Churches are bearing better witness to life beyond its “potential.”
The thing itself cannot be praised,” Cicero said. “Only its potential.”
He was talking about young children. Such was the view in the empire where Jesus arrived as an infant. “The child,” said Plutarch, “is more like a plant” than a human, or even than an animal.
But Jesus and his followers had a different view of the moral status of children. To follow him, Jesus said, you had to become like a child. Even babies, Christians said, are fully human and fully bear the image of God. As the African bishop Cyprian wrote, “God himself does not make such distinction of person or of age, since he offers himself as a Father to all.” And if that’s God’s view, then “Every sex and age should be held in honor among you.”
The church even extended that honor and protection to the unborn. “Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill them when born,” says one of the earliest Christian documents, known as the Didache.
Rules like this one created not a precinct of prohibitions but a community of care. Pagans like the Greek physician Galen begrudgingly acknowledged that the Christians’ “contempt of death is patent to us every day. … And in their keen pursuit of justice, [they] have attained a pitch not inferior to that of genuine philosophers.”
Throughout the Roe regime, contemporary Christians have similarly demonstrated their “contempt of death,” their pursuit of justice for the unborn, and their love of children and pregnant women. But as many women and couples can attest, even pro-life Christians can too quickly treat the unborn as merely “potential” human life when a child is lost to miscarriage.
Sometimes …
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