Garry Wills on Abortion Rights

Garry Wills' Head and Heart: American Christianities is a new book about the many strands of (mostly Protestant) religion in American history. Wills is a liberal Catholic historian with many popular books to his credit, including Why I Am a Catholic.

Head and Heart posits that there are two main strands of American Protestantism: Evangelical and Enlightened. Though at times they have overlapped and cross-pollinated, the former is characterized by a personal, passionate piety, and the latter by a reasoned, philosophical approach.

The two strands didn't really start to separate until the 18th century, during the pre-Revolutionary and then the Revolutionary eras. Going all the way back to the early 1600s, the New England colonies, especially Massachusetts, were home mostly to Puritans, who were Congregationalists officially and Calvinists theologically. Though many of their beliefs and practices sowed the seeds of Evangelical outlooks yet to come, the Puritans were by and large also highly educated and committed to an intellectual approach to religion.

So were the mainly Anglican (Church of England) denizens of Virginia, another leader among the original thirteen colonies. Though these Virginian forerunners of today's American Episcopalians had a different religious outlook from that of the Puritans, they too combined personal piety with reasoned discourse.

The Virginia Anglicans were, however, notably more "liberal" in their outlook than the original Puritans, who imagined that only certain human individuals were predestined to be saved — or "regenerated" — and thus find a heavenly reward. The Puritans feared that even the regenerate among them could be deceived by Satan's wiles and consequently fall away, so they spent a lot of time worrying about the Quakers, Baptists, and supposed "witches" who were their close neighbors and might be agents of the devil.

The Puritans' corporate piety was thus highly normative; dissenters were dealt with harshly. Though there was officially what we would today call "separation of church and state" in the original Puritan colonies, the good offices of local government more often than not functioned to allay the Puritans' religious fears. Unorthodox fellow Puritans and others who had radically different ideas were often silence, exiled, or executed.


Fast forward to the early 21st century. We now have Evangelical Christians pillorying not just atheists and "secular humanists" but also liberal Christians, whom Wills sees as the heirs of the Enlightenment Protestants of the America of the mid-19th century: the Transcendentalists, as represented in Wills' book mainly by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The Transcendentalists equated their version of Protestant Christianity with a sort of "nature mysticism." Their God was a wonder-of-it-all Creator who did not need to reveal himself through Scripture, or to work miracles. To Emerson, the traditional, Biblical idea of "miracle" was "not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain," and so was a false notion. "Emerson had claimed that all the universe is the only real miracle ... " (p. 264).

Nor was the God of Emerson triune. The Transcendentalists jettisoned the doctrine of the Trinity — as did their intellectual forebears among the Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Madison, and John Adams, among others. The great minds who conceived America were mainly Deists and Unitarians, no matter their nominal (Protestant) denominations.

Those two terms, Deist and Unitarian, were originally synonyms, says Wills. They both referred to a Protestant outlook that was wedded to the notion that our One God has to be uniquely divine ... and so it is wrong to say that He is Three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and contemporary Unitarian/Deist children of the Enlightenment were responsible for that touchstone of religious freedom in America, the portion of the First Amendment that bars the government from "establishing" any one particular religion or denomination as supreme over all others, or from interfering with citizens' "free exercise" of personal conscience in choosing which religion, if any, to follow.

Jefferson in particular, Wills shows, felt that if the government carefully avoided channeling the religiosity of its citizenry, citizens would naturally gravitate to the sort of Unitarian Deism he espoused. But Jefferson was wrong about that. There had already been in America a "Great Awakening," which reversed some of the liberalizing trends of the early 1700s, and a "Second Great Awakening" would occur in the wake of the Emersonian liberalizing of religion in the 1800s. There were Culture Wars even then.


The Culture Wars today are, Wills says, about a lot of things: school prayer, stem cell research, homosexual marriage, sex education, Darwinism, pornography, and on and on. But the centerpiece of the Evangelicals' fight against — well, against the rest of the culture — concerns abortion.

A woman's right to choose an abortion during the first two trimesters of pregnancy was established by the Supreme Court in 1973, in the case of Roe v. Wade. The Court held that the states' erstwhile laws prohibiting abortion were unconstitutional because they violated a woman's "right to privacy," a right said to be latent in the language of the U.S. Constitution as duly amended.

Ever since the Roe decision made abortion legal, Evangelical Christians and many Catholics — together, they form the heart of the "pro-life" movement — have sought to roll Roe back, and to make it possible for the states to once again ban most or all abortions.

Wills shows that the political success of our current president, George W. Bush, was engineered by a close adviser, Karl Rove, by means of uniting Evangelical Protestants with pro-life Catholics, and also equally pro-life Jews, and getting them to vote for the candidate most likely, as president, to appoint Supreme Court justices who would reverse Roe.

As such, says Wills opposition to abortion rights has become "the ecumenical issue" that today suffuses American politics with one particular style of religion, the Evangelical style, writ large to include Catholics and Jews (see pp. 523ff.) Except, Wills demonstrates, abortion is not really a "religious" issue at all.

Wills' argument to this effect is a deft one — and one with which I mostly concur — and I would like to spend some time dissecting it in this post and posts to come.


One of the main points Wills makes in his argument in favor of legal abortion rights is that there is no authoritative passage either in Jewish Scripture (the Old Testament) or in the New Testament that conveys God's opposition to abortion. Though one of the Ten Commandments forbids killing, or the doing of murder, there is no purely scriptural reason to assume that abortion qualifies, in God's eyes, as murder.

After making this argument about Scripture, which I will go further into in a future post, Wills goes on to demonstrate that St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and the Christian Church in general have traditionally addressed abortion as a matter of "natural law," not revealed theology ... and so we today, to settle our disputes about the morality and legality of abortion, "must turn to reason and science, the realm of Enlightened religion" (p. 527).

Because the question is one of natural law, it is a "misconception" to say "that this is a religious issue, that the pro-life advocates are acting out of religious conviction" (p. 526; italics in the original).

Once Wills establishes that the question of abortion must be addressed as a matter of reason rather than scriptural revelation, he does just that. First, he shows it to be a misnomer to call the anti-abortion position "pro-life," since there is no principled way to show that the "life" of an embryo is any more sacred than the "life" of growing human hair or fingernails, semen, egg cells ... or, tellingly, the vast majority of fertilized eggs/human embryos! Most embryos naturally fail to get embedded in a womb wall, or, if they do, result in early miscarriages that are perceived to be no more significant than heavy menstrual flow:

Are these millions of embryos that fail to be embedded [in the wall of a womb] human persons? Then "intelligent design" [the doctrine about God's role in evolution supported by many pro-life Evangelicals] aborts far more persons than nay human abortioners can. God is responsible for this silent holocaust. (p. 528)

Then Wills addresses what he says the true question ought to be: not when human "life" begins, but when during the gestation period the human person emerges:

Is it when it is capable of thought, or of speech, of recognizing itself as a person, of assuming the responsibilities of a person? Is it when it has a functioning brain? Thomas Aquinas said that the fetus did not become a person until God infused the intellectual soul. A functioning brain is not present in the fetus until the end of the sixth month at the earliest (what Roe called the beginning of the third trimester). Only then can the cerebral cortex process information from the various senses. (p. 528)

Wills cites widespread medical opinion that it is only at about the point in gestation at which the fetus becomes viable outside the womb — roughly, the start of the third trimester of pregnancy — that the already abundant nerve cells present in the fetus' cerebral cortex become linked together through the formation of synapses: the gaps between nerve cells that impulses travel across during higher brain functioning.

Before that juncture, Wills argues, the life of the fetus — though the fetus does respond to external stimuli — is merely "vegetative," in the sense that Terri Schiavo was in a "persistent vegetative state" at the time she was taken off life support after fifteen years of never waking up.

Aquinas, intimates Wills, would have held that a soul in such a state was one of the "nutritive (vegetable)" variety, and not even of a "sensing (animal)" sort — much less an "intellectual soul" of the type God manifestly cherishes (see p. 526).

Even plants react to stimuli such as sunlight, etc. Animals have their own well-developed sensory lives. But only human persons have the full-fledged "intellectual soul" that was identified in Christian thought by Thomas Aquinas. And human fetuses, prior to the establishing of full brain function and the consequent onset of fetal viability outside the womb, presumably lack an "intellectual soul."

Hence, says Wills, abortion prior to the third trimester does not equal the killing of a human person.