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Religion is by no means a proper subject
of conversation in a mixed company.
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Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4 th Earl
of Chesterfield (1694-1773), letter to his godson, number
112
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Abortion has been practised almost universally since prehistoric
times. The early Churches prohibited it, although there is no
scriptural authority for such a prohibition. Indeed the Bible
indicates that it is not a serious crime to cause an abortion.
For example, if a pregnant woman is struck and suffers a miscarriage
the offender should merely be fined, but if the woman herself
is killed then the offender should die (Exodus 21:22-23). Evidently
God accorded different values to the lives of the foetus and
the mother.
Abortion can be seen as following the same general pattern
as many other social issues, with the Churches arriving in the
conventional order. The liberal Churches have already joined
the freethinkers" camp, and many others have started to
move away from their original position. There is, however, a
twist since the Roman Catholic has made its initial move in
the opposite direction. The Church's traditional teaching,
expounded by St Thomas Aquinas, was that a foetus is provided
with its soul 40 days after conception if it is male and 80
days after conception if it is unlucky enough to be female*.
Before it acquired a soul an embryo was regarded as inanimate
(foetus inanimatus); it only became a foetus animatus,
and thus human, after acquiring a soul. Medieval drawings show
the soul entering a fetus. As Pope Gregory XIII confirmed in
the sixteenth century, it cannot be homicide to kill an embryo
of less than 40 days, because it is not yet human *.
Roman canon law maintained the distinction between a foetus
animatus and a foetus inanimatus until 1869 ,
when it was suddenly abandoned. We do not hear much about it
nowadays. Instead the Roman Catholic Church now claims that
the human soul is implanted at conception, which provides an
argument for banning all abortion. Without this shift the Church
would have no argument for banning abortion before the 40th
day of pregnancy for boys or the 80th day for girls.
The Church's new ideas led to some curious conclusions.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century the Roman Church held
on a number of occasions that a physician must not perform an
abortion to save the life of a pregnant woman who was certain
to die without medical intervention. The question was whether
a non-viable foetus should be delivered early to save the mother's life, or whether mother and foetus should be left to die together
(in the circumstances these were the only options). The Holy
Office with the approval of Pope Leo XIII held that in such
cases both must die. Even in extreme cases, such as an ectopic
pregnancy where the foetus could not possibly survive, the mother
must die rather than undergo a relatively simple operation to
save her life*. This teaching
continued into the late twentieth century, and is only a little
better in the twenty first. In 2009 a Brazilian archbishop excommunicated
everyone involved in aborting two fetuses that doctors agreed
had no chance of survival. A small nine year old girl had been
raped, apparently by her step-father, and become pregnant with
twins. Medical opinion was that her uterus was too small to
carry even one child to term. The Church had tried to stop an
abortion going ahead, and when the attempt failed excommunicated
the girl's mother and doctors. The Vatican agreed with
the archbishop both that the mother and doctors should be excommunicated
and that the father should not be excommunicated — since
the mother's and doctors" crimes were so much more
serious in the eyes of the Church*.
As a consequence of continuing Roman Catholic attitudes to
contraception and abortion, vast numbers of women are driven
to backstreet abortionists, causing many to die unnecessarily.
In South America for example it is estimated that such abortions
cause half of all deaths during pregnancy*.
Since the fall of communism in eastern Europe, the Roman Church
has succeeded in making abortion illegal there. Conservative
Churches in the USA also campaign to have abortion prohibited.
Physicians have been murdered by enthusiastic Christians, who
claim to be doing God's work. Such murders are justified
by traditional Jesuit arguments. Many fellow Christians hail
these murderers as heroes, and physicians in the USA are ever
less willing to risk their lives by carrying out legal abortions
— even when they are medically necessary.
More social issues:
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