Pro-abortionists state our history this way
=================
from:
The History of Abortion Law in the… | Our Bodies Ourselves Today
The First Abortion Laws (1820s-1930s)
"Social and legal rules governing abortion can be found dating back to the colonial period. In the British colonies, abortion was legal
before “quickening,” the point at which a pregnant person feels the fetus move, generally at around four or five months. (18-21 weeks)
Prohibition against
abortion didn’t appear in state statutes until the 1820s, and early laws were ambiguous and not strictly enforced."
================
COMPARED To the Bible and Early Christian History ---
from:
History of abortion - Wikipedia
Exodus 21:22 describes a situation in which two men fight and injure a pregnant woman, causing her unborn child to leave her womb. The
Masoretic text uses the Hebrew term "veyats'u yeladeha" (וְיָצְאוּ יְלָדֶיהָ)
[54] to refer to the child coming out;
[55] different English versions translate this term either as a "premature birth" or as a "miscarriage".
[56] The Spanish translation published by the Sociedad Biblica Catolica Internacional (SOBICAIN) uses the term "aborto", clearly indicating the demise of the fetus.
[57] If no additional harm follows, then the perpetrator must pay a fine. Only if there is additional harm must the perpetrator be punished with equal harm (i.e. eye for an eye).
[58] Commentators such as
Bruce Waltke have presented this verse as evidence that God does not value a fetus as a human being, and/or evidence that a fetus has no soul.
[59][60][61][62][63] C. Everett Koop disagreed with this interpretation.
[64]
Another Old Testament passage that has been used to argue for divine approval of abortion is Numbers 5:11-31, which describes the test of an unfaithful wife.
[65] If a man is suspicious of his wife's fidelity, he would take her to the high priest. The priest would make a substance for the woman to drink made from water and "dust from the tabernacle floor". If she had been unfaithful "her abdomen will swell and her womb will miscarry, and she will become a curse." If she was innocent the drink had no effect.
[66]
...
The early Christian work called the
Didache (before 100 AD) says: "do not murder a child by abortion or kill a new-born infant."
[67] Tertullian, a 2nd- and 3rd-century
Christian theologian argued that abortion should be performed only in cases in which abnormal
positioning of the fetus in the womb would endanger the life of the pregnant woman
Saint Augustine believed that abortion of a
fetus animatus, a fetus with human limbs and shape, was murder. However, his beliefs on earlier-stage abortion were similar to Aristotle's,
[69] though he could neither deny nor affirm whether such partially formed fetuses would be resurrected as full people at the time of the Second Coming.
[70]
- "Now who is there that is not rather disposed to think that unformed abortions perish, like seeds that have never fructified?"[68]
- "And therefore the following question may be very carefully inquired into and discussed by learned men, though I do not know whether it is in man's power to resolve it: At what time the infant begins to live in the womb: whether life exists in a latent form before it manifests itself in the motions of the living being. To deny that the young who are cut out limb by limb from the womb, lest if they were left there dead the mother should die too, have never been alive, seems too audacious."[71]
The
Leges Henrici Primi, written c. 1115, prescribes compensation for a woman or her relatives if another person causes her to miscarry, and prescribes penance (3 years if the abortion occurs before quickening, 7 years after quickening) if the pregnant woman aborts her pregnancy;
====================== later in history
"Though the physicians' campaign against abortion began in the early 1800s, little change was made in the United States until after the
Civil War.
[87]
"The English law on abortion was first codified in legislation under sections 1 and 2 of
Malicious Shooting or Stabbing Act 1803. The
Bill was proposed by the
Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales,
Edward Law, 1st Baron Ellenborough to clarify the law relating to abortion and was the first law to explicitly outlaw it. The Act provided that it was an offence for any person to perform or cause an abortion. The punishment for performing or attempting to perform a post
quickening abortion was the
death penalty (section 1) and otherwise was transportation for fourteen years (section 2). In the 19th-century United States, there was little regulation of abortion, in the tradition of English common law, pre quickening abortions were considered at most a misdemeanor. These cases proved difficult to prosecute as the testimony of the mother was usually the only means to determine when quickening had occurred.
[88]
"The law was amended in
1828 and
1837 – the latter removed the distinction between women who were quick with child (late pregnancy) and those who were not. It also eliminated the death penalty as a possible punishment. The latter half of the 19th century saw abortion become increasingly punished. One writer justified this by claiming that the number of abortions among married women had increased markedly since 1840.
[89] The
Offences against the Person Act 1861 created a new preparatory offence of procuring poison or instruments with intent to procure abortion. During the 1860s however abortion services were available in New York, New Orleans, Cincinnati, Louisville, Cleveland, Chicago and Indianapolis; with estimates of one abortion for every 4 live births.
[90]
"pro-life (Anti-abortion) statutes began to appear in the United States from the 1820s.
www.christianpost.com
