Los Angeles Times, November
4, 2007
Abortion
isn't a religious issue
Evangelicals are adamant,
but religion really has nothing to say about the issue.
By Garry Wills
What makes opposition
to abortion the issue it is for each of the GOP presidential candidates
is the fact that it is the ultimate "wedge issue" --
it is nonnegotiable. The right-to-life people hold that it is
as strong a point of religion as any can be. It is religious because
the Sixth Commandment (or the Fifth by Catholic count) says, "Thou
shalt not kill." For evangelical Christians, in general,
abortion is murder. That is why what others think, what polls
say, what looks practical does not matter for them. One must oppose
murder, however much rancor or controversy may ensue.
But is abortion murder?
Most people think not. Evangelicals may argue that most people
in Germany thought it was all right to kill Jews. But the parallel
is not valid. Killing Jews was killing persons. It is not demonstrable
that killing fetuses is killing persons. Not even evangelicals
act as if it were. If so, a woman seeking an abortion would be
the most culpable person. She is killing her own child. But the
evangelical community does not call for her execution.
About 10% of evangelicals,
according to polls, allow for abortion in the case of rape or
incest. But the circumstances of conception should not change
the nature of the thing conceived. If it is a human person, killing
it is punishing it for something it had nothing to do with. We
do not kill people because they had a criminal parent.
Nor did the Catholic
Church treat abortion as murder in the past. If it had, late-term
abortions and miscarriages would have called for treatment of
the well-formed fetus as a person, which would require baptism
and a Christian burial. That was never the practice. And no wonder.
The subject of abortion is not scriptural. For those who make
it so central to religion, this seems an odd omission. Abortion
is not treated in the Ten Commandments -- or anywhere in Jewish
Scripture. It is not treated in the Sermon on the Mount -- or
anywhere in the New Testament. It is not treated in the early
creeds. It is not treated in the early ecumenical councils.
Lacking scriptural
guidance, St. Thomas Aquinas worked from Aristotle's view of the
different kinds of animation -- the nutritive (vegetable) soul,
the sensing (animal) soul and the intellectual soul. Some people
used Aristotle to say that humans therefore have three souls.
Others said that the intellectual soul is created by human semen.
Aquinas denied both
positions. He said that a material cause (semen) cannot cause
a spiritual product. The intellectual soul (personhood) is directly
created by God "at the end of human generation." This
intellectual soul supplants what had preceded it (nutritive and
sensory animation). So Aquinas denied that personhood arose at
fertilization by the semen. God directly infuses the soul at the
completion of human formation.
Much of the debate
over abortion is based on a misconception -- that it is a religious
issue, that the pro-life advocates are acting out of religious
conviction. It is not a theological matter at all. There is no
theological basis for defending or condemning abortion. Even popes
have said that the question of abortion is a matter of natural
law, to be decided by natural reason. Well, the pope is not the
arbiter of natural law. Natural reason is.
John Henry Newman,
a 19th century Anglican priest who converted to Catholicism, once
wrote that "the pope, who comes of revelation, has no jurisdiction
over nature." The matter must be decided by individual conscience,
not by religious fiat. As Newman said: "I shall drink to
the pope, if you please -- still, to conscience first, and to
the pope afterward."
If we are to decide
the matter of abortion by natural law, that means we must turn
to reason and science, the realm of Enlightened religion. But
that is just what evangelicals want to avoid. Who are the relevant
experts here? They are philosophers, neurobiologists, embryologists.
Evangelicals want to exclude them because most give answers they
do not want to hear. The experts have only secular expertise,
not religious conviction. They, admittedly, do not give one answer
-- they differ among themselves, they are tentative, they qualify.
They do not have the certitude that the religious right accepts
as the sign of truth.
So evangelicals take
shortcuts. They pin everything on being pro-life. But one cannot
be indiscriminately pro-life.
If one claimed, in
the manner of Albert Schweitzer, that all life deserved moral
respect, then plants have rights, and it might turn out that we
would have little if anything to eat. And if one were consistently
pro-life, one would have to show moral respect for paramecia,
insects, tissue excised during a medical operation, cancer cells,
asparagus and so on. Harvesting carrots, on a consistent pro-life
hypothesis, would constitute something of a massacre.
Opponents of abortion
will say that they are defending only human life. It is certainly
true that the fetus is human life. But so is the semen before
it fertilizes; so is the ovum before it is fertilized. They are
both human products, and both are living things. But not even
evangelicals say that the destruction of one or the other would
be murder.
Defenders of the fetus
say that life begins only after the semen fertilizes the egg,
producing an embryo. But, in fact, two-thirds of the embryos produced
this way fail to live on because they do not embed in the womb
wall. Nature is like fertilization clinics -- it produces more
embryos than are actually used. Are all the millions of embryos
that fail to be embedded human persons?
The universal mandate
to preserve "human life" makes no sense. My hair is
human life -- it is not canine hair, and it is living. It grows.
When it grows too long, I have it cut. Is that aborting human
life? The same with my growing human fingernails. An evangelical
might respond that my hair does not have the potential to become
a person. True. But semen has the potential to become a person,
and we do not preserve every bit of semen that is ejaculated but
never fertilizes an egg.
The question is not
whether the fetus is human life but whether it is a human person,
and when it becomes one. Is it when it is capable of thought,
of speech, of recognizing itself as a person, or of assuming the
responsibilities of a person? Is it when it has a functioning
brain? 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.
Not surprisingly, that
is the earliest point of viability, the time when a fetus can
successfully survive outside the womb.
Whether through serendipity
or through some sort of causal connection, it now seems that the
onset of a functioning central nervous system with a functioning
cerebral cortex and the onset of viability occur around the same
time -- the end of the second trimester, a time by which 99% of
all abortions have already occurred.
Opponents of abortion
like to show sonograms of the fetus reacting to stimuli. But all
living cells have electric and automatic reactions. These are
like the reactions of Terri Schiavo when she was in a permanent
vegetative state. Aquinas, following Aristotle, called the early
stage of fetal development vegetative life. The fetus has a face
long before it has a brain. It has animation before it has a command
center to be aware of its movements or to experience any reaction
as pain.
These are difficult
matters, on which qualified people differ. It is not enough to
say that whatever the woman wants should go. She has a responsibility
to consider whether and when she may have a child inside her,
not just a fetus. Certainly by the late stages of her pregnancy,
a child is ready to respond with miraculous celerity to all the
personal interchanges with the mother that show a brain in great
working order.
Given these uncertainties,
who is to make the individual decision to have an abortion? Religious
leaders? They have no special authority in the matter, which is
not subject to theological norms or guidance. The state? Its authority
is given by the people it represents, and the people are divided
on this. Doctors? They too differ. The woman is the one closest
to the decision. Under Roe vs. Wade, no woman is forced to have
an abortion. But those who have decided to have one are able to.
Some objected to Karl
Rove's use of abortion to cement his ecumenical coalition, on
the grounds that this was injecting religion into politics. The
supreme irony is that, properly understood, abortion is not even
a religious issue. But that did not matter to Rove. All he cared
about was that it worked. For a while.
Garry Wills is the
author of numerous books, most recently "Head and Heart:
American Christianities," from which this article is adapted.
Back
to Top
Send
this page to a friend!
