Faiths of Our Fathers

A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion, by Seattle University philosophy professors Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert J. Deltete, continues to interest me. It argues that Catholics such as I should be open to a pro-choice position concerning abortion because the church, prior to the seventeenth century, objected to early-stage abortions only because they were said by St. Augustine and others to pervert the only non-sinful use of sex: procreation by married couples.

St. Augustine and, later, St. Thomas Aquinas, held that a fetus could have no truly human soul until the later stages of pregnancy, when it was fully formed.

When scientific inquiry in Europe ramped up during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, scientists at first incorrectly found reason to think the embryo was, contrary to Augustine and Aquinas, fully formed from the moment of conception — just very, very tiny. Ergo, it could have a God-given soul after all, and early-stage abortions were wrong.

Since that time, two key things have happened. The sexual mores of Catholics have changed, and procreation is no longer seen as the only legitimate function of sex. The intensification of conjugal love and even the taking of physical pleasure in the sex act are now seen as legitimate uses of sexuality.

Sex can be appropriate today, many Catholics believe, as long as there is "mutual agapic respect" between consenting adults. Agape, a Greek word for love, is synonymous with Christian love. As long as erotic love is subsumed within agape or Christian love, Dombrowski and Deltete argue, it is not necessarily sinful — even if the adult partners are not married or are of the same sex.

Also, science has rectified its original supposition that the tiniest embryo is a fully formed, potentially soul-bearing "homunculus." We now know (for example) that the ability of the fetus to undergo experiences — e.g., to suffer — begins only when the cerebral cortex has been fully "wired up," which happens no earlier than the 24th week of fetal development. It looks as if Augustine and Thomas Aquinas were right about "delayed hominization" after all.

Dombrowski and Deltete argue that today's liberalized sexual mores and the latest evidence concerning fetal development combine to offer us Catholics a reasonable way to support a woman's "right to choose."


Dombrowski and Deltete go on to argue, in their chapter on "Catholicism and Liberalism," in favor of what they term a "liberal" form of societal governance. To them, "liberal" governance is what makes for political and social "justice," a state of affairs which I think boils down to an active appreciation by all in the society of pluralism. Though we all tend to identify with communities having "relatively comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral views" (see pp. 106ff.), we all are supposed to see that "the only way to have one 'comprehensive' view reign supreme over others is to force it down people's throats ... " (p. 107).

As an example of a "relatively comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral view," take Catholicism. As another, take Evangelical Protestantism. Yet another might be "secular humanism," an outlook of which many atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers are accused by Catholics and Evangelical Protestants. The list of comprehensive views is a long one. Each, according to Dombrowski and Deltete, ought to recognize that the path to mutual pluralistic "justice" runs through the setting aside of one's own party's "reasonable" positions concerning disputed matters, such as abortion rights, in recognition that other "relatively comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral views" can also claim to be reasonable ones.


That wholesale embrace of pluralistic "justice" is a taller order, I think, than Dombrowski and Deltete admit.

I think the reason has to do with human nature. One of the most fundamental aspects of our nature is that we value our communal solidarities so highly.

When Catholics or Evangelicals, or secular humanists, or anyone else, bond into communities, there have to be some meaningful signs given by each member of communal solidarity, which generally amount to the making of some sort of personal sacrifice on behalf of the community.

Not all signs of communal sacrifice need to be in any way illicit. That said, they can be and often are at least quasi-illicit.

Take, for example, the sign of sacrificial solidarity made by a soldier who takes up arms against an enemy. Killing is generally seen as a violation of one of God's commandments — or, for nonbelievers in God, of one of the basic principles of morality and ethics — yet when a soldier kills an enemy combatant, that's not seen as a sin. One reason for the exception is that the soldier's sacrifice of his personal innocence in wartime is an unmistakable sign of his solidarity with the nation as a whole.

Another, more debatable example might be that of a protester against abortions who kills an abortion doctor. As Dr. Susan Wicklund's This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor shows, Wicklund as an abortion provider lived in constant fear of assassination at the hands of true believers who think abortion is murder.

Again, I think killers of abortion providers are sacrificing their personal innocence in order to give an unmistakable sign of their solidarity with other "right-thinking" folks.

Their actions are clearly (a) immoral and (b) irrational. But that's my point. Human nature so values signs of sacrificial solidarity with one's own party or group that considerations of rationality or even basic morality can easily get shunted aside.


We Catholics are far from immune. That's why I think Dombrowski and Deltete's arguments that Catholics ought to reevaluate their positions on abortion fall mostly on deaf ears. Many — dare I say most — Catholics today take it that, even if Dombrowski and Deltete are right from a strictly philosophical point of view, such a view is an intrinsically "deracinated" one.

"Deracinated" is a word Dombrowski and Deltete use often. Stances such as that of Dombrowski and Deltete that Catholic traditionalists and communitarians oppose, the traditionalists and communitarians call "deracinated" ones. To deracinate is to pull something up by its roots. Certain philosophical positions that have been advanced, traditionalists and communitarians complain, tend to pull Catholics right out of the soil of their tradition.

For example, many Catholics feel they are being deracinated by views such as that of Dombrowski and Deltete that make abortion seem less than absolutely wrong.

Consciously or not, such Catholics probably feel that entertaining a pro-choice stance constitutes a break with the faith of their fathers. ("Faith of Our Fathers" is a hymn we Catholics sing often in church. Every community organized around "relatively comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral views" could adopt the same hymn!)

Accordingly, if only as a sign of sacrificial solidarity, many Catholics consent to give up any personal, individual attempt to reason abstractly about the morality of abortion. Their assumption is that the church has done all the abstract reasoning that is required, and it is simply the duty of themselves as Catholics to follow their church's lead and oppose abortion.

Signs of sacrificial solidarity — ways of upholding the "faiths of our fathers" at some (possibly great) personal sacrifice to ourselves — mean so much to us that "deracinating" philosophical arguments like that of Dombrowski and Deltete don't often stand much of a chance.

The Great Thought Divide

A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion, by Seattle University philosophy professors Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert J. Deltete, is a must-read for Catholics such as myself who are locked into neither a pro-life position nor a pro-choice stance, but are honestly trying to decide whether abortions are in and of themselves sinful. Dombrowski and Deltete argue they are not.

There are two horns to their argument. Horn One: virtually no Catholics still believe, as St. Augustine did, that sexual sin is anything sex-related which fails to uphold procreation — not bodily pleasure, not even conjugal love — as the sole acceptable basis for sex between two marriage partners. That abortions make a mockery of the biblical procreation mandate ("Be fruitful and multiply") was the reason Augustine found abortions sinful, for he did not believe — and neither did St. Thomas Aquinas — that an embryo or fetus possesses either sentiency or a rational, God-given soul until some point late in pregnancy.

Horn Two: if "delayed hominization" — the position of Augustine and Thomas — is correct, then modern abortion foes who explicitly or implicitly assume there is "immediate hominization" — or a God-given soul which arrives on day one of pregnancy — are philosophically out of step with current medical science, which seems to affirm delayed hominization. To wit, we now know that it is only in the 24th through 32nd weeks of pregnancy that the central nervous system has developed to the point of being able to undergo any sort of experience. Being able to have conscious experience, including the ability to suffer, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the development of a rational soul, which is the fulfillment of human personhood.

So say Dombrowski and Deltete. I think they're right.


Unless, that is, there is reason to believe that a fully human "identity" simply exists at all points in the temporal career of the fetus, past, present, and future, being there from the instant of its conception through all of its embryonic and post-embryonic developmental stages; being present at its birth; then accompanying its life as an infant, as a child, and as an adult; and finally persisting to its death and beyond.

This view, which Dombrowski and Deltete explore, and the antithetical one which they prefer both bear upon the question of what time is. As Dombrowski and Deltete point out in their chapter on "The Importance of Temporal Asymmetry," there is and has long been a tendency among philosophers to believe that time is basically symmetrical.

If time is symmetrical, then it indeed makes sense to say that a newly fertilized egg cell already contains that immutable "substance" which gives it, now and forever, its unique "identity." Abortion is, on this view, wrong because it snuffs out that "substance," that "identity."

Philosopher-mathematician Gottfried Leibniz held in the 17th century, say Messrs. D. and D., that there is indeed an immutable "substance" in which inheres the constant "identity" of a person throughout life.

Time is therefore symmetrical, in Leibniz' view, because a person accumulates no added identity as time goes on. What is essential to a person's identity never changes.

The identity of any one person is, on this view, something like the subject of a sentence. It can accumulate more predicates over time, without itself being changed in any essential way.

Or, it is like a noun that can, over the course of time, have more and more adjectives attached to it, without having its core meaning altered in any fundamental way.


Dombrowski and Deltete disagree with Leibniz on this matter of time and identity. To them, we are what we have become. Our life is an ongoing process whose events, though they do not cancel the past, mean that a partially new and even unexpected identity emerges with each event that transpires in our lives. Each new identity is not strictly the same as any of our previous identities, though it subsumes all of them.

It is for this reason that Dombrowski and Deltete say that time is asymmetrical. The future for each of us is not set in stone, even as all of our past identities remain exactly what they always were.

As I said in this earlier series of posts, Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine has written in The End of Certainty of scientific discoveries and insights that give him abundant reason to think science should abandon its longstanding conviction that time is symmetrical, and that our awareness of an "arrow of time" is but an illusion. If we think Prigogine is right, then I'd say it becomes easier to find Dombrowski and Deltete right as well.

But we are all somewhat heirs to the other type of thinking, the one which Leibniz upheld, which looks for an immutable, unchanging core of our (or anything's) existence. Such an immutable core of existence makes each of us in the present moment not different in any fundamental way than what we were in our (already determined) pasts and/or what we will be in our (equally predetermined) futures.

Einstein said, "God does not play dice." If indeed God were never a dice player, we could be assured that being, rather than becoming, is alone at the heart of who we are. If that is so, our future is somehow already written, and an omniscient God knows what it is.

But, as Dombrowski and Deltete point out, this view of what divine omniscience supposedly is contradicts the traditional Catholic belief in free will, which denies that each of our fates, salvation-wise, is predestined.


It seems we have two dueling sets of ideas here, each set being a constellation of multiple notions that somehow "go together" and likewise somehow mutually contradict all the notions that make up the other constellation. One set of ideas elevates being over becoming, identity over process, constancy over change, omniscience over wait-and-see knowability, determinism over free will, destiny over potentiality. The other set of ideas flips the picture over and emphasizes the second of each of these matched pairs.

The first set of ideas seems to me (and I am not trained in philosophy) to be basically Platonic, while the other is basically Aristotelian. In the view of Dombrowski and Deltete, the Catholic Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas were more Aristotelians than Platonists, while (I gather) people like Leibniz and René Descartes were more Platonists than Aristotelians.

Platonists believe that objects in the material world are fleeting, imperfect renditions of eternal ideas or forms. These forms are more real than anything tangible or physical. Christian Platonists think of the God-given soul as a real, eternal, indestructible thing; hence the soul is much like a Platonic form. At base, the soul's existence is independent of the physical body of the embryo or fetus that it is bestowed upon. Hence, God's act of bestowing the soul can be assumed to take place at the moment of conception.

Aristotelians (I gather) grant more reality to physical matter than do Platonists. There is no absolute divide between form and substance, mind and matter, etc., such that the one can exist without the other. Hence, it can make sense to believe that that which anything presently is can come about, at least in part, only through a process of becoming, and no part of that something's "identity" can be separated from the process by which that identity has been built up.


If I am right about this distinction — this Great Thought Divide — between Platonists and Aristotelians, then I imagine the late Ilya Prigogine was an Aristotelian (and Einstein was a Platonist).

And I, too, am an Aristotelian at heart, even if I sometimes catch myself thinking like a Platonist.

For too many years to count, I have been assiduously working out a worldview in which my belief as a Christian need not contradict my views as an (amateur) philosopher or (equally amateur) scientist. In my capacity as amateur philosopher-scientist, I have yearned to see how the Darwinian theory of evolution can be brought into accord with Christian belief, or vice versa. To make a long story short, I've come to embrace the extensions of Darwinism that the sciences of "complexity" have recently offered (see my Beyond Darwin blog).

According to the sciences of complexity, even chaos (defined mathematically and scientifically, of course) is of creative value in an unfolding cosmos. The "edge of chaos," where genesis is ongoing, is where evolution takes place.

Complex systems that evolve at the edge of chaos, and even chaotic systems per se, pass through "bifurcation points" where they opt for one possible future trajectory and bypass at least one other. In this earlier series of posts about Prigogine's book — a book which upholds the notion that all "dissipative systems" are intrinsically "complex systems" in the above sense — I suggested that God works minor miracles at the bifurcation points of such systems' developmental processes. With the "assent" (in some sense of the word) of the system itself, an evolutionary branch is taken which pleases God.

Yet God does not coerce assent at the time of what I am calling the mini-annunciation that he makes to the system, seeking its cooperation, nor does he know what the system will choose to do in advance.

Such an idea about mini-annunciations and mini-miracles, it seems to me, tips the philosophical scales toward the Aristotelian constellation of notions, and away from the Platonic. Time is asymmetrical, and the future is not somehow already latent in the past. The human person, likewise, is not somehow already "there" in the fertilized egg cell. The genesis of worldly being is not somehow "above" the process of evolutionary becoming. And God in his omniscience does not know everything that will someday happen.

Such an idea about mini-annunciations and mini-miracles as part of the ongoing process of creation, while it flies in the face of Platonic notions of genesis and ensoulment, does not make me un-Christian. It just puts me on the other side of the Great Thought Divide from a great many other Christians.

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.

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.

The Anti-Defilement Covenant

In Garry Wills on Abortion Rights and Is the Bible Anti-Abortion?, I talked about a convincing argument I found in a recent book, Head and Heart: American Christianities by liberal Catholic historian Garry Wills, to the effect that an abortion in the first two trimesters of pregnancy does not amount to the murder of a human person.

A key part of Wills' line of reasoning was that the Bible doesn't really prohibit abortion, not specifically. In fact, the Old Testament book of Numbers (verses 5.11-27) has God telling Moses:

If any man's wife go aside, and commit a trespass against him,
And a man lie with her carnally, and it be hid from the eyes of her husband, and be kept close, and she be defiled, and there be no witness against her, neither she be taken with the manner; And the spirit of jealousy come upon him, and he be jealous of his wife, and she be defiled: or if the spirit of jealousy come upon him, and he be jealous of his wife, and she be not defiled:
Then shall the man bring his wife unto the priest, and he shall bring her offering for her, the tenth part of an ephah of barley meal; he shall pour no oil upon it, nor put frankincense thereon; for it is an offering of jealousy, an offering of memorial, bringing iniquity to remembrance ... and the priest shall have in his hand the bitter water that causeth the curse: And the priest shall charge her by an oath, and say unto the woman, If no man have lain with thee, and if thou hast not gone aside to uncleanness with another instead of thy husband, be thou free from this bitter water that causeth the curse: But if thou hast gone aside to another instead of thy husband, and if thou be defiled, and some man have lain with thee beside thine husband ... Then the priest shall charge the woman with an oath of cursing, and the priest shall say unto the woman, The LORD make thee a curse and an oath among thy people, when the LORD doth make thy thigh to rot, and thy belly to swell; And this water that causeth the curse shall go into thy bowels, to make thy belly to swell, and thy thigh to rot: And the woman shall say, Amen, amen ... And when he hath made her to drink the water, then it shall come to pass, that, if she be defiled, and have done trespass against her husband, that the water that causeth the curse shall enter into her, and become bitter, and her belly shall swell, and her thigh shall rot: and the woman shall be a curse among her people.

Today, we would say the priest is coercing this hypothetically "defiled" woman to use a herbal abortifacient ("bitter water") to terminate her pregnancy! All because the woman's "defilement" has been cast as a "trespass" that has been committed against ... her husband!

In other words, the woman's sexuality, fertility, and reproductive capacity here belong to her husband, not to her. When she is "defiled" (actually, or according to her husband's suspicions) it is as if her (suspected) illicit lover has stolen property ... from the husband. This, the worst possible sort of transgression against the husband, demands that the woman (not the man she has supposedly "lain with") be punished in a most extreme way: "the curse shall enter into her, and become bitter, and her belly shall swell, and her thigh shall rot: and the woman shall be a curse among her people."


The society in question was a patriarchal one in which a female's reproductive capacities are originally owned, when she is still a child, by her father. We still say, do we not, that when a woman is married, her father "gives her away" to her new husband.

In such a view of womanhood, the menfolk of the tribe or society participate in a sort of communal "anti-defilement covenant." Together, the men control each and every woman's sexuality from the cradle to the grave.

According to such a covenant, a woman's sexual chastity is a precious possession, to be guarded at all costs by its possessors: the men. The men collaborate to set up the rules of conduct and official ceremony by which this can reliably be done. In the case of the ancient Hebrews, the rules were said to have come to Moses from God.

The underlying notion is, again, that a woman's sexual and reproductive identity belongs to her husband, her father, her brothers (whose job it is to avenge any adultery or rape committed by or against her), and the tribe's menfolk in general (who are adjured, for the sake of domestic tranquility, to rein in their natural tendency to want to "lie with" this woman or that, and with the other as well).

Looked at in one way, this kind of anti-defilement covenant puts every woman on a pedestal. That doesn't sound so bad. But looked at another way, it makes her into a mere object, a container of fertility by means of which her legitimate husband can reliably secure his own posterity.

This patriarchal idea of womanhood is so crucial to the mores of the Bible that womanhood's "defilement" becomes perhaps the only imaginable God-sanctioned rationale for abortion. On the other hand, an undefiled woman who is pregnant by her husband presumably must never have an abortion, for in so doing she is robbing her husband of his posterity.


An interesting aspect of this patriarchal setup is that it may also explain why the Old Testament comes down so hard against homosexuality.

On the one hand, it might be thought that any man who prefers other men to women would be, as one who is not at all inclined to "defile" the womenfolk, welcomed.

But, as a moment's consideration shows, such a man cannot really be part of the covenant, for the covenant is all about the sacrificial obligations men undertake vis-à-vis other men. A man bound by the covenant is giving up something big: his chance to sow his wild oats. He's making a huge sacrifice. (Perhaps this is why circumcision, the painful sacrificing of foreskin tissue at the tip of the penis, betokens membership in the covenant.)

So a shared sacrifice is what binds the covenanters indissolubly together. A homosexual man is making no real sacrifice by agreeing not to "lie" indiscriminately with the womenfolk. That's not very strong glue, by any means.


We who are Christians or Jews today inherit the ideas about womanhood that were inherent in the original, patriarchal covenant of anti-defilement, and transmitted to us via our Bible and our religious doctrines. But these ideas aren't a good match with our own up-to-date, feminist-inspired notions of womanhood. Feminism and women's liberation have taught us that a woman's sexual and reproductive capacities are her own, to do with as she sees fit.

In a society such as ours, where abortion-on-demand has recently (1973) been made legal, is it any wonder that religious conservatives are absolutely opposed to Roe v. Wade? The idea that a woman can, on her own, choose to have an abortion — or not — is diametrically opposed to the ancient understanding of womanhood implicit in the anti-defilement covenant. According to that understanding, a woman's fertility belongs to the menfolk in her tribe. Only they can adjudicate when an abortion is necessary.

And it is likewise no surprise that religious conservatives are equally adamant that homosexuality will not be tolerated — much less blessed by allowing gays to marry.

It all goes back to ancient ideas about how a tribe or society ought to treat the generative capacity of women: as something belonging to, and in turn demanding costly sacrifice from, men.

Is the Bible Anti-Abortion?

As I detailed in Garry Wills on Abortion Rights, the recent book Head and Heart: American Christianities by liberal Catholic historian Garry Wills argues, in one important section, against the "pro-life" stance of today's Evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics and Jews. After asserting that there is no authoritative text in the Bible in which God specifically forbids abortions, Wills makes a case that an abortion in the first two trimesters of pregnancy does not amount to the murder of a human person.

Absent definite scriptural guidance, we must fall back on philosophical reasoning about "natural law," Wills says. Given what we now know about fetal development, we can be certain a fetus possesses no high, cognitive brain function until neural synapses form in the brain, at a point twenty-five to thirty-two weeks into pregnancy. Before that juncture — which coincides with the onset of the ability of the fetus to survive outside the womb — the fetus is manifestly not "capable of thought, or of speech, of recognizing itself as a person, of assuming the responsibilities of a person" (p. 528).

Hence, a fetus during the first six months of pregnancy does not have the "intellectual soul" which Thomas Aquinas felt, writes Wills, "is directly created by God 'at the end of human generation' (in fine generationis humanae)" (p. 526).

In modern language, "personhood" as Aquinas defined it doesn't begin until late in pregnancy. Prior to the emergence of personhood, the fetus does not have a soul "directly created by God."


It's a convincing argument — one that I imagine (based on an endnote citation) comes from a book by Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert Deltete called A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion, which I intend to read.

But the argument depends on there not being a specific proscription of abortion in the Bible, which is a topic Wills expounds in what is perhaps his lengthiest endnote. I'm going to replicate that endnote here:

Though Jewish tradition did not draw any teaching on abortion from Scripture, modern Christians who believe in what they call the Old Testament try to dredge up something on the subject. Here are some of the desperate expedients.

Psalm 139.13-16 [actually, the verses cited are 13-15]:

For thou hast possessed my reins;
thou hast covered me in my mother's womb.
I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:
marvellous are thy works;
and that my soul knoweth right well.
My substance was not hid from thee,
when I was made in secret,
and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.

This says only that God foreknows everything, every stage of a thing's coming into existence — even its primordial patterning in the lowest parts of the earth (whatever that means). That this is not a statement of when a person actually comes into being is seen from Jeremiah 1.5: "before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee."

Exodus 21.22: "If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine."

The penalty is not for murder (which calls for the death penalty), but a mere fine to the husband for the possibility of losing an heir. This says nothing of the present status of the fetus, only of the future profit to the male. The woman is not treated as having any stake in the matter. Only the man.

Genesis 38.24-26:

[Wills does not actually give the quote, which is: "And it came to pass about three months after, that it was told Judah, saying, Tamar thy daughter in law hath played the harlot; and also, behold, she is with child by whoredom. And Judah said, Bring her forth, and let her be burnt. When she was brought forth, she sent to her father in law, saying, By the man, whose these are, am I with child: and she said, Discern, I pray thee, whose are these, the signet, and bracelets, and staff. And Judah acknowledged them, and said, She hath been more righteous than I; because that I gave her not to Shelah my son. And he knew her again no more."]

[Wills paraphrases:] Tamar is brought to be executed, but she is pregnant and is spared. But she is not spared because she is pregnant — that was known when she was condemned to death. She is spared because she produces proof that the father is the head of the tribe, Jonah.

[Then Wills adds:] Actually there is one passage in the Jewish texts that shows God himself inducing an abortion, Numbers 5.11-26 (the Lord is speaking):

[Again, Wills omits the actual text, which (including verse 27) is:]

[And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,
Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, If any man's wife go aside, and commit a trespass against him,
And a man lie with her carnally, and it be hid from the eyes of her husband, and be kept close, and she be defiled, and there be no witness against her, neither she be taken with the manner;
And the spirit of jealousy come upon him, and he be jealous of his wife, and she be defiled: or if the spirit of jealousy come upon him, and he be jealous of his wife, and she be not defiled:
Then shall the man bring his wife unto the priest, and he shall bring her offering for her, the tenth part of an ephah of barley meal; he shall pour no oil upon it, nor put frankincense thereon; for it is an offering of jealousy, an offering of memorial, bringing iniquity to remembrance.
And the priest shall bring her near, and set her before the LORD:
And the priest shall take holy water in an earthen vessel; and of the dust that is in the floor of the tabernacle the priest shall take, and put it into the water:
And the priest shall set the woman before the LORD, and uncover the woman's head, and put the offering of memorial in her hands, which is the jealousy offering: and the priest shall have in his hand the bitter water that causeth the curse:
And the priest shall charge her by an oath, and say unto the woman, If no man have lain with thee, and if thou hast not gone aside to uncleanness with another instead of thy husband, be thou free from this bitter water that causeth the curse:
But if thou hast gone aside to another instead of thy husband, and if thou be defiled, and some man have lain with thee beside thine husband:
Then the priest shall charge the woman with an oath of cursing, and the priest shall say unto the woman, The LORD make thee a curse and an oath among thy people, when the LORD doth make thy thigh to rot, and thy belly to swell;
And this water that causeth the curse shall go into thy bowels, to make thy belly to swell, and thy thigh to rot: And the woman shall say, Amen, amen.
And the priest shall write these curses in a book, and he shall blot them out with the bitter water:
And he shall cause the woman to drink the bitter water that causeth the curse: and the water that causeth the curse shall enter into her, and become bitter.
Then the priest shall take the jealousy offering out of the woman's hand, and shall wave the offering before the LORD, and offer it upon the altar:
And the priest shall take an handful of the offering, even the memorial thereof, and burn it upon the altar, and afterward shall cause the woman to drink the water.
And when he hath made her to drink the water, then it shall come to pass, that, if she be defiled, and have done trespass against her husband, that the water that causeth the curse shall enter into her, and become bitter, and her belly shall swell, and her thigh shall rot: and the woman shall be a curse among her people.]

[Wills does provide this interpretation:]

If a woman is suspected of infidelity, her husband must bring her before a priest, who will make her drink "bitter water" into which he has mingled cursed (23). "If she be defiled, and have done trespass against her husband, that the water that causeth the curse shall enter into her, and become bitter, and her belly shall swell, and her thigh shall rot: and the woman shall be a curse among her people" (27).

I don't know whether to call this last example "God himself inducing an abortion," so much as God calling for the priest to induce one, using "bitter water" as an abortifacient. But never mind. It does seem to show that God in that period of history and among those people ordered an illicit fetus of a "defiled" woman to be aborted, does it not?

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.

Ruby Slippers

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

In "O for Order," as I continued my ongoing discussion of Pope Benedict XVI's book Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, I postulated that our society's capacity for ethical awareness is gradually producing a new moral "order for free" in the wake of the demise of old-fashioned taboos.

Very recently there has been a decline in the number of abortions being performed, in the amount of drug abuse that occurs, and in the rate of teen pregnancy, I said. Given that the erstwhile strictures on society's moral behavior have loosened considerably over the last several decades, why?

I suggested the reason has to do with evolution. Not biological evolution per se, but the way in which various types of complex-adaptive, self-organizing systems evolve. Among these types of systems are species, ecosystems, cultures, technologies, economies, financial markets ... and, I would suggest, the ways in which societies come to grips with their moral, ethical understandings.

All such dynamical systems, argues biologist Stuart Kauffman in his book At Home in the Universe, have the capacity to evolve by virtue of hovering mathematically at or near the "edge of chaos" — a unique dynamical locale where both novelty and stability are to be expected. "Chaos" itself has the ability to produce novelty but not stability; the two distinct regimes of dynamical "order" yield stability but not novelty. Only the "edge of chaos" offers sanctuary to the processes of graceful change we call evolution.

Stuff happens ... and when it does, chaos often ensues. But complex-adaptive systems are self-righting, and as they make their way back out of the regime of chaotic instability to the vaunted domain that has been dubbed the edge of chaos, which is equally the edge of order, their ability to self-organize produces new order for free — "for free," because the new order is not imposed on the system by any force or contrivance that exists outside or above the system.


The new moral order that is evolving in our society is not, I would claim, a matter of necessarily seeking different moral ends, but rather of having different moral means.

Take abortion. Those who support a "woman's right to choose" nevertheless want abortion to become (albeit safe and legal) rare. Of late, abortion indeed seems to have grown (slightly) less frequent than it was just a few years ago, as it remains safe and legal. Why?

That trend is probably due to a confluence of causes, I would say:

• Various new laws have chipped away at the ease with which women — for example, teens living with their parents — obtain abortions.
• Sexual mores have shifted in favor of serial monogamy, albeit not full-fledged pre-marital chastity.
• There are now "morning after" birth control pills.
• Women can now take birth control pills that suppress their monthly periods, a desirable goal in itself from the point of view of many women. The pills also protect against pregnancy.
• Advice columnists in newspapers now give hard-headed, practical advice about sexual relationships that no parish priest was ever equipped to give.
• Schools teach condom use.
• TV shows portray getting pregnant when you aren't in a stable relationship as not necessarily a wonderful thing to have happen.
• Women are not as starry-eyed as they once were about "Mr. Right."
• Religious and secular institutions with a pro-life agenda have learned how to pursue it more effectively.
  
• And so on.

There are also countervailing tendencies, to be sure, such as boyfriends, parents, and job requirements that pressure women to terminate unwanted pregnancies. But now there is increasingly a reaction against such pressures on the part of not only pro-lifers but also feminists who resent all forms of coercion exacted upon women.

All in all, the situation is evolving. As it does, abortion becomes rarer ... even though there are (a) fewer formal legal forces exerted upon women contemplating abortion, as there were before Roe v. Wade; (b) fewer informal taboos that remain in widespread effect against premarital sex, pregnancy outside marriage, or the illegitimacy of children.


What does any of this have to do with the pope's book? Well, the pope argues that the rise in the West, over the last several centuries, of the notion that we as individuals are, or ought to be, radically free to express ourselves as we see fit, without having to kowtow to external authorities or taboos, has put us in a self-contradictory situation. As more and more of us gain more and more "power to choose," in the guise of newly minted human "rights," those newfound "rights" endlessly trump other people's and institutions' existing rights — to the point, ultimately, of constricting freedom itself. Lost in the struggle, he believes, is our basic respect for the lives and dignity of other human persons.

I see his point, of course, since in the short term there is an apparent deficit of respect for life and dignity abroad in the land. But I would argue that in the long term, moral "order for free" will in fact emerge and rectify that situation. Indeed, it is already happening.

And so, an analogy. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her fellow travelers on the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City expect the great wizard who rules the Land of Oz mostly by the force of bluster and intimidation to grant whatever it is that would turn each one's individual world into a seeming paradise. Dorothy wants to go home to Kansas. The Scarecrow wants a brain. The Tin Man, a heart. The Cowardly Lion, courage.

As the story unfolds, it becomes quickly apparent that the Great Wizard of Oz is actually a humbug who lacks the power to grant anything. The wizard, I take it, is a stand-in for all external, top-down sources of authority: governments, churches, and those less-visible bastions of behavioral governance which sociologists catalog.

Accordingly, the wizard, who is actually a soft-hearted charlatan whose hot-air balloon descended quite by accident into Oz, confers empowering symbols of braininess, compassion, and courage on Dorothy's friends, and they each come to believe in the qualities they had all along.

As for Dorothy, after the wizard's plan to carry her back to Kansas in his resurrected balloon misfires, the Good Witch Glinda reveals that the ruby slippers Dorothy has inherited from the killed Wicked Witch of the East have the unsuspected ability to transport her home. I take "home" to represent (among other things) the graceful stability we associate with life on earth. The ruby slippers betoken (again, among other things) the power of living organisms — ruby is the color of blood — to, by virtue of their self-organized complexity, produce order for free from within themselves.


The Wizard of Oz is a paean to self-determination in the absence of external coercion, hard (as with formal laws) or soft (as with informal taboos). It is a tribute to the ability of complex systems such as Dorothy represents to right themselves after a catastrophe such as the cyclone that blew Dorothy's house from Kansas to Oz. It is an affirmation that good things can "magically" happen even when everyday logic would suggest otherwise.

When Pope Benedict makes in his book what otherwise would seem to be a logically compelling case that our radical bias toward more and more individual liberty today violates life's sanctity and dignity, and ultimately undermines liberty itself, I think he reckons without the capacity of self-organizing systems to produce (moral) order for free, as they gracefully evolve. I think he overlooks, as Dorothy did, the power of our cultural ruby slippers to transport us out of moral chaos and back to paradise.

The Future of Abortion

Associate Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy

"Justice Kennedy: The Highly Influential Man in the Middle" appeared on Sunday, May 13, 2007, in The Washington Post and piqued once again my interest in the question of whether the Supreme Court is going to — or ought to — overturn its 1973 Roe. v. Wade decision legalizing abortion on demand. (I last took up abortion in any depth in
Roe, Casey, and Originalism in July 2005.)

Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Post article says, was the key "man in the middle" on several cases that were heard during this 2006-2007 term of the court and which were decided by 5-to-4 votes split otherwise along liberal-conservative ideological lines.

The '06-'07 court under still-new Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has achieved an impressive number of unanimous or near-unanimous decisions. It has also decided a fair number of close 5-4 cases that had no clear ideological cast — with Kennedy casting the swing vote in most of them. But in the several 5-4 cases involving a sharp ideological divide, Kennedy has cast the decisive fifth vote in all of them.

This makes Kennedy's vote the sine qua non of close, ideologically based decisions which the view of recently retired justice Sandra Day O'Connor used to be. O'Connor's replacement, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., typically sides with the conservative Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Associate Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Paul Stevens, David Souter, and Stephen Breyer usually line up on the liberal side. In many key cases, whichever cadre can earn Kennedy's support wins.

It came as a surprise to many court watchers that it was the conservative bloc which won Kennedy's support in the recent Gonzales v. Carhart decision, in a case concerning the late-term abortion procedure reviled by critics as "partial-birth" abortion. Kennedy himself wrote the April 2007 decision upholding the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of the U. S. Congress. (The full text of the decision, along with its concurrences and dissents, can be read here.)

When the Carhart decision was handed down in April, the Post reported in this article:

"The government may use its voice and its regulatory authority to show its profound respect for the life within the woman," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote. He said the ban on the controversial method for ending a midterm pregnancy is valid because other abortion procedures are still available.

Kennedy had (per the first-mentioned Post article) spoken some perhaps contrasting words from the high bench in 1992, in handing down the decision he himself had jointly written with O'Connor and Souter in another key abortion case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. On that day, as a decision basically upholding Roe was being issued, he said that "at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existing, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of life."


And there we have the nut of the abortion issue which continues to divide America: the woman's right to assert her "own concept" of moral right and wrong versus society's "profound respect for the life within the woman."

If Mork from Ork or E.T. the Extraterrestrial asked you to give an accounting of the proper, objective way to resolve the tension between those two ethical claims among Earth's populace, would you be able to comply? I don't know that I would.

I do believe the question needs to be debated again in the political arena, not the judicial one. That's one of the reasons why I hope Roe gets overturned. If that happens, the laws of the 50 states concerning (generally outlawing) abortion would once again come into force. These laws are presently held in abeyance under Roe, at least to the extent that they prohibit abortion outright in certain stages of pregnancy.


Those laws that make few or no exceptions to a state's general ban on abortion would surely become the focus of intense political efforts to change the law, given that polls show most Americans wanting abortions to be mainly illegal but with broad exceptions to protect a woman's life and health and to permit abortions in the case of rape or incest.

There might also be efforts to pass federal laws establishing abortion rights legislatively at a national level, and/or a movement to make abortions either unconstitutional or constituti0nally guaranteed, via an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

So there would surely be a massive debate, during which a whole generation of citizens who weren't even alive when Roe was decided would have to confront the issue directly, stripped of any obfuscating questions of whether the Supreme Court's now-vacated pronouncements in favor of abortion rights were properly decided or not.


Another reason why I favor such a back-to-square-one debate is that we know more about how a fetus develops in the womb than we did in 1973. Some (admittedly disputed) scientific evidence now suggests that the fetus is able to feel pain in the first trimester, for instance. We didn't have much of a basis for validating such a claim of early fetal sentience in 1973. Modern diagnostic and imaging procedures now offer us such a basis.

Although we knew prior to 1973 that the heart of the fetus begins to beat in the fourth week after conception, at a juncture when a prospective mother may not yet know she is pregnant, that fact was still relatively new to the general public consciousness.

The human brain begins to form in the same early week of pregnancy and is formed enough to produce brain waves by six weeks — just two weeks after brain formation begins — which means that most abortions destroy a human brain that is in some sense functioning. We apparently weren't aware of just how early the fetal brain starts to function back in 1973. (I am drawing on "Science and Abortion," a religiously oriented pro-life tract, for some of this information.)

10mm human embryo, about five weeks old

By about five weeks into pregnancy, an embryo (the fetus-to-be is still called an embryo at this stage) is only 10mm in size (see this Wikipedia article), yet it already has recognizable eyes, ears, organs, and appendages. Images such as the one to the right were groundbreaking at the time of the Roe decision. (This one is from an ectopic pregnancy, outside the uterus.) Images of this type are commonplace today.

Obstetric ultrasonography — ultrasound — is routinely used during pregnancy these days. Real-time ultrasound technology in which moving fetal images may be viewed by the patient as well as the doctor or technician as they are being gathered was not, as far as I can tell, widely available in 1973. (See this article on the history of real-time scanners. See this video at YouTube.com for a scan of 13-week-old fetus.)

If nothing else, the pervasiveness of this kind of imaging today has made the general public aware that a recognizably human life form is present in the womb well before the time of pregnancy at which many abortions are performed. That awareness is new since 1973.


All in all, more of us know more about pregnancy and fetal development today than people did in 1973, and most of that new knowledge comes from a revised medical science which makes it harder, not easier, to support abortion-on-demand morally during the second trimester of pregnancy.

Roe prohibited states outright from outlawing first-trimester abortions, based in part on scientific evidence that is no longer generally accepted. Subsequent Supreme Court decisions, though mainly upholding Roe, have tried to accomodate more up-to-date science concerning early fetal development in various ways, with varying degrees of success. Still, it's clear to me that if they had it to do all over again, the justices would need to approach at least the first-trimester abortion issue in a wholly different way.

And if first-trimester abortions could be legally proscribed by the states in view of present understandings of early fetal development, what would that say about second- and third-trimester abortions? States would presumably have even fewer constitutional hurdles to jump in outlawing most of them.

So I think our society needs to wipe the constitutional slate clean and hash out such issues in the political/legislative arena. That's why I'll be happy if Roe bites the dust. And if Justice Kennedy casts the deciding vote against Roe sometime in the not-too-distant future, I won't be at all surprised.

Of the Self and the Soul

This was originally to be the first in a series of posts whose original intent was to try to figure out when, during its development in a human womb, a sperm-fertilized egg cell that becomes an embryo, then takes on the status of a fetus, acquires a soul. This effort has evolved quite a bit since I began it initially. My initial intent was to dispute the idea that ensouled human life begins at the moment of biological conception. Later, I wanted to do more than that. I wanted to see when human life qua human life does begin.

By "human life" I meant (since I believe in a God-given soul) life after the "arrival" of the soul in the new human-to-be, developing in the womb of its mother. Biased against the assertion that all abortion is tantamount to murder (though this is what my church, the Roman Catholic Church, teaches) I wanted to discover some intellectually and spiritually acceptable argument against that belief. I wanted to show that abortion isn't murder until some time well after pregnancy begins.


I started out simply trying to show how science can furnish arguments to the effect that the instant at which fertilization of the egg from the mother takes place by the action of a sperm from the father is very likely not the moment when the soul "comes to earth" and joins the body (see Considering Embryos). As I proceeded, however, I became interested in figuring out when exactly the soul does come, and why that particular moment or juncture in fetal development is the "right" one to construe as the beginning of human life, as opposed to all other possible candidate moments.

My initial thought in this regard was to identify as the transition point when the soul actually comes into the picture the "dawn of sentience," the time at which the embryo or fetus first becomes conscious. I wrote a great deal of verbiage in support of this thesis, which I posted to this blog and have now withdrawn.

As I tried to develop my argument, I did some (further) reading on the subject of what consciousness or sentience actually is. In so doing, I came to see that self-consciousness, or self-awareness, is considered by those in the know — philosophers of mind, psychologists, neuroscientists, etc. — to be a special case of "mere" consciousness. While consciousness per se might well be something we humans share with other species, and maybe even with things that are not alive in any ordinary sense, self-awareness is different.

I prefer the term "self-awareness" to "self-consciousness," by the way, since the latter can, Webster says, mean no more than "uncomfortably conscious of oneself as an object of the observation of others": ill-at-ease in social situations.

Self-awareness of the profound sort that I am talking about, most experts assume — though this cannot actually be proved — is something unique to humans. One has to be conscious to be self-aware, but presumably humans are the only conscious entities in the natural world that are self-aware. We are accordingly the only conscious agents in the world who qualify as persons.

So my argument evolved into one dependent on the idea that the soul comes to us when and only when we have developed, in our mother's womb, into full-fledged persons who have become not only conscious but self-aware. Ergo, whatever the moral implications of abortion prior to the dawn of fetal self-awareness may be, abortion isn't necessarily murder.


That was the project I originally had in mind. But as I investigated such areas of human inquiry as various theories of consciousness/self-awareness and the Christian notion of the soul, I ran into problems.

One of these problems was the very notion that the soul — the transcendent dimension or spiritual principle of the human person, which survives after death — is something that "arrives," something that can "come to earth" from on high at some particular time. In the Bible, specifically, neither the Old Testament nor the New has it that soul and body are ever all that distinct to begin with. We are each an animated body, in the view of the Bible writers, not an incarnated spirit. (See Richard P. McBrien, Catholicism, p. 159.)

The latter idea came into Christendom from ancient Greek thought, via the patristic writings of the Early Church and then the Scholastic philosophy of the medieval period. Where the animated-body view spoke mainly of the resurrection of the body, the incarnated-spirit idea envisioned Christian salvation in terms of the immortality of the soul.

Modern Christian thought, guided by science, philosophy, etc., draws in various ways from both traditions. I find that I am not qualified — as yet — fully to disentangle such questions. But it has become evident to me that my original concept of the soul as something separate from and added to the body may be subject to doubt.


In fact, I now find myself leaning more in the direction of the animated-body notion of the soul. I interpret this notion as (at least possibly) an instance of what I believe is called by modern philosophers "phenomenal" existence.

I have only an incipient grasp of phenomenology, I admit. My understanding is that physical and phenomenal existence are seen as conceptually different, with the former giving rise, in the case of consciousness, to the latter. Accordingly, consciousness or sentience or subjective experience is "always conscious of something, of phenomena" (McBrien 118, my italics).

In at least one phemomenological view of consciousness (that of Chalmers; see below), in this world it very likely arises naturally from physical brain states, but it is not identical to them. Nor is there necessarily any logical reason to presuppose that this arising of consciousness must happen. This could instead have been a "zombie world" where physics and psychology say all there is to say about the workings of the human mind.

Real consciousness is in this view aware of external objects, in themselves, as phenomena whose characteristics are called qualia. The physical and psychological processes of sensation, perception, and cognition merely underlie consciousness. Instead of seeing, say, a red tricycle as just a thing in the external world, it experiences a red tricycle. There is thus (again, in this particular philosophical view) a dualism between the physical and the phenomenal. You can't in our natural world have the phenomenal without the physical — or vice versa — but the two are not the same. Hence, consciousness "has a structure and rules proper to itself ... an intentionality" (McBrien 118).

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

The same philosophical position, that of phenomenology, can serve (as I have already indicated) as a basis to suppose that consciousness, and particularly self-consciousness or the human sense of self, is unique to human persons, given rise to by the sheer complexity of the "information states" human brains can take on. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, by the philosopher of mind David J. Chalmers, hints that such may in fact be the case.

Chalmers is careful to give contrary theoretical positions their due, but he basically favors a phenomenological mind-brain dualism, a fundamental distinction between the phenomenon of consciousness and the psychological workings of the mind which gives rise to it. But, again, this dualism is naturalistic; it is in the nature of things in this world, not the result of some logical necessity. Hence, the strictly conceptual possibility that the mind could exist independently from the brain simply does not pertain to our actual world.

Chalmers does not dwell on self-consciousness or self-awareness as such. He seems to feel that we humans possess it uniquely, in that we alone are agents or persons; other animals may lack it. It, too, seemingly represents for him a phenomenal counterpart to something brain-based and neural, something whose operations we call psychological. We have a subjective, intentional experience of the inner self, just as we have a subjective, intentional experience of a red tricycle. The real objects of these experiences both qualify as not things but phenomena.


This view, which I find I now tend to adopt as my own, poses another pair of problems for my original intention to demonstrate that early-stage abortion is not tantamount to murder.

At first, I thought to suggest that there is a "dawn of sentience," during later stages of fetal development — sentience being a synonym for consciousness or subjective experience. If that were so, perhaps the soul "arrives" at that juncture, not before.

But Chalmers seems to think it to be non-crazy to associate some incipient form of consciousness with anything, alive or not, that processes information — even a thermostat! Clearly a very-early-stage human embryo, whose nervous system has already begun to form during the third week of pregnancy and which now responds to external stimuli, processes information. In other words, its mother may not yet have even discovered she is pregnant by the time her embryo has already had its "dawn of sentience."


The second of the pair of problems posed to my position by Chalmers's ideas on consciousness has to do with what I imagined to be the "dawn of self-awareness," supposedly occurring sometime after the dawn of sentience. I had hoped to be able to show that the "dawn of self-awareness" comes at sometime roughly near the point at which the fetus becomes viable outside the womb, in (say) the seventh or eighth month of pregnancy.

But showing that seems not to be possible. For one thing, I have yet to find in Chalmers or anywhere else anything which justifies supposing that self-awareness as a form of consciousness can exist prior to the inception of the self as a psychological construct.

When a psychologist speaks of the self, what he or she has in mind depends in part on his or her particular school of personality theory. But in general, personality theories that emphasize the self at all hold that a newborn infant doesn't even have one yet! The self seemingly appears in the psyche during (say) the first few months of human life after birth, after the neonate has begun to recognize that the external world is something separate, a set of objects that can be inspected, moved around in, and manipulated.

If that is so, then very likely the fetus has no self, psychological or phenomenal, to be aware of. The dawn of self-awareness comes only after birth; it cannot serve as a possible delimiter to when early-term abortion stops counting as anything other than murder.


Then there is the problem of when, from a religious perspective, ensoulment happens — i.e., when the body of the embryo or fetus acquires a soul. According to Wikipedia, during at least one period in the Middle Ages the Catholic Church held that ensoulment coincides with the "quickening" event during the second trimester of pregnancy when the mother first feels the fetus move in her womb. Still, during most of history ensoulment has been taken to occur at the time of conception.

In the same way as, according to phenomenology, consciousness is "associated with" underlying physical brain states, I wonder if perhaps the soul is, at bottom, the phenomenal aspect which is associated with the physical human body from the moment of its conception on.

(I hope I am stating this right. I find that speaking phenomenologically feels quite clumsy, as of yet. I would like to say that the "phenomenal soul," if there be such a thing, emerges at conception. However, I am aware that emergentism is a philosophical position in its own right, and may require a different theory of consciousness — and possibly of the soul. So maybe I'd better avoid saying "emerges" and just keep saying "arises from," or "is given rise to," or "is associated with.")

The general idea of phenomenology seems to be that phenomena, with their qualia, deserve to be treated by philosophers in a different way than the mere "things" which give rise to them. Their very existence is of a unique sort. They are "objects of intentionality," per the philosopher Husserl.

As intentional objects, moreover, they are to consciousness as the field of vision is to the eye. "There can be no field of vision without the eye, and yet the two remain distinct," McBrien writes of Husserl's insights (McBrien 118). "For the same reason there can be no reality without consciousness. The task of phenomenology is to describe the various regions of reality in the way they appear to consciousness, and to show what activity consciousness must carry out to allow such regions of reality to appear."

So it occurs to me that a human soul could be thought of as one of the countless "intentional objects" of God's consciousness. We assume that God has a mind and a will, after all, implying that he is possessed of some sort of consciousness. Suppose a child-to-be appears in God's consciousness — in his "eye" or phenomenological field of vision, as it were — and boom! A soul is born.


What seems to have happened to me, along the way to trying to show that an early-stage fetus is not ensouled until some (apparently nonexistent) "dawn of fetal self-awareness," is that I have managed to begin convincing myself of just the opposite. There is every reason to believe, I now think, that ensoulment occurs at conception, when God "first casts his eye" on the child-to-be.

So I have discovered in the very concepts which I have drawn from phenomenology, in hopes of using them to morally legitimize early-term abortions in Christian eyes, reason to believe I've been wrong, wrong, wrong all along.

It is not a comfortable feeling, I can assure you.