a human being:
Psalm 139:13 "You formed my inmost being; You knit me in my mother's womb. I praise You, so wonderfully You made me... My very self You knew; my bones were not hidden from You, when I was being made in secret, fashioned as in the depths of the earth. Your eyes foresaw my actions; in Your book all are written down; my days were shaped, before one came to be." This clearly shows we are known to God as individuals, even before we draw our first breath. Abortion wrenches us out of earthly existence, and out of the vision of the future that exists in the mind of God.
Jeremiah 1:5 "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you. Before you were born I dedicated you..." From the very first moment of our conception God claims us as His own, and sets our lives in motion.
Ecclesiasticus 11:5 "Just as you know not how the breath of life fashions the human frame in the mother's womb, so you know not the work of God which he is accomplishing in the universe." And also Job 31:15 "Did not he who made me in the womb make him? Did not that same One fashion us before our birth?" Notice these two verses say "...fashions the human frame in the mother's womb..." and "...the same One fashion us before our birth?". Neither of these say anything about "fetal tissue" or a "glob of cells" that will become a human.
Psalm 51:7 "I was born guilty, a sinner, even as my mother conceived me." This verse shows that conception is the birth of our spiritual existence.
Isaiah 49:1 "The Lord called me from birth, from my mother's womb he gave me my name." We are known, loved, and named by God in the womb. This shows that God regards an individual as whole and complete even before birth.
Luke 1:15 (referring to St. John the Baptist) "He was filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother's womb..." This shows that St. John was a fully vested human person, with a body and soul, even before he was born.
Luke 1:41-43 "When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the infant leaped in her womb...And she cried out with a loud voice and said: Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" There are several points that can be made here:
First, St. John was able to respond to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, even while still in his mother's womb.
Second, it says "the infant" leaped in her womb, not "the fetus" or "the glob of tissue".
Third, the Bible says that after the Annunciation Mary "...went into the hill country with haste into a city of Juda" to visit her cousin Elizabeth (Luke 1:39). It was at this time when John lept in Elizabeth's womb. Mary had only been pregnant with Jesus for a very short time, only days, yet St. John knew that Jesus was in his presence, and Elizabeth called Mary "the mother of my Lord", not "the mother of a blob of tissue that will become my Lord". This is clear proof that human life begins at conception.
Some pro-abortion supporters clain that St. Thomas Aquinas, a Catholic saint, taught that human life began at about 3 months, and that this somehow justifies abortion. St. Thomas Aquinas always taught that abortion at any stage of development was a grave sin, however, he held for gradations of seriousness, based on the knowledge of fetal development available in his day. We now know that the information available to him was based on faulty biology. We also now know that the entire person is present in the very first cell which is formed at the moment of conception. As as result of modern science, the Church's traditional opposition to abortion, from the very beginning of the Christian era, was actually strengthened.
The Catholic Church has always condemned abortion as a grave evil, and there is ample proof of this. Christian writers from the first-century author of the Didache to Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae ("The Gospel of Life") have maintained that the Bible forbids abortion, just as it forbids murder. Some examples of this consistent witness from the writings of the Fathers of the Church follow:
As the early Christian writer Tertullian pointed out, the law of Moses ordered strict penalties for causing an abortion. We read, "If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely [Hebrew: "so that her child comes out"], but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot" (Ex. 21:22–24).
This applies the lex talionis or "law of retribution" to abortion. The lex talionis establishes the just punishment for an injury (eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life,) compared to the much greater retributions that had been common before, such as life for eye, life for tooth, lives of the offender’s family for one life).
The lex talionis would already have been applied to a woman who was injured in a fight. The distinguishing point in this passage is that a pregnant woman is hurt "so that her child comes out"; the child is the focus of the lex talionis in this passage. Aborted babies must have justice, too.
This is because they, like older children, have souls, even though marred by original sin. David tells us, "Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me" (Ps. 51:5, NIV). Since sinfulness is a spiritual rather than a physical condition, David must have had a spiritual nature from the time of conception.
The same is shown in James 2:26, which tells us that "the body without the spirit is dead": The soul is the life-principle of the human body. Since from the time of conception the child’s body is alive (as shown by the fact it is growing), the child’s body must already have its spirit.
Thus, in 1995 Pope John Paul II declared that the Church’s teaching on abortion "is unchanged and unchangeable. Therefore, by the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his successors . . . I declare that direct abortion, that is, abortion willed as an end or as a means, always constitutes a grave moral disorder, since it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. This doctrine is based upon the natural law and upon the written word of God, is transmitted by the Church’s tradition and taught by the ordinary and universal magisterium. No circumstance, no purpose, no law whatsoever can ever make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the law of God which is written in every human heart, knowable by reason itself, and proclaimed by the Church" (Evangelium Vitae 62).
The Didache
"The second commandment of the teaching: You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not seduce boys. You shall not commit fornication. You shall not steal. You shall not practice magic. You shall not use potions. You shall not procure [an] abortion, nor destroy a newborn child" (Didache 2:1–2 [A.D. 70]).
The Letter of Barnabas
"The way of light, then, is as follows. If anyone desires to travel to the appointed place, he must be zealous in his works. The knowledge, therefore, which is given to us for the purpose of walking in this way, is the following. . . . Thou shalt not slay the child by procuring abortion; nor, again, shalt thou destroy it after it is born" (Letter of Barnabas 19 [A.D. 74]).
The Apocalypse of Peter
"And near that place I saw another strait place . . . and there sat women. . . . And over against them many children who were born to them out of due time sat crying. And there came forth from them rays of fire and smote the women in the eyes. And these were the accursed who conceived and caused abortion" (The Apocalypse of Peter 25 [A.D. 137]).
Athenagoras
"What man of sound mind, therefore, will affirm, while such is our character, that we are murderers?
. . . [W]hen we say that those women who use drugs to bring on abortion commit murder, and will have to give an account to God for the abortion, on what principle should we commit murder? For it does not belong to the same person to regard the very fetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God’s care, and when it has passed into life, to kill it; and not to expose an infant, because those who expose them are chargeable with child-murder, and on the other hand, when it has been reared to destroy it" (A Plea for the Christians 35 [A.D. 177]).
Tertullian
"In our case, a murder being once for all forbidden, we may not destroy even the fetus in the womb, while as yet the human being derives blood from the other parts of the body for its sustenance. To hinder a birth is merely a speedier man-killing; nor does it matter whether you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to birth. That is a man which is going to be one; you have the fruit already in its seed" (Apology 9:8 [A.D. 197]).
"Among surgeons’ tools there is a certain instrument, which is formed with a nicely-adjusted flexible frame for opening the uterus first of all and keeping it open; it is further furnished with an annular blade, by means of which the limbs [of the child] within the womb are dissected with anxious but unfaltering care; its last appendage being a blunted or covered hook, wherewith the entire fetus is extracted by a violent delivery.
"There is also [another instrument in the shape of] a copper needle or spike, by which the actual death is managed in this furtive robbery of life: They give it, from its infanticide function, the name of embruosphaktes, [meaning] "the slayer of the infant," which of course was alive. . . .
"[The doctors who performed abortions] all knew well enough that a living being had been conceived, and [they] pitied this most luckless infant state, which had first to be put to death, to escape being tortured alive" (The Soul 25 [A.D. 210]).
"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" (ibid., 27).
"The law of Moses, indeed, punishes with due penalties the man who shall cause abortion [Ex. 21:22–24]" (ibid., 37).
Minucius Felix
"There are some [pagan] women who, by drinking medical preparations, extinguish the source of the future man in their very bowels and thus commit a parricide before they bring forth. And these things assuredly come down from the teaching of your [false] gods. . . . To us [Christians] it is not lawful either to see or hear of homicide" (Octavius 30 [A.D. 226]).
Hippolytus
"Women who were reputed to be believers began to take drugs to render themselves sterile, and to bind themselves tightly so as to expel what was being conceived, since they would not, on account of relatives and excess wealth, want to have a child by a slave or by any insignificant person. See, then, into what great impiety that lawless one has proceeded, by teaching adultery and murder at the same time!" (Refutation of All Heresies [A.D. 228]).
Council of Ancyra
"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 until the hour of death, and to this some have assented. Nevertheless, being desirous to use somewhat greater lenity, we have ordained that they fulfill ten years [of penance], according to the prescribed degrees" (canon 21 [A.D. 314]).
Basil the Great
"Let her that procures abortion undergo ten years’ penance, whether the embryo were perfectly formed, or not" (First Canonical Letter, canon 2 [A.D. 374]).
"He that kills another with a sword, or hurls an axe at his own wife and kills her, is guilty of willful murder; not he who throws a stone at a dog, and unintentionally kills a man, or who corrects one with a rod, or scourge, in order to reform him, or who kills a man in his own defense, when he only designed to hurt him. But the man, or woman, is a murderer that gives a philtrum, if the man that takes it dies upon it; so are they who take medicines to procure abortion; and so are they who kill on the highway, and rapparees" (ibid., canon 8).
John Chrysostom
"Wherefore I beseech you, flee fornication. . . . Why sow where the ground makes it its care to destroy the fruit?—where there are many efforts at abortion?—where there is murder before the birth? For even the harlot you do not let continue a mere harlot, but make her a murderess also. You see how drunkenness leads to prostitution, prostitution to adultery, adultery to murder; or rather to a something even worse than murder. For I have no name to give it, since it does not take off the thing born, but prevents its being born. Why then do thou abuse the gift of God, and fight with his laws, and follow after what is a curse as if a blessing, and make the chamber of procreation a chamber for murder, and arm the woman that was given for childbearing unto slaughter? For with a view to drawing more money by being agreeable and an object of longing to her lovers, even this she is not backward to do, so heaping upon thy head a great pile of fire. For even if the daring deed be hers, yet the causing of it is thine" (Homilies on Romans 24 [A.D. 391]).
Jerome
"I cannot bring myself to speak of the many virgins who daily fall and are lost to the bosom of the Church, their mother. . . . Some go so far as to take potions, that they may insure barrenness, and thus murder human beings almost before their conception. 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" (Letters 22:13 [A.D. 396]).
The Apostolic Constitutions
"Thou shalt not use magic. Thou shalt not use witchcraft; for he says, ‘You shall not suffer a witch to live’ [Ex. 22:18]. Thou shall not slay thy child by causing abortion, nor kill that which is begotten. . . . [I]f it be slain, [it] shall be avenged, as being unjustly destroyed" (Apostolic Constitutions 7:3 [A.D. 400]).
SOURCES
Abortion Yes or No, by John L. Grady, M.D.
Douay Rheims version of the Holy Bible
Catechism of the Catholic Church
http://www.everythingcatholic.com/1024/
The Catholic Answer Book 2, by Rev. Peter M. J. Stravinskas, PH.D., S.T.L.
Birth Prevention Quizes to a Street Preacher, by Fathers Rumble and Carty
The Teachings of the Church Fathers, by John R. Willis, S.J.
Catholic Doctrine in Scripture, by Gregory Oatis
This Is The Faith, by Canon Francis Ripley