For two millennia, the communities organizing themselves around Christ have shared the conviction that life is sacred at every stage of development.
For two millennia, the communities organizing themselves around Christ have shared the conviction that life is sacred at every stage of development.
T he Dobbs decision has provided yet another opportunity for commentators deeply unfamiliar with Catholic theology to distort the church’s teaching on abortion. The church, we are told at CNN, the New Yorker, and widely read outlets, only recently condemned abortion. It’s crucial to set the record straight.
First, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable.” The Didache, written by Jewish Christians just decades after Jesus’s death, condemned abortion and infanticide. The communities organizing themselves around Christ shared the conviction that life is sacred at every stage of development. That conviction has remained constant over two millennia.
Second, we know that constancy of that teaching exists despite disagreement among theologians about “ensoulment” (that is the moment when the developing fetus is understood to receive its rational soul). Long before Catholic theologians started talking about human dignity and “the person” and long before advances in embryological science, they prohibited early termination of pregnancy as an illicit action taken against developing innocent life.
It’s true that Catholic theologians have argued about quickening and “delayed hominization.” For instance, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Alphonsus Liguori relied on the (to us) primitive science of their day, which led them to conclude that what they regarded as “pre-hominization” abortions were not technically homicidal, though nonetheless still illicit.
These theological disagreements are seized on by supporters of abortion to suggest a diversity of opinion among Catholic theologians regarding the prohibition of abortion. But the disagreements show no such thing. Instead, they reveal that disagreement about the moment of ensoulment never undermined the consensus to defend life in the womb. As the church’s “Declaration on Procured Abortions” (1974) puts it: “It was never denied at that time that procured abortion, even during the first days, was an objectively grave fault. This condemnation was in fact unanimous.”
Contemporary science confirms this unanimous judgment of Catholic theologians and philosophers. From the moment of conception, a unique human being is present: composed of the contributions from both the father and the mother, this new being is also neither of them. The zygote (the cell formed by the union of an ovum and a sperm) is a new life, a new human being. Science actually provides us with greater grounds for respecting the earliest stages of human life than were available to the earlier theologians — who, to repeat, nonetheless prohibited intervention in the development of the human being. We now know what they did not: From the moment of conception, a discrete human being is present.
The church’s commitment to innocent human life has never wavered. Significantly, it’s not a teaching of the faith aimed just at Catholics: It’s basic morality that applies to everyone. As human beings we should never intend to harm or kill the innocent. We all understand that. The protection of life in the womb is the same protection that extends to innocent life at all stages and regardless of condition. Euthanasia and eugenics directed at the disabled are therefore prohibited by the same moral law that prohibits abortion.
Unfortunately, human beings are notoriously bad at identifying others as human beings with equal rights. We often favor our own, those who look and behave like us, and those who by blood or citizenship are related to us. We often disadvantage those who do not and deploy the language of morality and law to justify our inhumane treatment of these others.
What’s happening now is that “pro-choice” supporters of the inhumane treatment of the unborn are using instances of theological speculation to advance inaccurate claims about the church’s commitment to life. Why are these supporters of abortion suddenly so obsessed with this arcane subject of ensoulment? Because they want to show apparent inconsistency in Catholic teaching, in an attempt to undermine one of the most authoritative moral voices on the planet.
These articles are part of a campaign employed to suggest that Catholics don’t really care about human beings developing in utero. These tactics are of the same sort as those alleging that Catholics care only about life in utero (and don’t care about children once they’re born, or seek only to control women). These tactics perpetuate falsehoods. It’s time for Catholics to say we’ve had enough. People who support abortion are perfectly entitled to craft their own arguments in favor of their position. What they’re not entitled to do is to distort the record in an effort to convince the general public — and, one suspects, especially Catholic members of the public — that the church once held a view of abortion that, in reality, it has always condemned as repugnant. The last thing we need right now is fake history. Falsehoods never help anyone.