Abortion and Ensoulment

Q: Didn’t S. Thomas Aquinas and the Mediaevals sanction Early Term abortion? Were they not lenient and confused?

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MOF: I wouldn’t call it lenient or confused. The world simply didn’t know what we know today. Right up until the invention of the microscope by Leewenhoek [pronounced ‘lay-ven-hook’, meaning ’Lions Corner’ in English – nothing to do with the present topic, just mentioning it] in the late Seventeenth Century, nobody in the world knew what ‘conception’ even WAS. People knew about the male ‘seed’ no doubt since the beginning of the Human Race, but nobody knew about the sperm and the ovum before then.

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{This topic, incidentally, provides an antidote to those who place too much credence on Private Revelations that describe episodes in the life of Christ and the Holy Family. They are something much more subtle than simply DVDs. They should be treated with caution, and taken as subjects for devotion rather than literally factual descriptions. Ven. Mary of Agreda wrote a detailed paragraph about the actual conception of either Mary or Our Lord (I forget which) that is completely and utterly erroneous as to the medical facts – and this was as late as the Sixteenth Century. God had left it up up to our advancing progress in science in this as in other spheres…}

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The Church has never changed in her insistence on the following obvious fact: killing any innocent human being is intrinsically evil and it cannot be employed in any circumstance as a pretext for advancing a perceived, or alleged, Greater Good.

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But a mother does not actually know the moment of ‘conception’ and is not immediately aware that she is With Child. A human being is made of a material body endowed with an immortal soul. The body is produced by the same general process as in the other animals, but the soul is created immediately by God, tailored specifically for that particular body, and united with the body until death – to be reunited at the General Resurrection.

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Even the Pagan Greeks and Romans abhorred abortion as a dreadful crime. Remember, the Hippocratic Oath, sworn by physicians for two and a half thousand years before it was dropped in the Stupid Seventies, specifically required that the physician would never assist a woman in procuring an abortion. But what about three days after conception? They didn’t even know that the infant was there.

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The advance of scientific and medical knowledge pinpoints for us when a new human life actually begins: it is when the DNA from the sperm and the ovum unite. From that time a new individual, different from the flesh of the mother, and with a new and unique combination of DNA, has come into being. ‘Faith inspiring Reason’ tells us that this would be the moment when God joins the Spirit to the body: the ‘ensoulment’. C.f. Genesis: God made man from the dust of the earth and ‘breathed’ into his nostrils the breath/spirit [same word in Hebrew] of life: and Adam became a living soul.

Since the spirit is not part of the Material Order, we have no direct way of knowing when the spirit has united with the body. A moment’s reflection, however, will tell us that, from the moment of conception until the moment of physical death, there is a seamless continuity. Any other, later, moment for conception must be arbitrary. We are not entitled, in the Twenty-first Century, to presume that the ‘ensoulment’ comes at any time later than conception.

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The Ancients and the Mediaevals, on the other hand, knew nothing of this. Since a living body was seen to move and a dead one not to move, the general opinion was that ‘ensoulment’ had occurred when the unborn child began to move. Before that, the body was ‘in preparation’ and developing until it was ready for the ensoulment. That being so, removing it was not removing a human being, but removing one of the building blocks of what might in the future be a human being.

Notice that this is the very same line of argument why it is licit to destroy sperm, or ova in a diseased ovary, that are not able to participate in conception.

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Mocking atheists often claim that we are destroying human life when sperm or ova are allowed to die, and so our arguments are illogical. The reply is that these are mere building blocks: they are not yet human.

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Thus I maintain that it is grossly unfair and anachronistic to charge the Mediaevals, and S. Thomas Aquinas, with supporting Early-term abortion. S. Thomas was the eminent leader of the Catholic movement in showing how Faith and Reason are complementary, and not opposed. I for one find the calm logic of his writings to be truly inspiring. If he had been given access to modern medical knowledge, there is not the slightest doubt that he would have declared the ‘ensoulment’ to occur at conception: the uniting of a spermatozoon with an ovum. Naturally he is now safely dead these last seven hundred years, and we cannot dig him up and question him, but I assert that to judge his conclusions, based on the knowledge of his own time, on the basis of the medical knowledge we have now, is a self-evident solecism. This accusation is made mostly by pro-abortionists who, if they were thinking clearly, would not be falling for the false pro-abortion arguments in the first place.