Catholic Church's changing position on abortion
Saint Thomas Aquinas leapt to mind-and therein crept the irony.
What does a thirteenth-century saint have to do with contemporary temporary debates over abortion? O ye of little faith: we need look no further than the controversial Supreme Court case of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. The Webster case, you recall, questioned the constitutionality of certain statutes regulating abortions in Missouri. The restrictions upon abortions (for example, public facilities may not be used for abortions even if no public funds are spent) were upheld by a five-to-four Supreme Court vote. Media coverage of the dissenting votes focused around Justice Harry Blackmun's cryptic "I fear for the future" sermon. But the key passage in the Missouri law was quietly and persistently targeted by Justice John Paul Stevens. The crucial passage-actually contained in the preamble of the Missouri statute-set forth "findings" which stated that the life of each human being "begins at conception" and that "unborn children have protectable interests in life, health, and well-being." In other words, zygotes are people too.
Justice Stevens argued that the Missouri "findings" were unconstitutional, and he appealed to a remarkable (yet little noticed) argument. At first, his reasoning seems rather academic-indeed, this is undoubtedly why the media centered on Blackmun's more dramatic comments. Had we given Stevens' "illustrational" argument closer examination, however, we would have found it to expose the irony lurking just beneath the surface of pro-life ideology. And guess who Stevens appeals to in his subtle dissent? Why, Saint Thomas Aquinas, of course.
The irony, quite simply, is this: how many clinic-blocking, doctor-harassing, "pro-life" Roman Catholics know that the entire history of their church denies that the zygote is a person? Since history can be so painfully embarrassing, I suppose we should all be thankful for that most soothing of afflictions, the short memory.
The current official position of the Catholic church is published in the 1987 Vatican-issued Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation. In the Instruction, it is stated that "every human being" has a "right to life and physical integrity from the moment of conception until death. . . ." Now contrary to most writers and readers of abortion-related discourse, I am not going to line up on either side of this insoluble question (sorry to disappoint the simple-minded dichotomy purveyors). In fact, to leap in at this point, boldly asserting or denying the personhood of the zygote and then weighing that conviction against the woman's personal rights, is precisely the move that has consistently clouded the clear argument of thinkers like Justice Stevens. What I wish to point out, as Stevens subtly attempts to do, is that the official position of the church-from the church's very conception up until Pope Pius IX's 1869 decree-held that the fetus did not become a person until late in the course of gestation. And this tradition (lasting almost two millennia) of church "findings" should give the modern Catholic some pause over the "eternal veracity" of their current findings.
Ask almost any Roman Catholic if the saints believed in personhood at conception, and they will scoff, "Of course." But they would be wrong.
I wish to focus primarily on
Saint Thomas, but even earlier church fathers held that "personhood" developed late in the pregnancy. Saint Augustine and Saint Jerome, for example, both believed that
destruction of a fetus could not be considered homicide until the fetus had fully formed. Prior to this "full formation," the fetus held no greater moral significance than an irrational animal. That is not to say that the fetus held no moral status, for all living things, according to the faithful, are products of God's handiwork and consequently deserving of reverential respect. But this line of thinking (which Ronald Dworkin, in his new book Life's Dominion, finds more intelligible than other abortion-related arguments must be understood as quite different from the "personhood argument." It is different because the criteria for moral respect widens radically from the sanctity of "persons" to the sanctity of "life." Moreover, such a broadening of the criteria for moral respect opens the door too widely for the pious believer, who must now sin nightly as he devours his sacred sirloin.
In dredging up the uncomfortable past creeds of Augustine, Jerome, and Aquinas, I am not suggesting that changes in dogma automatically manifest church fallibility. Rather, to expose the irony - indeed, the contradiction - in church doctrines is a crucial first premise in a wider and more important argument about the relation between church and state. It is for this reason that we must visit the embarrassing saint.
Thomas Aquinas has been the official Catholic theologian for the past 600 years. Aquinas was given the thankless job of making the potentially heretical ideas, of Aristotle (then only newly discovered by European intellectuals) consistent with church doctrine. Anyone who doubts his current influence on Christianity need only visit a Catholic college campus, where the mandatory core-curriculum is drenched in Thomistic ideas, or simply ask any priest to recite one of Aquinas' proofs for the existence of God (he will no doubt be able to recite five). The pope himself, in his October 1993 encyclical, cites Aquinas no less than six times.
In the Thomist-Aristotelian tradition,
it is the faculty of "reason" that distinguishes humans from all other animals. Reason, then, is the defining essence of what it means to be a human person.
Aquinas draws out this principle to its conclusion when he observes that, if the "bodily and sense faculties" do not develop until the eighth week, then "reason and free will" also do not develop until that time. Consequently, if reason and free will are the defining properties of human persons, then in the first eight weeks of pregnancy no human person per se exists
The "levels" of soul, according to the Thomist position, develop from lower to higher through the course of fetal development. This temporal development follows the basic
embryological law of epigenesis (which Aristotle argued for and which modern biology currently affirms). Epigenesis means that embryological development occurs in a pathway from the less specific to the more specific. In other words, in the chronological order of gestation, I was alive (a nutritious blob) before I was an animal (capable of sensation and self-movement), and I was both these things before I developed into a human being (having the faculty of reason). The more "specific" (species-defining) traits develop last in the order of time. Now all this may sound quite antique in tone, but it is only a different way of stating what current biology asserts. Human capacities develop at different times in the course of embryological growth; the finished product is not all there at the outset. Regarding the powers of soul, Aquinas states that "the more imperfect powers precede the others in the order of generation, for the animal is generated before the man."
Human ensoulment occurs, according to the saint, not at conception but at six or eight weeks. This discrepancy - between classical and contemporary Catholic theories of personhood-development - is enough to make the pope cringe.
The Renaissance church even codified the saint's "findings" into laws at the Council of Trent, stating that an individual would not be committing homicide if he or she aborted a fetus prior to its human ensoulment (six to eight weeks). Justice Stevens makes note of the Trent council in his dissenting Webster opinion and uses this embarrassing chapter of Catholic theology to make the crucial point about the separation of church and state.
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