Retrograde

This reminds me of the comment made by an old friend of mine, who said he was happy I'd found something to do in life that I was interested in and passionate about, but was sorry that it was something "so retrograde".

In the interests of maintaining a 25 year-long friendship, I refrained from pointing out that the unlimited license of individuals within a society to kill their own children is something very old that was only stopped after the advent of Christian civilization in the west.

Cardinal Pell (eeee!) makes the same point:

Two thousand years ago, for example, the exposure of unwanted female infants and deformed male infants was legal, morally accepted and widely practiced throughout the Greco-Roman world. Far more babies were born than were allowed to live and Plato and Aristotle both recommended infanticide as legitimate state policy. There was also frequent recourse to abortion, with Roman law according the male head of the family the right to order a woman in the household to abort and the weight of Greek philosophy fully supporting such views...

the historian Rodney Stark records how by the end of the second century, these people who were by now know as "Christians" were not only proclaiming their rejection of abortion and infanticide, but had begun to confront pagans and pagan religions for sustaining these crimes. Stark argues that the relatively superior fertility of the Christian population was one of the reasons for the rise of Christianity within a society that was otherwise intent on contracepting and killing itself and its future.