religious life and churches are closing for lack of parishioners because they don't admit that in the early Church women had equal status to men. Communion was prepared and distributed by the women at meals eaten in their homes in the early days of the Church, which is where they get the Mass from. Abortion and birth control were considered the business of the women and their mid-wives. It wasn't even a problem until the Renaissance when the medieval universities started turning out doctors and they decided to get into the business of women's reproductive health that the mid-wives had dominated. Since they often were also clergy they started questioning whether reproductive practices would be considered termination of a life.
It was in the middle of the nineteenth century that the doctrine of abortion as destroying a human life was proclaimed by Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum Novarum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_social_teaching<snip>
Catholic teaching about the dignity of life calls us to oppose torture, unjust war, and the use of the death penalty; to prevent genocide and attacks against noncombatants; to oppose racism; and to overcome poverty and suffering. Nations are called to protect the right to life by seeking effective ways to combat evil and terror without resorting to armed conflicts except as a last resort, always seeking first to resolve disputes by peaceful means. We revere the lives of children in the womb, the lives of persons dying in war and from starvation, and indeed the lives of all human beings as children of God.
<snip>
Although the encyclical which was well-intentioned to end social injustice, the Pope was plain wrong in meddling in women's reproductive freedom. If this Pope doesn't start bringing his Church into the twenty-first century, it will die.
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