The Pro-Life Movement in the Early Church

Rescuing babies in the early church

We tend to think of abortion and unwanted children as a relatively recent problem in society. The truth is, helping the defenseless traces back to be one of the very first ministries of the early church.

In the ancient world, infanticide was a large, shameful problem. In ancient Greece and Rome, babies would be killed if they were illegitimate, unhealthy, deformed, or the wrong sex (i.e. female), or would be too great a burden on the family. Abortion, while sometimes tried, resulted in a very high mortality for the mother. A very typical practice was for an unwanted child to be abandoned in the elements to die of exposure.

A letter recovered in Egypt, ca. 1 BC, is a husband’s direction to his wife. An excerpt from this short letter reads, “If-good luck to you!-you bear offspring, if it is a male, let it live; if it is a female, expose it.”

A site in Ashkelon (part of the Roman Empire) was found containing the haphazard remains of about 100 babies, each less than three days old. After researching the site, it was discovered that they were in a sewer that ran underneath a brothel. Sadly, a number of other archaeological sites similar to this have been found.

With the outbreak of Christianity in the Roman Empire, Christians not only refused to participate in the horrible practice of infanticide, they took great pains to find the children that were abandoned and adopt them into their own families. Untold numbers of children were given life by this. Those early believers show us, by their testimony, that being pro-life is more that merely being anti-abortion.

The early church kept no statistics on how many babies were rescued and adopted, but the fact that this was widespread in the church is testified to by the writings of the early church fathers such as Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Augustine, Ephraim, Basil, John Chrysostom, and in famous early church writings like the Epistle of Barnabas and the Didache.

What does the Bible say about our responsibility to the fatherless, the helpless, the orphan? One of many examples in Scripture is James 1:27 ‘Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.’

References:
http://www.teii.org/women-their-unborn/the-witness-of-the-early-church/
http://knowledgenuts.com/2014/02/13/the-tragically-common-practice-of-roman-infanticide/
http://thewardrobedoor.com/2012/02/adoption-movement-recaptures-early-church-distinctive.html
http://www.seeker.com/infanticide-common-in-roman-empire-1765237924.html
http://www.stoa.org/diotima/anthology/wlgr/wlgr-privatelife249.shtml
http://nacsw.org/Publications/Proceedings2011/GruberJOrphanCareE.pdf