Take On the Talking Heads
Catholics and Abortion
by Garry Wills
May 11, 2000 -- In the public debate over the morality of abortion, one thing is usually assumed as certain -- that the Catholic Church has always opposed abortion at every stage of the fetus. In a sense, that is true, but the sense is a misleading one. Two Catholic philosophers have just published a scholarly investigation of this subject, published by the University of Illinois Press -- "A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion," by Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert Deltete.
They establish that through most of its history, Catholic moral theologians condemned abortion on grounds Catholics no longer find convincing. On the other hand, the argument now normally given as the Catholic reason for opposing abortion -- that life begins at conception -- was not held by the most authoritative theologians of the church, beginning with the powerful names of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.
Augustine did not know whether fetuses that miscarried were "ensouled" -- he said there was no way to establish that. They were not treated as if they were (they were not, for instance, baptized or given Christian burial, and still aren't, even in Catholic hospitals).
Whether the fetus was a person was irrelevant to Augustine's discussion of abortion, which he condemned on grounds that would not be affected even if the fetus were not a "human life" -- because, in his view, any use of sex (even inside marriage) was evil if it was not designed specifically and entirely to achieve procreation. Abortion defeats that purpose. The point is not what happens to the fetus, but what happens to the souls of the consenting partners. This made Augustine condemn sex during sterile periods, after menopause, by anyone who is impotent, or with any form of contraceptive. For him, the so-called "rhythm method," now sanctioned by the Vatican, was immoral for the same reason that abortion is immoral.
In short, Augustine opposed abortion for the reason the Vatican opposes contraceptives -- and most Catholics, polls show, no longer agree with the condemnation of contraceptives, any more than they agree with the condemnation of sex during sterile periods or after menopause. The Vatican has taken a half-Augustinian stance where only an all-or-nothing acceptance of his views is logical. If sex is allowable for any other reasons but conception, then Augustine's argument against abortion falls.
Well, in that case, one must ask the question that Augustine said was unanswerable. What is the status of the fetus in its early stages? Here St. Thomas gave a firm answer. Following Aristotle, he said there are progressive "ensoulments" of the fetus -- first with a vegetative life, then with an animal life. Only as the fetus became fully formed was the human soul infused. This accords with the suggestion of Bernard Haring, the eminent Catholic ethicist, that something like the evolution of the human species is re-enacted by the individual in the womb.
And it accords with the findings of modern science, carefully summarized by the two authors -- that a truly human response is not possible until the cerebral cortex is capable of coordinating the various responses of the fetus's parts. Up to that point -- to quote a useful metaphor in the book -- "a pile of wires and switches is not an electrical circuit, and a collection of nerve cells is not a functioning brain."
As it happens, the cerebral cortex is formed at just that point -- between the sixth and seventh months -- when viability was fixed by Roe v. Wade (end of the second trimester). Dombrowski and Deltete say this corresponds to what Thomas and others taught right up to the 17th century, when Catholics began accepting the view that the soul is a kind of complete person to be popped into a fertilized egg, like an angel in a machine.
I have given just a brief summary of this book's starting argument. The authors follow it up with a consideration of Catholic social teaching and Catholic political concepts that, they believe, are in conformity with the view of abortion presented here. The book is calmly reasoned, carefully explained, and terribly important.
Copyright © 2000 Universal Press Syndicate
