Abortion Matters

Abortion as a Challenge to Christian Orthodoxy

by Terry Schlossberg

Approval of abortion by mainline Protestant denominations is a thoroughly modern phenomenon—scarcely more than two decades old. Early Church documents—the second-century Didache and the Epistle of Barnabas, for example—specifically condemned abortion. Opposition to abortion can be found as a thread running through the ancient writings of church fathers up to those of twentieth-century theologians and denominational proclamations. Orthodox scholar Alexander Webster notes that for all the points of division in the Christian Church through the centuries, abortion was one matter on which the Church was never divided.

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Terry Schlossberg is executive director of Presbyterians Pro-Life (www.ppl.org), one of the sixteen unofficial renewal groups in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

more on abortion from the online archives

24.1—January/February 2011

Sanger's Victory

How Planned Parenthood's Founder Played the Christians, and Won by Allan C. Carlson

19.1—January/February 2006

As If We Were to Be Immortal

on Death & Seven of the Last Words of Socrates by Graeme Hunter

26.1—Jan/Feb 2013

The Destroyer of Peace

on Abortion as a Matter of National Welfare by W. Ross Blackburn

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