Published as an Op Ed piece in the Litchfield County Times, December 12, 2008          

Abortion, Church Law, and the Endless Controversy

 

David Begelman

            How far back does the raging controversy over abortion go? Certainly not to biblical times. There is no revealed or scriptural underpinning for the antiabortion position in the Old or New Testaments, as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas both noted. Abortion must have been practiced during biblical eras, yet there is no scriptural indication the practice commanded moral attention, much less prohibition. Does the omission weaken an ancient grounding for pro-life ideology?

            For a major period of church history, theologians accepted Aristotle’s embryology. The Greek philosopher held there were three stages in the development of human actuality. His doctrine of progressive animation provided that the soul was not present at the creation of a new human body. St. Augustine harbored continuing doubts about the timing of ensoulment. He averred we should not profess to know that about which we are ignorant. Gratian, the Bolognese monk and author of the Decretum, a definitive codification of canon law, declared no one could be considered a “murderer” who aborts a fetus before the soul is in the body. Papal endorsement of progressive animation was a dominant theological theme up to the sixteenth century. During that era, Pope Gregory XIII held it was not murder to destroy an embryo before ensoulment, because “it was not human.”

            St. Thomas mirrored the opinion of many centuries of doctrine on the matter when he held that it was murder to abort a fetus with a soul and sinful, although not murder, to abort one without a soul since this meant the destruction of potential human life. For him, that this second act was not actually murder did not render it morally permissible.

All this, of course, was to change. Gregory’s successor, Sixtus V, in his bull Effaenatum of 1588, ruled that all abortions were murders. His opinion was rendered null and void by his successor, Pope Gregory XIV. In 1621, the theologian Paulo Zacchia attacked the doctrine of progressive animation, although the more influential theologian, St. Alfonsus Ligouri, came to its defense in the eighteenth century. The uncompromising view of Sixtus was revived in 1869 by Pope Pius IX. One year later, Vatican I enunciated the doctrine of papal infallibility.

            Since Sixtus V in the sixteenth century held that all abortion was murder, it is a mistake to assume that it was the discovery of the sperm, ovum, and fertilization process that accounts for why theologians pushed the onset of life back to conception. Fertilization as a biological process was an 1875 discovery, and the ovum was discovered by von Baer in 1827. However, Sixtus’s bull predates such discoveries by three centuries.

            Pro-life and pro-choice ideologues tend to frame the controversy over abortion in misleading terms. The issue does not, as they would have it, center around when “human life” begins, but when personhood or the soul is created. Human life is a biological concept, the basic unit of which is the cell. Of course human life is destroyed during abortion; but so is it destroyed during premature ejaculation, menstruation, manicures, appendectomies, and haircuts. The unfertilized egg or spermatozoa are likewise “human life” because, unlike celery stalks or monkey germplasm, they are human cellular units.

            Personhood is a legal/philosophical concept, one at the center of an issue over an entity that has rights, property, or identity, whereas soul is a theological concept. The three concepts are logically distinguishable, and do not map easily onto one another—precisely the reason why the abortion controversy is such a complex one.

If one of the bases for the pro-life position is an assumption about ensoulment, then scientific information concerning human ontogenesis would appear to be irrelevant to strengthening the position. There is no “scientific,” secular, or medical foundation for the existence or non-existence of souls. Accordingly, the ploy of displaying the formation of the embryo in utero is utterly beside the point in promoting pro-life ideology when the concept soul is at the center of a debate. We should refrain from broaching the problem of abortion by mixing up concepts gleaned from independent strands of discourse.

On the other hand, the pro-life assumption of the creation of personhood at conception, irrespective of its religious origins, cannot be countered by pro-choice arguments involving a woman’s so-called “right to choose.” No person has an imagined right to choose to murder another person, on the theory the fertilized egg is a person. The pro-choice objection to this, that those who believe in the creation of the soul or personhood at conception should not impose their religious views on others who do not share it, will not do. It does not matter how pro-lifers come to appropriate the view that the fertilized egg is a person; they feel obliged to defend the rights of the fetus so conceptualized, and that no extraneous argument about a mother’s “right to choose” has relevancy when the life or death of a person is at stake.

The wrinkle in the pro-life position is the contradiction many of its proponents seem to incur when they brook such exceptions to the impermissibility of abortion, as in cases of rape or incest. If a mother’s “right to choose” is regarded as irrelevant in preserving the sanctity of life, why should the way in which a woman is impregnated form exceptions to the inviolability of the same principle? The unwanted pregnancy by forcible means would seem to have no bearing on the preservation principle if the embryo is a person. Is it any less deserving of protection than the embryo created in a loving way? The pro-lifer who speaks of such exceptions to the principle of preserving life (many social conservatives do) is either contradicting his or her ideology, or else tacitly believes fertilized eggs may not be “human beings” in certain cases.

What about cases in which fertilized ova are expelled by natural processes, like miscarriages? Pro-lifers do not regard such accidents as deserving the special care appropriate for a deceased family member. There are no rituals like religious prayers at burial sites, church events, or baptisms on “persons” expelled as miscarriages. Material thus expelled is usually unceremoniously flushed away. Does the attitude implied in such perfunctory action indicate that pro-lifers do not regard miscarriages as involving the death of individuals, a contradiction in the pro-life ideological stance if persons or souls are created at conception?

 

Danbury News-Times, 8/31/12, Letters to the Editor, James S. Mellett:

“By counting the number of actual pregnancies that follow implantations, we can get an idea of the actual loss of fertilized eggs and embryos.

Based on research done on thousands of women, the embryo loss is about 70 percent, and that does not count the loss between fertilization and implantation, which runs at least 50 percent according to in vitro studies on humans.

If we extrapolate the miscarriage results backward, we can estimate that 90 percent of all fertilized eggs never make it to term…One can only conclude as did former Dominican priest and eminent geneticist Francisco Ayala, that God is the greatest abortionist of all.”