One thing I've always appreciated with conservative Protestants is their opposition to the evil of abortion.

Some of my fondest memories after college involved traveling the country with a group equally comprised of Catholics and Protestants who would dialogue with

college students on the issue of abortion. But while I appreciate this alliance

now that wasn't always the case between Catholics and Protestants.

In this episode, I want to talk about how American Protestantism's relatively late condemnation

of abortion reveals a serious flaw in Protestantism's view of doctrinal authority.

So in his book, Defenders of the Unborn, the Pro Life Movement before Rovi Wade,

which is published by Oxford University Press,

Daniel K. Williams shows that most people, Protestant and Catholic,

were against abortion in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

You have Protestants like Anthony Comstock, who crusaded against all obscenities, including abortion and contraception.

That changed, however, when the Anglican Church removed its condemnation of birth control at the 1930 Lambeth conference.

After that, many Protestants bought into the idea that contraception was not sinful

because the Bible doesn't explicitly condemn it.

Williams writes,

while Catholic clergy and physicians considered liberalized abortion laws

a direct attack on the nation's fundamental values,

Protestants were more likely to describe abortion as an unfortunate problem

that could be solved by better access to contraception.

Except for the Anglicans in 1930, no Protestant denomination made a statement against abortion until the 1960s.

Whereas in 1930, Pope Pius 11th reaffirmed the Church's opposition to contraception and abortion in his encyclical

castie canoeb. One prominent story about abortion in the 1960s was the case of

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