Did the Early Church Oppose Abortion?
by Justin Taylor, The Gospel Coalition:
If you’ve ever wanted to know what the early church thought about abortion and how it responded, the book to read is Michael J. Gorman’s Abortion and the Early Church: Christian, Jewish and Pagan Attitudes in the Greco-Roman World.
Abortion was rampant, especially in ancient Rome, and the early Christians, like the Jews, consistently opposed it.
For some ancient citations to this effect, I’ve reprinted some relevant sections from an essay in the back of the ESV Study Bible on “The Beginning of Life and Abortion,” which offers a concise overview on the extrabiblical Jewish and early Christian literature in contrast to Roman culture:
First-Century Judaism Condemned Abortion
For example, the Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides 184–186 (c. 50 B.C.–A.D. 50) says that “a woman should not destroy the unborn in her belly, nor after its birth throw it before the dogs and vultures as a prey.”
Included among those who do evil in the apocalyptic Sibylline Oracles were women who “aborted what they carried in the womb” (2.281–282).
Similarly, the apocryphal book 1 Enoch (2nd or 1st century B.C.) declares that an evil angel taught humans how to “smash the embryo in the womb” (69.12).
Finally, the first-century Jewish historian Josephus wrote that “the law orders all the offspring to be brought up, and forbids women either to cause abortion or to make away with the fetus” (Against Apion 2.202).
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