"Now we allow that life begins with conception because we contend that the soul also begins from conception; life taking its commencement at the same moment and place that the soul does" (ibid., 27). "The law of Moses, indeed, punishes with due penalties the man who shall cause abortion [Ex. 21:22–24]" (ibid., 37). - Tertullian, Early Church Father year 197

Tertullian "In our case, a murder being once for all forbidden, we may not destroy even the fetus in the womb, while as yet the human being derives blood from the other parts of the body for its sustenance. To hinder a birth is merely a speedier man-killing; nor does it matter whether you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to birth. That is a man which is going to be one; you have the fruit already in its seed" (Apology 9:8 [A.D. 197]). "Among surgeons’ tools there is a certain instrument, which is formed with a nicely-adjusted flexible frame for opening the uterus first of all and keeping it open; it is further furnished with an annular blade, by means of which the limbs [of the child] within the womb are dissected with anxious but unfaltering care; its last appendage being a blunted or covered hook, wherewith the entire fetus is extracted by a violent delivery. "There is also [another instrument in the shape of] a copper needle or spike, by which the actual death is managed in this furtive robbery of life: They give it, from its infanticide function, the name of embruosphaktes, [meaning] "the slayer of the infant," which of course was alive. . . . "[The doctors who performed abortions] all knew well enough that a living being had been conceived, and [they] pitied this most luckless infant state, which had first to be put to death, to escape being tortured alive" (The Soul 25 [A.D. 210]). "Now we allow that life begins with conception because we contend that the soul also begins from conception; life taking its commencement at the same moment and place that the soul does" (ibid., 27). "The law of Moses, indeed, punishes with due penalties the man who shall cause abortion [Ex. 21:22–24]" (ibid., 37).

St. Hippolytus of Rome, writing between A.D. 199-217, is absolutely scathing in his condemnation of those who procure abortion in order to avoid “embarrassment” or social liability: Whence women, reputed believers, began to resort to drugs for producing sterility, and to gird themselves round, so to expel what was being conceived on account of their not wishing to have a child either by a slave or by any paltry fellow, for the sake of their family or excessive wealth. Behold into how great impiety that lawless one has proceeded by inculcating adultery and murder at the same time!” (Refutation of All Heresies, 9:17.)

Condemnations of abortion appeared early in Church history. Possibly the earliest is the pseudonymous Epistle of Barnabas, written in Alexandria, Egypt between A.D. 117-132. It states quite unambiguously: “Do not murder (Greek: phoneuseis) a child (Greek: teknon) by abortion (Greek: phthora), nor commit infanticide.” (19:5). Similarly, a Syrian Church manual known as the Didache (literally, “The Teaching of the Apostles”), written sometime before A.D. 140, gives the same structure in the very same words: “Do not murder a child by abortion, nor commit infanticide.” (2:2:2). In both these early sources, abortion is condemned as the murder (phoneuseis) of a child (teknon), not a vegetative “fetus.”

Abortion is never directly addressed in the Old Testament because instances of abortion rarely occurred in ancient Israel; neither is abortion mentioned in the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. Abortion was becoming something of an issue, though, in the pagan Greco-Roman world Christianity entered. Confronted with the issue of abortion and all forms of contraception in the Greco-Roman world, the early Church was forced to respond. The early Christian view was that the unborn child is a full person, and that aborting the unborn child is a form of infanticide.