I hope Christopher will forgive me for taking this in a slightly different direction. As I write this, I am preparing for tomorrow's celebration of America's "Independence" Day. What does it mean to be a loyal American? This is a debatable point. What makes a treasonous American? That's not so hard. A treasonous American is one who works to effect the overthrow or decline of America. Those who support the killing of children are committing treason because their actions:
1) directly impact our ability to protect our shores;
2) directly injure our ability to provide for the needs of our population by diminishing the doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers and other vital professions whose newcomers are never born.
3) directly injure our elderly by reducing the number of workers who are able to provide benefits for the retired: fewer new vocations to religious orders, fewer income-earners for Social Security or its replacement "safety net"
4) directly commit the murder of our fellow citizens, depriving them of the due process of law.
5) make us vulnerable to overthrow by immigration: If Osama Bin Laden has 20 children and Bill Clinton has one, if only a fraction of Bin Laden's children move here, they can overthrow America's form of government and culture (such as it is) by sheer force of numbers.
Would someone explain what were Augustine's and Aquinas' position on both abortion and the definition of personhood?
Augustine and Aquinas accepted the science of their time.
The early Christians are the first on record as having pronounced abortion to be the murder of human beings, for their public apologists, Athenagoras, Tertullian, and Minutius Felix (Eschbach, "Disp. Phys.", Disp. iii), to refute the slander that a child was slain, and its flesh eaten, by the guests at the Agapae, appealed to their laws as forbidding all manner of murder, even that of children in the womb. The Fathers of the Church unanimously maintained the same doctrine. In the fourth century the Council of Eliberis decreed that Holy Communion should be refused all the rest of her life, even on her deathbed, to an adulteress who had procured the abortion of her child. The Sixth Ecumenical Council determined for the whole Church that anyone who procured abortion should bear all the punishments inflicted on murderers. In all these teachings and enactments no distinction is made between the earlier and the later stages of gestation. For, though the opinion of Aristotle, or similar speculations, regarding the time when the rational soul is infused into the embryo, were practically accepted for many centuries still it was always held by the Church that he who destroyed what was to be a man was guilty of destroying a human life.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/...then/
01046b.htm
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