Popcak on abortion

Gregory Popcak has a more-insightful-than-average defense of faith-based opposition to abortion, written in response to this Gary Wills book excerpt. Both pieces are pretty much intellectual abortion boilerplate; they don't break a lot of new ground but do provide a nice summary of some of the more thoughtful (i.e., less reactionary and screamy) arguments out there. (The two aren't neatly opposed, either: Popcak writes from a Catholic perspective, while Wills focuses his criticism on evangelicals, and they do have some points of agreement.)

Popcak situates the epistles historically to connect a couple passages to the common Roman practice of abortion. He also cites more explicit condemnation in not only the church fathers but also non-canonical early church writings. All of this is interesting but also begs the question why the New Testament doesn't include explicit condemnation of abortion. (This is, or should be, especially problematic in an evangelical context, which tends to deny the influence of the fathers and other non-scriptural sources--even as it endorses, say, trinitarian doctrine.) People often try to argue that Paul and others were addressing their own culture and not ours--tellingly, one of the only times you'll hear such talk from conservative evangelicals--but that dog won't hunt: abortion was as common in the wider culture then as it is now.

Anyway, Popcak offers a good summary of how anti-abortion Christians can do a lot better than "it's murder and God hates murder but liberals love it."