In Defense of Abortion

Right now I am reading two excellent books on the subject of abortion. The first is Susan Wicklund's This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor, the memoir of a doctor who has provided women with first-trimester abortions and other reproductive health services for over twenty years.

Wicklund came from a traditional, upper-Midwestern, rural background and was, judging by her family's history, unlikely to do anything so bold as go to medical school, much less, as a professional doctor, provide women with abortions. But when as a young woman she became pregnant, under circumstances that made it impossible to try to have and bring up a child, the abortion she had instead was an experience made needlessly traumatic by medical professionals who hadn't the vaguest idea of how to treat their patient as a worried, fearful fellow human being. Wicklund decided she needed to do something to keep that sort of thing from happening to other women in the future. She became an abortion doctor.

This was in the 1970s, in the wake of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that made state laws banning abortions unconstitutional. When Wicklund found her medical school loath to train her in abortion procedures, it was but a foretaste of how hostile the communities in which she would eventually practice, medium-sized cities scattered across the North Central United States, would be to women's newfound reproductive rights. Her story is as much about how much danger she was perennially placed in from menacing, if supposedly well-meaning, "pro-life" protesters — and occasionally from angry perpetrators of paternal incest — as it is about how she allayed the fears and anxieties of her patients, none of whose fetuses she would abort unless patient and doctor were both clear that it was what the patient really, truly wanted.

As I read through the episodes of Wicklund's professional and personal life — the latter being circumscribed by the need to cope with the ceaseless perils of the former — I am frankly ashamed of myself for having failed to recognize for so long just how evil are the intentions and actions of those who would kill abortion doctors (!) in order to prevent the supposed "murders" of "unborn children."

But could "pro-life" forces be somehow correct when they say embryos and fetuses are human persons whose lives are, inexplicably, more sacrosanct than that of an abortion doctor like Wicklund? Wicklund's book is not the place to explore such issues coolly and philosophically. For that, one needs to turn to ...



The second book I am presently reading, which is as detached and intellectual as Wicklund's book is personal and emotional. It is A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion, by two (Catholic, male) professors of philosophy at Seattle University, Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert J. Deltete.

This book examines the history of Catholic thought about abortion ... which in many ways is the history of Western thought on the subject, since two of the Christian West's philosophical pioneers, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, wrote before the Reformation.

Prior to the 17th century and the rise of enlightened science, Western Christians looked to their forebears — Augustine, Aquinas, the other Church Fathers — for guidance on thorny issues such as when and whether abortions are anything but sinful, and when the new life in a woman's womb acquires the status of a human person.

As Dombrowski and Deltete set forth, neither Augustine nor Aquinas based their rejection of abortion on the notion that a just-begun embryo, or even an early-stage fetus, has yet been infused with a God-given soul. Ensoulment, they reasoned, happens later, in the final stages of pregnancy, when the fetus becomes what we would today call sentient. Before that, Aquinas said, the fetus has but a vegetative, nutrition-seeking soul, and later a sensing, questing, animal soul ... but not yet an "intellectual soul" of the sort conferred and cherished by God.

Aquinas' view echoed that of the much earlier St. Augustine. Augustine's notions on the "succession of souls" were not as elaborate or consistent as those of Aquinas, yet they nonetheless led to the same conclusion: that the soul whose extinguishing constitutes murder does not arrive until the later stages of pregnancy.


But, never mind. Augustine found another way to show that abortion was sin. Though he sidestepped the "ontological" argument, that the God-conferred soul exists from the time of conception on, he pretty much originated the "perversity" argument: that abortion blocks procreation and thus perverts the true purpose of sex and marriage.

In fact, it was St. Augustine's belief — one that hounds many of us to this day — that anything that admits the slightest glimmer of pleasure into the marital dealings of wives and husbands was an occasion for "lustful cruelty":

Married persons who have intercourse only (sola) for the wish to beget children do not sin, whereas those who mix pleasure with sex, even if sex with one's spouse, commit sin. A remarkable view! It must be granted that this sin is venial (i.e., venia or pardonable), but the mere fact that it is a sin at all should alert us to how negative Augustine's view of sex is. Even worse than intending pleasure in sex is to try to prevent pregnancy, say through an evil appliance (opere malo), or, we might add, through the "rhythm method." For Augustine those who use such contraceptive devices retain no vestige of true matrimony, which is synonymous with, not accidentally connected to, propagation. These people sometimes (aliquando) go so far as to have abortions in their lustful cruelty (libidinosa crudelitas). Since Augustine also accuses those who have merely used contraceptive devices of being cruel, we can be sure that it is not cruelty to a human person inside the womb that he is worried about. It is Augustine's own clever pen that makes this clear when he rephrases his accusation as cruel lust (libido crudelis). Lust itself (or even the desire for sexual pleasure) is cruel, whether or not a fetus is aborted. (p. 21)

Sexual mores have changed radically since Augustine's time, yet the Catholic Church still condemns using contraceptive devices. (The "rhythm method" is somehow excluded from latter-day condemnation, though by Augustine's own logic it, too, ought not to be permitted.) And the Church continues to call abortion sin.


However, since the 17th century the Church's continuing condemnation of abortion has moved prudently away from emphasizing the perversity argument, Dombrowski and Deltete show. Nowadays, the argument most heard as to why abortion is bad is an ontological one — the sort of argument Augustine and Aquinas expressly shunned.

When scientists first got hold of optical devices in the 1600s — the microscope, etc. — which let them peer at aborted embryos and fetuses with a high degree of magnification, they found human contours and organs begin to develop very early on. They quite naturally jumped to the conclusion that perhaps Augustine and Aquinas had been wrong: perhaps "hominization," the juncture at which a fetus becomes a human being, occurs at or precious near the very moment when sperm meets egg.

Hence, maybe all abortions kill a human person.

But wait. Today, as Dombrowski and Deltete point out, our much more advanced science of embryology gives us reason to believe that Augustine and Aquinas were correct after all. Though tiny embryos quickly develop recognizable organs, including brains, the cells in the forming brain don't actually start to communicate with one another until the 25th through 32nd weeks of pregnancy.

Accordingly, what Messrs. D and D refer to as "sentiency" — sentience, self-awareness, higher cognitive function — are entirely missing in younger fetuses. And it is to the onset of sentiency that the authors say we may ascribe the advent of the "intelligent," or truly human, soul. That this is the time at which the fetus can first hope to survive outside the womb is further indication that abortions in the first or even the second trimester of pregnancy are not murder.