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).
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more on abortion from the online archives
30.3—May/June 2017
on the Misuse of Property Rights to Justify Slavery & Abortion by Robert Hart
24.1—January/February 2011
How Planned Parenthood's Founder Played the Christians, and Won by Allan C. Carlson
26.1—Jan/Feb 2013
on Abortion as a Matter of National Welfare by W. Ross Blackburn
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