The Church Fathers and the Abortion- Why Prior "Lies" No longer Bear Political Fruit

The United States Speaker for the House's position that the Church Fathers allow her to be pro- choice is not new. In fact this was heard often just a couple of decades ago.

I thought the Patristic Blog The Way of the Fathers had a good post on the Church Fathers and Abortion at 70 A.D. and All That . He says in part:

Not since the book 1066 And All That: A Memorable History of England have the Fathers been so badly mangled and tangled. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. The early Church left clear paper trails on very, very few issues, but abortion is certainly one of them. It is condemned by the Didache, the so-called Epistle of Barnabas, the apocryphal Apocalypse of Peter; by Clement of Alexandria, Athenagoras, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Minucius Felix, Hippolytus, Origen, and Cyprian. And that partial list takes us only to the middle of the third century. Those witnesses emerged from ancient Syria, Egypt, Rome, Greece, Samaria, and North Africa. So, as the Vincentian Canon puts it, abortion was condemned always and everywhere and by all. There is no exception in the ancient Christian record, and this is one of those moral teachings that set Christians distinctly apart from the pagan world. If there were Nancy Pelosis in the world before the discovery of California, everyone — pagan or Christian — recognized that advocates for the “choice” of abortion were extra ecclesiam, outside the Catholic Church.

Again Pelosi argument was not new but lately has not been in vogue. Why? Because it is so easy to be defeated now. This is partly because the Church Fathers are no longer just located in volumes that in remote parts of University Libraries.

The rise of Catholic Apologetics (that have a big interest in the Church Fathers) , the Internet, the increased interest in Patristics by the Evangelicals make such misleading nonsense easily defeat able.

This was not the case in the 1980's and earlier when the information to refute such issue was not so much available to the common person.

If Speaker Pelosi had made these comments in 1987 on Meet the Press she would have gotten away with it largely. However today is a different time