It is a huge reversal to go from "I will die for the good of all" to "I will kill for the good of all,"--a complete inversion of a central tenet of Christianity.
Yet this is basically the decision a person makes when entering the military, for instance, right?
I am also thinking that the early christian rejection of abortion as a medical practice might have had as much to with concerns about the mother as concerns about the fetus,
It seems likely that abortion would have been a very dicey attempt to use herbs like pennyroyal to poison the fetus without *quite* killing the woman. Another method would have been to hit the woman repeatedly in the abdomen, but again, it's very dicey whether you're going to kill the fetus or the woman first.
Back in those "kill a white cock at dawn and smear the blood on the south wall" days, "medicine" didn't have much to offer; that had to await the invention of science.
no subject
Yet this is basically the decision a person makes when entering the military, for instance, right?
I am also thinking that the early christian rejection of abortion as a medical practice might have had as much to with concerns about the mother as concerns about the fetus,
It seems likely that abortion would have been a very dicey attempt to use herbs like pennyroyal to poison the fetus without *quite* killing the woman. Another method would have been to hit the woman repeatedly in the abdomen, but again, it's very dicey whether you're going to kill the fetus or the woman first.
Back in those "kill a white cock at dawn and smear the blood on the south wall" days, "medicine" didn't have much to offer; that had to await the invention of science.