Recently, Bradley Onishi wrote a piece for Politico entitled “Why Christians—and Republicans—Should Reconsider the Premise that ‘Life Begins at Conception.’”
The beginning of the piece correctly notes how some Protestant denominations were hesitant to say abortion is sinful. In 1971, for example, the Southern Baptist Convention allowed for abortion in the case of rape. He then says,
It’s not Protestants, but Catholics in the United States who, as a religious community, have opposed abortion forcefully going back to the nineteenth century, and it is in Catholicism that we find the view that life begins at conception. Starting with an 1869 document called Apostolicae Sedis, Pope Pius IX declared the penalty of excommunication for abortions at any stage of pregnancy.
Now, the Church has not defined when life begins, because that is a scientific question. But it has consistently taught that abortion is immoral. The Catechism says, “Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable” (2271).
However, Onishi’s argument goes downhill when he tries to undercut the consistent tradition in Catholicism of opposition to abortion. He writes, “There were also forceful and influential voices that argued fetuses did not become persons until they were ‘ensouled.’”
Onishi is correct that some theologians of the past considered abortion of an “unformed” fetus to be less serious than of a “formed” fetus, but they still considered it sinful to kill the fetus through abortion. Tertullian said in the third century, “Whether you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to birth, that is a man which is going to be one; you have the fruit already in its seed” (Apology). Tertullian believed that “the soul also begins from conception; life taking its commencement at the same moment and place that the soul does” (Treatise on the Soul).
Some theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas believed that an unborn child receives a rational soul several weeks after he is conceived. But they probably believed that because they relied on the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s mistaken view of human development. Aristotle thought that unborn children progressed through vegetable and animal stages of life before their bodies were “animated” with a rational soul and became human beings later in pregnancy. Moral theologian William May says,
Aquinas relied on the inadequate biological knowledge of his day, that in human generation the male seed was alone the active element; he concluded that the body first formed by maternal blood by this seed was only vegetative in nature. . . . But note that for St. Thomas the bodies generated were not human in nature. . . . St. Thomas, were he alive today and cognizant of the biological evidence known today, would not hesitate in concluding that the body that comes to be when fertilization is completed is indubitably a human body and hence that its organizing and vivifying principle can only be a human soul, an intellectual or spiritual soul (Catholic Bioethics and the Gift of Human Life Huntington, 164–165).
Onishi also claims, “There are Irish ‘saints’ who performed abortions in circumstances of rape and fornication.” A common example offered in this vein is Ireland’s Brigid of Kildare, who allegedly performed “miraculous abortions” that dissolved pregnancies caused by rape. But we know that the Church condemned abortion during this time period, and historians have shown that these accounts come from unreliable folklore written centuries after the saints lived. Even Maeve Callan, an example of a historian who downplays the medieval Church’s attitude toward abortion, admits, “The sixth-century Penitential of Finnian, the seventh-century Irish Canons, and the eighth-century Old Irish Penitential include abortion among the sins to be repented.”
Throughout Church history, punishments were sometimes lighter for abortions earlier in pregnancy, but punishments for many sins have changed throughout history. That doesn’t mean that the Church’s teaching on those acts being evil changed. In the early Church, penances for sins like adultery could last for years, but now penances are reduced to encourage people to confess their sins in the first place. For example, in 1591, Pope Gregory XIV rescinded his predecessor’s rule that only the pope could lift excommunications for abortion and allowed bishops the authority to do this. In 1869, Pope Pius IX erased all distinctions between “formed” and “unformed” unborn children in canon law and made the punishments for abortion the same regardless of when during pregnancy the abortion occurs.
The question of whether abortion is wrong has nothing to do with the question of whether the unborn have souls. There is no way to empirically prove that a newborn infant—or anyone, for that matter—has an immortal soul. As a result, this argument proves too much and would justify killing humans at any stage of life. It would be more responsible to believe that biological human beings have a right to life, and that is why abortion, infanticide, and other forms of homicide are wrong.
That’s why in 1974 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said that a human life is still present in the womb, and this fact justifies prohibiting abortion. It also says that if we are unsure about the status of an embryo, then we should not risk killing a person whose existence in the womb is at least “probable” (just as we would not shoot a figure in the woods that was “probably” a hiker and not a bear).
Finally, contra Onishi, Christians shouldn’t give up on the belief that life begins at conception because the question of when the life of an individual biological human being begins has been settled.
The standard medical text Human Embryology and Teratology states, “Although human life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is formed” (8). Leading pro-choice philosophers agree that human fetuses are human beings.
In Planned Parenthood v. Rounds (2008), the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals found that requiring abortionists to say that the fetus is a “living, separate, whole human being” does not force an abortionist to espouse an unconstitutional religious viewpoint. The Court ruled that this statement is a biological fact that even physicians affiliated with Planned Parenthood accept.
David Boonin, author of A Defense of Abortion, writes, “Perhaps the most straightforward relation between you and me on the one hand and every human fetus on the other is this: All are living members of the same species, Homo sapiens. A human fetus after all is simply a human being at a very early stage in his or her development” (20).
After reviewing several medical and embryology textbooks, I have yet to find a single one that denies that a human embryo or fetus is a human organism. Since, by definition, a human fetus is a stage of development in the life of a human organism, I doubt I ever will find such a claim in a serious textbook.
Therefore, when it comes to scientific questions about when life begins, we should listen to the scientific consensus, and when it comes to moral questions, we should listen to the teaching of the Church. Any advice an editorial in Politico might give on these matters should be judged in accord with what the real authorities say on these issues.