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What is your opinion regarding the following excerpt from a book written by a Copt.

"I am truly amazed, and deeply sorrowful, when I hear priests preventing women from taking Communion while they have their monthly period or after childbirth, considering them sinful and holy. Sinful?! Unholy?! My God! After all that Christ did to make women holy and sanctified, as a member of His Body! In Christianity, she is considered a Church begetting children to Christ. So how can her infant when only eight days old, take Communion while she herself is deprived for forty days (or eighty days if the baby is a girl)? Is it more appropriate to return to the old covenant which has become so old and obsolete? This is to blaspheme against the baptism which has made a woman spiritually and physically holy. Has the priest not read in the Bible how the woman with the flow of blood touched Jesus, yet He did not forbid this but rather encouraged her, after healing her and forgiving her sin? How can this woman with the flow of blood touch Jesus Himself and yet the priest forbids a woman to take His Body and Blood? Shall we destroy what the Gospel and Christ build up and shall we choose to follow or re-impose the old covenant?" [Page 10].

Our church, in her teachings, always follows the Holy Bible and the canons of the early fathers. The first canon dealing with this topic is the Second Canon of St. Dionysius, the thirteenth Archbishop of Alexandria, who lived, in the mid-third Century. He states:

"Concerning menstrual women, whether they ought to enter the temple of God while in such a state, I think it superfluous even to put the question. For I opine, not even they themselves, being faithful and pious, would dare when in this state either to approach the Holy Table or to touch the body and blood of Christ. For not even the woman with a twelve years' issue would come into actual contact with Him, but only with the edge of His garment, to be cured. There is no objection to one's praying no matter how he may be or to one's remembering the Lord at any time and in any state whatever, and petitioning to receive help; but if one is not wholly clean both in soul and in body, he shall be prevented from coming up to the Holies of Holies."

Timothy, Archbishop of Alexandria, in the latter part of the forth century, wrote 18 Canons, also known as "The Questions and Answers". Question 7 asks:

"If a woman finds herself in the plight peculiar to her sex, ought she to come to the Mysteries on that day, or not?" Timothy's answer was very short, "She ought not to do so, until she has been purified."

I'd like to emphasize here that this condition is not considered sinful or unholy in the New Testament, but it is considered as a non-fasting condition.