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.

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.

Considering Embryos

As I wrote in a post over in another blog, a new book by Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, nicely reconciles Darwinism with faith. Collins is the physician-geneticist who headed the Human Genome Project, and a committed evangelical Christian to boot, who believes in a God that cares about us and wants to be in fellowship with us. Collins also believes unreservedly in Darwinian evolution. The main point of his book is that the latter can be rather easily reconciled with the former.

Once Collins has made that argument (which I won't go into now) in the course of the book per se, he attaches a lengthy appendix dealing with issues of bioethics from a religious-scientific point of view. Among these issues are abortion, cloning, and research into human stem cells, some of which come from human embryos.

One of the topics he addresses in his discussion of the abortion issue is that of when precisely a feritilized egg cell which begins to divide and form an embryo takes on the status of a human life. From a religious perspective, this transition is usually identified with coming to possess a God-given soul.

Many religious people who oppose abortion outright say that it is at the moment of conception, at the instant when sperm meets egg, that the soul commences to be. From that point on, the embryonic life is fully human. To destroy the embryo on purpose is tantamount to murder. This indeed is, to the best of my understanding, the precise position of my own religious denomination, the Roman Catholic Church.

Collins points out a difficulty with this approach to the issue, though, one which I had never considered before. It is the case of identical twins.

Identical twins arise from a single fertilized egg, also known as a zygote. In the womb of the mother, the zygote begins to divide in the usual way, making an embryo of first two cells, then four, then eight, etc. But now something unusual happens: the embryo itself splits in two. It might be, in a given instance, an embryo of eight cells that turns into two separate embryos of four cells apiece. Those two embryos are just alike; they have the exact same DNA.

The two identical embryos then go on to increase in size, independently one one another, in the usual way. This happens by virtue of further cell divisions. At some point, the cells in each embryo begin to differentiate from one another, so as to form different tissues and organs. (The embryonic stem cells which now come into being play a crucial role in cell differentiation.) The two identical embryos soon become fetuses, and nine months or so after the single sperm from a father met the single egg from a mother, two healthy identical-twin babies are born.

As Collins points out, there was only one moment of conception, but the result has been two human infants, just alike in their DNA, but presumably with two independent souls. If the human soul "arrives" at the moment of conception, then in the identical-twins scenario, when and how does the second soul "arrive" — the one for the "extra" body that belongs to the "second" twin?


A second topic which Collins takes up involves, in its own way, a similar conundrum. In his discussion of stem-cell research, Collins points out a possible way around the ethical problem of obtaining embryonic stem cells only by destryoing embryos.

In the normal course of events, a human embryo in its mother's womb develops in the first four or five days of pregnancy into a blastocyst, a ball of 50-150 cells whose outer layer will form the enclosing placenta and whose inner cells, which consist of the embryonic stem cells or ESCs, will become a fetus. See "Embryonic stem cell" and related articles in Wikipedia for more on the science of embryonic stem cells.

The ESCs are "pluripotent," meaning that they can "develop into each of the more than 200 cell types of the adult body when given sufficient and necessary stimulation for a specific cell type." Adult bodies also make stem cells, but adult stem cells (ASCs) are only "unipotent." Each can generate only one type of organ or tissue.

Pluripotent ESCs accordingly have greater potential, if harvested and manipulated to be used in new therapies for diseases like Alzheimer's, in which cells in victims' bodies have died and need replacement.

The lines of embryonic stem cells currently used in ESC research all originated with embryos produced in fertility clinics. These were "excess" embryos that turned out not to be used in in-vitro fertilization procedures. They would otherwise be discarded. Some of them have been used instead to derive lines of embryonic stem cells, a process which has the side effect of destroying the embryos.

Collins notes that this sort of thing is ethically problematical from the point of view of those who believe the fertilized egg and resulting embryo already has a soul. So he suggests an alternative way to obtain embryonic human stem cells, a derivative of the procedure used in making clones such as Dolly the sheep.


The technique is called "somatic cell nuclear transfer" (SCNT). SCNT involves, as I understand it, removing the nucleus of an egg cell and replacing it with the nucleus of (say) a skin cell from a different donor.

The nucleus of an egg cell contains all the DNA that would normally be contributed by a mother to the eventual zygote that results when her egg is fertilized by a sperm cell from a father. The sperm which fertilizes the egg contains, in its own nucleus, the father's DNA. Each gamete, whether sperm or egg, contains half the number of chromosomes of an ordinary body cell. When sperm and egg meet and unify, a single nucleus results having the full complement of chromosomes.

When an unfertilized egg has its nucleus removed by a scientist and replaced with the nucleus of an ordinary body cell from a male or female donor other than the female that has produced the egg, the resulting cell (given the proper manipulation) is able to start dividing into an embryo. This embryo is in most ways just like an embryo that comes from the customary fertilization of an egg by a sperm ... except, of course, that the embryo will turn into a genetic clone of the donor of the nucleus. It will have no DNA whatsoever from the surrogate mother whose egg cell has been borrowed, and possibly in whose womb the embryo is implanted to be carried to term.

This is a brief summary of the process called somatic cell nuclear transfer or SCNT. Given that "somatic" means "bodily," or "of the body," you can see why the term is used. The nucleus (with its DNA) taken from a cell in the body of a donor organism is transferred to an egg cell from another (necessarily female) organism. The SCNT-derived cell then may develop into a clone of the nucleus donor.

Or, as Collins points out, the embryo which results from SCNT might be used to harvest embryonic stem cells. Instead of implanting it in a womb to be carried to term and given birth to, it can stay in a test tube until its stem cells are harvested; then the remainder of the blastocyst could be discarded. The stem cells thus harvested could well be as valuable to medical research as those which derive from a fertilized egg — because in most ways, the two sources of embryonic stem cells are just alike.

The question is, would an SCNT-derived blastocyst, intended to be used as a source of human stem cells, possess a soul? After all, if those who say the soul appears at the instant of conception are right, then in the case where there is nuclear transfer, but no sperm-egg conception, when and how would the soul appear?


This question is admittedly a tricky one. Presumably, an SCNT-derived human blastocyst could instead be introduced into a woman's womb, where it would actually turn into a baby who is a clone of the donor of the original nucleus. This has not actually been tried in humans, of course, as it has in sheep and other species. There are obvious religious and ethical objections, not to mention the practical and scientific problems of cloned organisms in other species not turning out as robust as might be hoped.

But let us say the practical problems could be solved and the ethical problems ignored. Would the clone-child have a soul? Most of us who believe in souls at all would answer an emphatic yes. After all, the process which turns a single fertilized egg into two identical twins in a mother's womb is a natural form of cloning. Admittedly, it is different in technical detail, but it results in two humans having identical DNA, even though there has been but one single fertilization of an egg by a sperm.


I have just given two cases in which it doesn't make sense to say the human soul "arrives" at the time of conception, when one sperm meets one egg, and only then. Of course, one might respond that God could make a "special delivery" of an "extra" soul when the embryo divides into twins, and that there is likewise a special delivery of a soul from God when a human embryo is derived via SCNT. But this sort of fixing up of the soul-arrival scenario isn't very intuitively satisfying, at least not to me.

And so I now question the whole idea of the soul "arriving." I have a completely different notion of what theologians call "ensoulment." I'll discuss it in a follow-up post, Of the Self and the Soul.