Flip-Flops on Abortion

If you go back and read my entire series of Abortion Rights posts to date — and please don't waste your time delving into them at any length — you can see that I've been flip-flopping on my support as a Christian for a woman's right to choose. At this point in my evolving attempt to confront the issue, I am pro-choice, but as recently as a year ago, I was anti-. Prior to that, I had once thought I'd found good reason to support women's abortion rights, while earlier still, I was against them. And so on and so on, as far back as I can remember.

Recent readings have, for now, changed my attitude yet again from pro-life to pro-choice. Among them:

• Garry Wills' Head and Heart: American Christianities (see this, this, and this post)
  
• Susan Wicklund's This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor (see In Defense of Abortion)
  
• A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion, by Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert J. Deltete (see, again, In Defense of Abortion)

One of the main things that I have learned from Wills and also from Dombrowski and Deltete concerns embryology. The fact that medical science now knows more about how the fetus develops than ever before gives me good reason to believe that "ensoulment" — the conferring by God of an "intelligent" human soul of the type identified by Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas — happens only after the cells in the developing brain start to communicate with one another. That happens between the 24th and 32nd week of fetal development, meaning that a fetus in its first two trimesters of existence need not be considered a human person.

Sentiency — higher mental function of a human-specific sort — coincides with fetal viability, the infant-to-be's ability to survive outside the womb, which arrives during that same span of weeks. That fact is another clue that pre-viable fetuses don't have the moral status we accord to newborn infants.


In so saying, I repudiate ideas I expressed in, among other posts, The Future of Abortion. In that post I said a five-week-old embryo, but 10 millimeters in size, already has recognizable eyes, ears, organs, and appendages. It therefore presumably has the moral status of a human person.

That assumption, however, misses the fact that the cerebral cortex, though it exists early on in the budding embryo, has yet to be "wired up."

According to Dombrowski and Deltete, it is only during the third trimester that "neural pathways are connected through the thalamus to the neocortex (p. 45). The neocortex — the most recently evolved part of the cerebral cortex of the brain — is the part of the higher mammalian brain concerned with sight and hearing. Before it is "wired in," the fetus cannot form sensory knowledge about the stimuli it receives.

Prior to the 24th through 32nd week of gestation, according to Wills, the cerebral cortex's neurons are functionally isolated from one another, pending the development of tiny synaptic gaps between neurons for electrochemical signals to bridge and thereby propagate thoughts, feelings, cognitions, and perceptions within the higher brain.

From these reasons which flow from modern embryology, the authors conclude that fetuses do not yet have the moral status of a sentient human person.

Augustine and Aquinas lacked such sophisticated knowledge of embryonic development, but both of them likewise argued against the view that "hominization" — the conferring by God of an immortal human soul — coincides with fertilization of the woman's egg cell by the male's semen or sperm.

Hence, said Augustine, if an abortion is sinful, it is not because the soul "arrives" then and there, at the time of conception. It is sinful, rather, because it is one of several sorts of behavior that thwart or pervert what he believed to be the essential function of coitus: to procreate. Augustine went so far as to declare that any sort of pleasure derived from the marital act, even when procreation is also intended, is "lustful cruelty." Augustine was anti-sex, as we understand and experience sex today.

Aquinas, centuries later, was pretty much silent on Augustine's "perversity" argument against "lustful" sex and (consequently) against contraception and abortion. But Aquinas elaborated Augustine's notion of late fetal hominization into a scheme by which there was a "succession of souls" during the development of a fetus, only the last of which comes from God.


This "succession of souls" schema has never been formally repudiated by the Catholic Church, but since the 17th century a great many Catholic (and other) thinkers have informally set it aside in favor of a growing belief that an embryo at very early stages of development is well enough formed to receive a God-given soul. Early scientific investigations of embryonic development, using powerful magnifying glasses and the first microscopes, convinced scientists (wrongly) that the embryo (or the seed it comes from) is a "homunculus." That is, it is already a fully formed human being, albeit exceedingly tiny. All that happens during the nine months of gestation is that it gets bigger.

Accordingly, the soul began to be envisioned as a separate, fully formed entity that God attaches to the physical homunculus, perhaps as early as the moment of fertilization. Before the 17th century, though, Aquinas' view held sway. According to the Thomistic (after Thomas Aquinas) theory of "hylomorphism," the soul and body develop step by step, in tandem, during a woman's pregnancy. It is only at the last step of this developmental trajectory that the "intelligent" soul can pair with a sufficiently developed brain to yield a being whose life is thenceforth sacrosanct.

In my earlier Abortion Rights posts, I spent a lot of time trying to decide when sentience and self-awareness arrive in an embryo/fetus/newborn child. One reason I wavered so much on the subject was that I had never been made aware of of the Augustinian and Thomistic viewpoints, derived from Aristotle.

As Dombrowski and Deltete show, the "early hominization" position that fully emerged in the 19th century had its roots in the 17th century, when the homunculus notion became, briefly, gospel. This position, which informed the attitudes of the Catholic Church toward abortion in the centuries following the 17th, came to overshadow the Church's original Augustinian-Thomistic-Aristotelian view ... although, as Dombrowski and Deltete point out, the Church never formally repudiated the Thomistic doctrine of the succession of souls.

It was then, in the 17th century when scientists temporarily believed in the homunculus theory, when Rene Descartes said "I think, therefore I am." That is, Descartes championed a Platonic notion of the soul as an entity basically higher than and separate from the body. The Greek philosopher Plato had held that "ideas" or "forms" exist on a higher plane than physical beings, which were imperfect representations of the forms. Descartes' notion of the thinking mind as the true locus of our existence, rather than the physical brain or body, was fundamentally Platonic.

We are all, myself included, prone to the Platonic-Cartesian view today. Yet up-to-date science leads us back toward the Aristotelian-Augustinian-Thomistic view, in which the fully formed physical body is a precondition of the existence of the rational soul. Today's embryology seems to show that a human fetus is not wholly formed, not capable of higher mental function, and not viable outside the womb until the third trimester of pregnancy.