Great article.

 

The Pagan roots of Democrats’ abortion extremism

 

...Democrats’ position on abortion is the archaic one. Abortion is an archaic practice. In Pagan Rome, abortion was commonplace, performed by a variety of surgical and medicinal methods and taken for granted by philosophers. Plato, for example, laid out in Book V of the “Republic” various regulations for what offspring should be conceived and prescribed abortion for any infants conceived outside of those regulations, including by women older than 40 and men older than 55.

 

The ancient Pagans largely accepted infanticide as well, and the exposure of infants was common. The Greek father had an absolute right to expose his children. Exposure of infants, especially girls, was common and often linked to economic concerns about raising too many children. But even in large families “more than one daughter was practically never reared.” Termination of female infants was so common as to contribute to a dramatically skewed sex ratio, estimated at “131 males per 100 females in the city of Rome, and 140 males per 100 females in Italy, Asia Minor, and North Africa.”

 

This archaic willingness to dispose of infants fit into a broader callousness toward human life. As historian Tom Holland put it, the Romans had a “genius for making a show out of death” that showed up in many places, including in the cheering crowds that packed amphitheaters to watch people thrown to animals, forced to fight one another to the death and subjected to cruelly inventive forms of torture.

 

The standard archaic Pagan position on the value of the lives of infants is reemerging today. A leading voice has been Princeton professor Peter Singer, who holds that “killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person.” According to Singer, the normal reason to care about protecting the life of a newborn is not because of some intrinsic value in the baby itself but because “most infants are loved and cherished by their parents.”...

 

...From its earliest days, the Christian church rejected abortion and infanticide based on recognition of the intrinsic value of infants, even while speculating about how body and soul intersect in the womb. The oldest extant Christian catechism, “the Didache,” written right around the end of the first century, commanded, “thou shalt not kill a child by abortion, neither shalt thou slay it when born.” And the “Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus,” one of the earliest extant works of Christian apologetics, explained what “distinguished” Christians “from other men” by saying, “they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring.”...

 

MORE AT THE LINK

Good find! I honestly had no idea abortion went that far into history

50 minutes ago, SackMan518 said:

Plato, for example, laid out in Book V of the “Republic” various regulations for what offspring should be conceived and prescribed abortion for any infants conceived outside of those regulations, including by women older than 40 and men older than 55.

 

 

Book V of Plato's Republic concerns defective governance and Constitutions.  In as much as it concerns abortion, it's not a treatise arguing for abortion in any way, it's a Socratic dialog against such laws and practices in describing an unjust state.

 

Whoever wrote that opinion piece is a cotton-pickin' ignoramus.  They should read their references.