Not Hard to Refute the Canard

Would you believe it?  Earlier this year, I actually heard someone claim that “The Church never even had a position on abortion until the 1880s” while walking to sing in the choir at Mass!  This is just one of the mendacious arguments held by some who could know better, with just the tiniest amount of effort.

Here, let’s just put two simple and obvious texts–outside the Bible, in the Christian tradition, and before the Nicene Creed was formulated.  Just for starters.

Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not corrupt youth; thou shalt not commit fornication; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not use soothsaying; thou shalt not practise sorcery; thou shalt not kill a child by abortion, neither shalt thou slay it when born; thou shalt not covet the goods of thy neighbour;

(source: Didache)

People will frequently try to make something out of the difficulty faced by St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, among others, in differentiating the crimes of contraception, abortion, and homicide clearly–given the lack of clear science on the early stages of human development.

But there is really no doubt that from the earliest days the Church not only condemned infanticide, but also the deliberately induced death of a child in the womb:

You shall not use magic. You shall not use witchcraft; for He says, You shall not suffer a witch to live. You shall not slay your child by causing abortion, nor kill that which is begotten; for everything that is shaped, and has received a soul from God, if it be slain, shall be avenged, as being unjustly destroyed. You shall not covet the things that belong to your neighbour, as his wife, or his servant, or his ox, or his field. You shall not forswear yourself; for it is said, You shall not swear at all. But if that cannot be avoided, you shall swear truly; for every one that swears by Him shall be commended. You shall not bear false witness; for he that falsely accuses the needy provokes to anger Him that made him.

(source: Apostolic Constitutions, Book VII)

So let’s just quit destroying justifying grace in our lives, and tempting others, on the verge of meeting Jesus, right?  And at any rate, let’s don’t use easily-refuted folly to do it.