The wealthy, in order that their inheritance may not be divided among several, deny in the very womb their own progeny. By use of parricidal mixtures the snuff out the fruit of their wombs in the genital organs themselves. In this way life is taken away before it is given.
~ Ambrose of Milan
What reason would we have to commit murder when we say that women who induce abortions are murderers and will have to give account of it to God? For the same person would not regard the fetus in the womb as a living thing and therefore an object of God’s care.
~ Athenagorus of Athens
Moreover, those, too, who give drugs causing abortion are [deliberate murderers] themselves, as well as those receiving the poison which kills the fetus.
~ Basil of Caesarea
Why sow where the ground makes its care to destroy the fruit? where there are many efforts at abortion? where there is murder before the birth? For even the harlot you do not let continue a mere harlot, but make her a murder also…. Why then do you abuse the gift of God, and fight with his law, and follow after what is a curse as if a blessing and make the chamber of procreation as chamber for murder, and arm the woman that was given for childbearing unto slaughter?
~ John Chrysostom
Our whole life can go on in observation of the laws of nature, if we gain dominion over our desires from the beginning and if we do not kill, by various means of a perverse art, the human offspring, born according to the designs of divine providence; for these women who, in order to hide their immorality, use abortive drugs which expel the matter completely dead, abort at the same time their human feelings.
~ Clement of Alexandria
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…. Behold, into how great impiety one has proceeded, by inculcating adultery and murder at the same time.
~ Hippolytus
A plant is a plant the moment the seed begins to sprout. It has all that is essential to its nature, not only as a plant, but as a plant of a certain genus or species…. So with regard to every animal. I should suppose it must be granted that it has its specific character from the commencement of its organization. If this is so, why must it not be allowed that the human being is a human being from the beginning? There is no greater difference between the newborn infant and the embryo, than between the infant and a full-grown man. I should say, therefore, that he moment life begins, it is the life of a human creature, having all the essential attributes of such a being…. The human soul, as I understand the matter, has no separate existence (in this world) from the body, nor the body from the soul.
~ Charles Hodge
[They] drink potions to ensure sterility and are guilty of murdering a human being not yet conceived. Some, when they learn they are with child through sin, practice abortion by the use of drugs. Frequently they die themselves and are brought before the ruler of the lower world guilty of three crimes: suicide, adultery against Christ, and murder of an unborn child.
~ Jerome of Bethlehem
Let me put the issue plainly. If the unborn is not a human person, no justification for abortion is necessary. However, if the unborn is a human person, no justification for abortion is adequate.
~ Greg Koukl
But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?
~ Mother Teresa in her National Prayer Breakfast speech in Washington, D.C. on February 3, 1994
Murder being once for all forbidden, we may not destroy the foetus in the womb, while as yet the human being derives blood from 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 the birth. That is a man which is going to be one; you have the fruit already in the seed
~ Tertullian
For it was you [God] who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mothers’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.
~ Bible, Psalm 139:13-16
The word of the Lord came to me saying, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.
~ Bible, Jeremiah 1:5
I remember the buzz when the original murder trial of O.J. Simpson was in process. It dominated the news and conversations at home, work and play. Recently, we were reminded of the “economy” that arose out of those events when O.J. Simpson was again arrested, this time for “removing” memorabilia from an O.J. entrepreneur. Memoirs as well as memorabilia is part of the O.J Simpson economy. In 
, John Maxwell Hamilton writes that,
