I am amazed a hundred times a year that pro-life Christians get away with claiming that they stand on eternal principles when it comes to abortion, even though, if you prod them, they will start talking rot about DNA (whose existence and nature somehow went undisclosed through centuries of religious revelation) and will admit that it was the progress of scientific understanding which obligated them to suddenly promote abortion in the panoply of sins, circa 1968.
Meanwhile in World Magazine publishes this:
Abortion was so extensive in the mid-1800s that The New York Times called it "The Evil of the Age . . . The enormous amount of medical malpractice [a euphemism for abortion] that exists and flourishes, almost unchecked, in the city of New York, is a theme for most serious consideration. Thousands of human beings are thus murdered before they have seen the light of this world." But the abortion rate began to fall after the Civil War as a nationwide pro-life movement gathered strength.
That movement included the largest women's organization of the era, the WCTU (Women's Christian Temperance Union), as well as the YMCA and YWCA (Young Men's or Women's Christian Association), various Societies for the Suppression of Vice, and, by the end of the century, the Salvation Army. Many doctors were involved; unlike today, the American Medical Association was a staunch opponent of abortion, which it dubbed "unwarrantable destruction of human life."
Then as now, theological radicals such as Henry Wright argued that a child's "first claim is to a designed existence, if it is to exist at all." Some said "it was less criminal to kill children before they were born, than to curse them with an unwelcome existence." But pro-life leaders rejected the premise that an "unwelcome existence" was the only alternative to abortion. They looked at three groups of women at risk for abortions and offered programs of education, refuge, and adoption that would help women to avoid unwanted pregnancy or to recover from it, without killing a child.
