Tertullian Quotes
To forbid birth is only quicker murder.
Tertullian. Apology. The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 3, edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1885, p. 25.
History has shown that as girls and women get educated and learn about family planning, their children are healthier and have better chances of survival and despite the lower death rate the population trend slows as a result of family planning.
Critics of Roberson observe that he had made much of his $100 million personal fortune evangelizing against abortion and communism, and yet he was willing to tolerate the Chinese government controlling procreation and using abortion as one of the methods. Then it was revealed that Robertson had large investments in China. If the Chinese had not reduced their birth rate, the huge increase in the Chinese standard of living that has been achieved would have been much less. Robertson did think that the abortion policy would hurt the Chinese but he was advising a foreign policy of non-interference.
In Burundi, family land is divided among the male children of a family. The average Burundian woman has 6.3 children, nearly triple the international fertility rate. With this fertility rate, the plots of land for each person inevitably get smaller and smaller over time. At 10,745 square miles, Burundi is slightly smaller than the U.S. state of Maryland, but it holds nearly twice as many people: about 10 million. The small plots of land are inefficient to farm and provide subsistence. So the nation was in a crises as there was little industrialization and land was essential for existence for most Burundians. See {35808} and {35809}.
At the time, condoms and other forms of contraceptives were illegal to buy, sell, possess or own. As late as 1963 a Connecticut druggist was sentenced to jail for filling a doctor’s prescription for condoms and selling them to a married couple even thought the woman might die if she again became pregnant. The Supreme Court (Griswald v. Connecticut) established that a woman had a right to control her own reproductive cycle and the government had no business interfering with a privacy right possessed by a couple. Roe v. Wade established the right to an abortion. The same moral compunctions used with abortion were, and still are used by some to oppose any form of artificial birth control. They argued: preventing a life was as serious a moral failure as taking one. Many Catholics, many evangelical and fundamentalist protestants, and some orthodox Muslims are today morally opposed to birth control and believe that the government should ban birth control as it once was in the United States.
This was the traditional Jewish view of abortion and infanticide. It is the view of the Orthodox Jews of today, but the larger body of Reform Jews, like many Protestant sects, do not equate abortion to murder or infanticide.
There were few reformers who had such a long, extensive, and activist career in both England and India. She began her career as a minister’s wife but was literally turned out of her house by her husband for whom she was not religiously orthodox enough. This started her religious activism which ended with her as an atheist. She led a match-girl’s strike, founded a Hindu college in India, and was even arrested for pornography in England when she wrote a book advocating birth control. She is on many lists of “Great Indians” along with Gandhi and Nehru. She was Jiddu Krishnamurti’s teacher.
Tertullian (/tərˈtʌliən/; Latin: Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus; c. 155 – c. AD 220) was a prolific early Christian author from Carthage in the Roman province of Africa. Of Berber origin, he was the first Christian author to produce an extensive corpus of Latin Christian literature. He was an early Christian apologist and a polemicist against heresy, including contemporary Christian Gnosticism. Tertullian has been called "the father of Latin Christianity" and "the founder of Western theology."
