Catholic identity and the abortion debate.

A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion Daniel A. Dombrowski & Robert Deltete (University of Illinois Press, 2000, 158pp)

WHEN POPE JOHN XXIII opened the second Vatican Council in 1962 he was seeking renewal of his ancient church, hoping that like the renovation of a historic building, the process would remove unnecessary accretions and disfiguring ornaments, returning the edifice to a condition of pristine beauty. But such expectations await the mercy or cruelty of circumstances and, from the vantage point of a new century, it is clear that the process of renewal has had surprising, confusing and often ambiguous consequences. The renovations have presented the outside world with a curious spectacle and left the inhabitants disoriented and unsure of their location.

One of the most significant effects has been the erosion of a long-standing Catholic identity. There was a time, not so long ago really, when people were agreed upon the certainties that characterized the typical Catholic. Such typical Catholics confidently believed that their church was the one, true road to salvation, that the pope was the fount of doctrine and discipline, that he was (in certain circumstances) infallible, that women could never be priests, that a married clergy was something only Protestants indulged, that contraceptive sex was mortally sinful, and that abortion was a dreadful wrong because the fetus, from the moment of conception, was an innocent human being. The list is not exhaustive: there were, for instance, matters of devotion, such as that to the Virgin Mary, that were characteristically (though not exclusively) Catholic, and there were various doctrines such as the Immaculate Conception associated with those matters.

Of course, there were many perfectly serious "non-typical" Catholics who were unpersuaded of one or more of these certainties, just as there had been Catholics in every age who belonged to "the loyal opposition" on such standard certainties as the legitimacy of torturing and executing heretics or the permissibility of slavery. There were also other certainties in the fairly recent past, such as the prohibition of vernacular mass and the ban on eating meat on Fridays that were perhaps equally definitive of identity at the time, but generally understood to be ephemeral because they were matters of church discipline that could and did change. The status of an unmarried clergy is surely in the same disciplinary boat, though church authority holds inflexibly to it with a determination that defies logic.

Such is the identity crisis generated by the events around Vatican II that virtually none of these certainties now have general acceptance. The proud boast that "outside the church there is no salvation" is now an embarrassment, though this was a central and commonplace teaching for centuries. Moreover, few (beyond perhaps a small Vatican coterie) even harbor this thought secretly. The prohibition on contraception has not been formally abandoned, but it is no longer seriously taught or preached and it is hardly obeyed by any of the laity. Nor do the vast majority of the disobedient, or their pastors, see their behavior as in any way sinful. Many still believe in papal authority and infallibility, but papal authority in most moral matters is effectively a dead letter with the laity, while infallibility is highly contentious as to meaning and truth. Marian devotion has dramatically declined in many parts of the Catholic world, and the impact of key Marian doctrines is mostly insignificant. But one item has remained rock solid--the rejection of abortion and the belief that the destruction of even the very early fetus is the killing of a human being (or, as some would more technically have it, a person).

OF COURSE, THIS CONVICTION is not restricted to Catholics. It has become a centerpiece of fundamentalist Protestant Christianity, especially in the United States, and there are even some non-believers who hold a similar position. Nonetheless, one gets the impression that Catholics who disagree markedly on all sorts of other religious and moral questions breathe a sigh of relief that they can at least agree on this. This collective sigh is surely emitted as a mark of common identity. The shared feeling is that here diversity can unite in the firm conviction that reason, faith, compassion and tradition speak together on this one certainty.

Yet there are many curious aspects to this consensus. One is, of course, that Catholic women have proportionately as many abortions as any other group in their communities. Another is that the current Catholic orthodoxy on this issue is relatively new. A recent book by two American Catholic philosophers, Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert Deltete, provides a timely reminder of this. In A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion, the authors point out that not only were there striking differences among many of the Fathers, but the great theologians of the medieval and early medieval period, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, did not propound the view that is now standard. They thought there was a marked difference between the early and late stages of fetal life, and the confidence of the contemporary view of the early fetus as "a human person" would surely have struck them as unfounded. Augustine refers to the early fetus in vegetative terms and Aquinas held that "ensoulment" could not occur in the early processes of gestation when a merely vegetative and then animal soul were involved. It required a later divine intervention to provide the developing living matter with a rational human soul. In fact, in an early work, his commentary on Peter Lombard's Book of Sentences, Aquinas places the crucial point at 40 days for a male and 90 days for a female. Making due allowance for equality of the sexes, this would plausibly indicate something like the end of the first trimester. Augustine displays less certainty about ensoulment, speculating at one point that it might occur at the 46th day and elsewhere expressing a degree of agnosticism. But his most considered judgment on the immorality of early abortion condemns it on the grounds of its connection with sexual license. He does not call it murder but married adultery. Aquinas likewise considers early abortion in the context of sexual perversity. Their outlook was determinative of the church's standard teaching until the 17th century.

The usual response to this intellectual history by the church's moral majority (when they don't ignore it altogether) is to point out that Augustine and Thomas were operating with outdated science. Modern science places, or puts theologians in a position to place, ensoulment at the beginning of fetal life and hence to treat early abortion as a form of murder. But there are many problems with this response, not the least of which is that most contemporary scientists in the relevant areas, such as embryology or genetics, are distinctly unimpressed with this interpretation of their work. Of course, they may be wrong, but it is significant that the church's shift away from the Thomistic/ Augustinian positions began with confusions generated by new scientific developments. As Dombrowski and Deltete point out, the invention of the microscope and some misobservations made with it led scientists in the 17th century to the profoundly mistaken theory of "preformationism" whereby it was supposed that every organism starts off with all its parts already formed. The theories of procreation known as ovism and homunculism gave different spins to this outlook in projecting the idea that tiny humans were somehow wholly present in the female egg or in the male sperm.

THESE THEORIES ARE NOW MERELY historical curiosities, though, at the time, they constituted advances in the understanding of generation. But as scientists moved on, theologians and religious apologists remained fixated in a preformationist mindset. Dombrowski and Deltete give an interesting and persuasive sketch of the development of this fixation, and in doing so draw upon the work of such theologians as Messenger and de Dorlodot and, more recently, Shannon and Wolter. They chart the emergence of an ontological view of the immorality of early abortion (whereby the fetus is a human person from the moment of conception) and contrast it with the perversity view that dominated earlier thinking about the matter. The perversity view is the position (mentioned above) that early abortion exhibits the wrong attitude to sexual intercourse. It is connected with the idea, most explicit in Augustine, that procreative intent is the only thing that can justify sexual intercourse (and then only within the confines of marriage). More broadly, it is associated with the profound suspicion of sexual pleasure and sexual desire that has marked official Catholic Christianity from its earliest years. This was relaxed somewhat in the 20th century so that sex solely for mutual pleasure (between married couples) is now officially approved in certain circumstances--a view that would have struck Augustine as immoral. Indeed, the English Catholic philosopher, Peter Geach, a strong opponent of contraception, was speaking in authentic, if extravagant, Augustinian tones when he said, `Apart from the good of marriage that redeems it, sex is poison.' (1)

The tangled historical record does not prove that the present orthodoxy is wrong; but if it is wrong or dubious on other grounds, it helps explain how church authority got it wrong, and reduces the appeal of the argument from tradition. But is the present view wrong? Dombrowski and Deltete do not argue outright that it is wrong, only that it is sufficiently uncertain to allow that other views on abortion, more favorable to its moral legitimacy, should form part of a pluralistic outlook within the church. They are not the first Catholics to challenge the ruling consensus. On the local scene, Fr Norman Ford, the Director of the Caroline Chisholm Centre for Health Ethics in Melbourne, has argued in his book When Did I Begin? that the human person does not begin at conception, but roughly two weeks later at segmentation (or the "primitive streak" stage) after which there is no longer any possibility of identical twinning. (2) Others have highlighted the same historical story that the American philosophers have told, and several other Catholic intellectuals--notably Daniel Maguire, Joseph Donceel SJ, Bernard Haring, and Garry Wills--have questioned the validity of the arguments by which the consensus is commonly supported.

In an attempt to dispel the initial implausibility of the tiny person thesis, the antiabortion case often deploys the idea of potentiality. The argument is that a certain point in embryonic or fetal development (preferably conception) marks the decisive presence of the potential for being a fully functioning human person. Destroying this potential is tantamount to killing that individual human being. But this maneuver has many problems. For one thing, it makes Norman Ford's argument difficult for the theological conservatives to handle. Ford is no radical on these matters, and opposes very early abortion on the grounds that it destroys potential human life, but he argues that the embryo is not an individual human being (or person) until the appearance of the primitive streak at roughly two weeks after fertilization. Prior to this we cannot have an individual human being because too many things are indeterminate, including whether the entity will be one being or more--twinning can still occur. On this view, there would seem to be a dramatic difference in status after two weeks so that the morning-after pill could no longer be regarded as a person-destroyer, even if it destroyed something that had the potential to become a human individual.

But even after the primitive streak stage, the question of potentiality is very ambiguous. We must be wary of the traps that can beset the use of adjectives like "potential." "Potential" does not function in the way many standard adjectives do. A happy dog is of course a dog, as a snappy tie is a tie, or a sad face a face. But just as a decoy duck is emphatically not a duck, and an imaginary win is not a victory at all, so a potential champion is not yet a champion of any sort. Hence the allegation that abortion kills a potential baby or potential person does not, even if true, amount to the charge of killing a baby or a person. Even if segmentation is an important step on the way to being a person, in that a more individual pathway for human development is in place, this does not license the conclusion that the implanted embryo is now a human being on a par with a newborn baby or late-term fetus. (I thank Arthur Kuflik for helpful discussion of this point.) None of this is to deny, of course, that the potentiality of an entity sometimes provides a reason for according it value or respect.

Similar things can be said about the idea that the embryo and early fetus have already been "programmed" for a distinctive human life. Popular genetics has much to answer for, most notably the quasi-magical notion that an individual's genes dominate their choices and destiny--"we are our genes!" Religious people are inclined to resist genetic determinism and various forms of genetic reductionism, and I am sure that they are right to do so. This makes it all the more surprising that they fasten on to fanciful elaborations of such ideas as "genetic code" and "genetic programming" for their own purposes. So they leap from the workaday significance of these concepts to dramatic conclusions about the presence of a small human being or person. This leap implies the equivalence of the soul or "individual human substance" to the chemical make-up of remarkable but primitive cellular life.

MUCH AS THE PERSONHOOD OF the fetus from conception is proclaimed by the antiabortionists, it is hard to believe that it is seriously held in their hearts. The test of genuine belief is surely the commitment to its obvious consequences. Yet there are many ways in which these consequences are ignored or avoided. If the early fetus is a person, then we would expect its death in miscarriage or abortion to elicit some concern for burial rites, but Catholic authorities have never required or urged anything of the sort. (Interestingly, Canon Law 871 states that "aborted fetuses, if they are alive, are to be baptized, in so far as this is possible." But pastoral practice is hardly in enthusiastic accord with this precept.) In fact, a very high percentage of normally fertilized human eggs are destroyed by natural processes, but no one treats this as a natural disaster akin to an earthquake. Nor does anyone seriously suggest some sort of baptism for stored embryos, created by the new birth technologies, when they are about to perish or be destroyed (allowed to die). Similarly, most antiabortionists make an exception to the ban on killing the early fetus in cases of grave danger to the mother's life, and some make an exception in cases of rape or incest. Yet if these fetuses are persons or human beings in any morally significant sense, they are clearly innocent of the crime or risk that allows their death. This is so whether we treat "innocence" as meaning "without moral fault" or give it the meaning common in "just war" theory of "not doing harm." Some theologians adopt this second interpretation and allow the killing of a fetus whose presence is endangering the mother's life because it is (or is like) an "unjust aggressor." But the analogy with war is too remote: soldiers who try to kill you may be morally innocent (because they are ill-informed or coerced) but they are still trying to kill you and that is what licenses your lethal self-defense. The fetus has no such intent. (Contemporary philosophers would treat the life-endangering fetus in the category of "innocent threat" and many would hold it licit to kill an innocent threat to one's life. But it is doubtful that traditional Catholic moral theology can follow this path.) Consistency for the "early fetus as person" view can be achieved by denying the permissibility of early abortion in such cases, but it is consistency achieved at the cost of compassion and common sense.

The implausibility of the ontological view suggests a deeper philosophical problem since the idea that the embryo or early fetus is already a human being with the same moral standing as other humans seems to fly in the face of the Thomistic tradition's unitary approach to the reality of human persons. Following Aristotle, Aquinas sees the human soul as the form of the human body. Dualistic theories that view the human soul or mind as a distinct complete substance from the body may be able to envisage a human soul connected to anything at all, a stone or a frog perhaps. But for Thomas there is surely something absurd about a rational soul animating a tiny speck that does not have organs or sensation even though it has some prospect of eventually developing them. (3) It is surely more plausible to place the moral significance of the developing human organism at the stage where the physical structures underlying sensation and thought are at least seriously in place. Dombrowski and Deltete argue that this happens only towards the end of the second trimester. There is clearly room for debate about these matters but the standard Catholic view blocks this debate with its commitment to "immediate hominization" (as Donceel calls it).

Dombrowski and Deltete try to support their position by recourse to "process metaphysics" and a philosophical critique of strict identity involving a theory of "temporal asymmetry." The average lay reader will find most of this merely mysterious and distracting, and I must say, as a professional philosopher, that a good deal of it struck me as philosophically unpersuasive and dubiously necessary for the case they want to make. The notion of identity at work in common uses of "the same person" is not univocal; in one sense I am clearly the same person as the 12-year-old boy in the photograph preserved in my parents' photo album, but I can also say that, in a different sense, I am now another person altogether. But we do not need to unravel these issues to be clear that there is no sense in which any adult is the same person as the fertilized egg that he or she grew out of.

PERHAPS BECAUSE THE TWO authors themselves disagree on some fundamentals, there is a certain tension in their book between different reasons for respecting the life of the late-stage fetus. The official reason is that the late-stage fetus is conscious and capable of experiencing pain. This puts the case for respecting its "right to life" on a par with respecting the right to life of various animals. Sometimes, however, they seem to place more weight on the combination of this actual sentience with the adequate development of the cerebral cortex to the point where it can be said that "real capacity" (p72) for rational thought is now instantiated. In any event, however the authors should be interpreted, there is a real issue (or several real issues) here. If sentience is all that is at issue, there will be good reasons for not killing the late fetus but these will only be as strong as the reasons for not killing a dog. No doubt we should be more respectful of animal life, but even many dog-lovers might hesitate to accept this parity. This suggests that when development has reached the stage of "real (though unexercised) capacity" for rationality there is room for an argument giving a stronger, though perhaps not absolute, right to life to the late fetus. Once we can think of the being in the womb not merely as an entity with a certain potential, but as an actual though immature member of the human community, then we should treat it as more significant (even) than the household pets. If this is "speciesism," then so be it. (4)

Then there is the question of what respect, if any, is due to the fetus in the early stages of its progress to being a human person, an issue that receives insufficient attention in Dombrowski and Deltete's book. Even if we reject the minuscule person story, this may not mean that we can treat the destruction of the early embryo as a matter of moral indifference. The very early stages of pregnancy may deserve respect for reasons that do not commit us to anything like the metaphysics of "immediate hominization." We can recognize that there is something remarkable in the processes of fertilization and early fetal development (at least at and after the stage of segmentation), something to evoke attitudes of wonder and even a certain reverence, without falling into the trap of "immediate hominisation." Such attitudes might well deploy the notion of potentiality (without falling into the traps mentioned earlier) and might well lead to a certain recoiling from the idea that abortion is a perfectly neutral moral practice. They might also support a concern that abortion not become more widespread, and a sense of regret whenever it becomes necessary.

In allowing room for such attitudes, I do not mean to suggest that they are entirely unproblematic. In particular, there are two sorts of problem that they face. The first concerns the weight to be given to this respect. Some conservative moralists, including many Catholics, view it as overwhelming. Invoking talk of the "gift" of life, they use this idea to rule out any research on the early embryo that is likely or certain to be destructive, including research that promises major medical breakthroughs such as the procuring of stem cells. I doubt that the respect in question can be made to do so much work. In particular, where infertility clinics have "spare" embryos that are to be destroyed anyway, the serious prospect of curing disease or relieving great suffering by carefully supervised, though destructive, research seems to me clearly to outweigh the demands of respect.

The second problem concerns the question of whether such attitudes are distinctively religious, in some broad sense of the term, as Ronald Dworkin has argued, and whether, if so, they should form no part of law and public policy in pluralist democracies. These questions are related to the way we should understand political liberalism, and are too complex to discuss further here, although the issue is canvassed by Dombrowski and Deltete in their chapter on liberalism. This chapter is not particularly deep or novel philosophically, but it avoids many of the errors and misunderstandings about contemporary liberal thinking that are unfortunately far too common among Catholic and other Christian commentators. They also have an interesting chapter propounding a new Catholic approach to sexual ethics, but reasons of space also preclude a discussion of this here.

IF WE ABANDON OR MODIFY THE current orthodoxy on abortion, what happens then to the sense of Catholic identity and solidarity that has been both supported and symbolized by it? There is no doubt that this identity will be further eroded, but is that such a bad thing? The sense of identity has an important psychological and moral role to play in human life, but its role is not always positive. There are good and bad identities and the fashion for preserving identities at all costs is one of the more ambiguous and sometimes dangerous fads of contemporary life. Nazi politicians and their supporters had a strong sense of identity but they would have been better off without it, and similar things can be said of many damaging, though less dreadful, identities. The Catholic identity referred to at the beginning of this article was both rigid and highly oppositional. It set Catholics proudly apart from other Christians and other religious people and signaled that their characteristic beliefs and practices were unchanging, indeed unchangeable. But this separation and inflexibility may be precisely what needs to be abandoned. Catholics should absorb the genuine insights, values and discoveries of other religious and secular traditions without viewing them as mere optional add-ons to the guaranteed "deposit of faith." They should be particularly wary of treating a mere attachment to social, moral and political conservatism as if it constituted attachment to the person and message of Christ. (The same goes of course for radicalism.) The record of church authority in recent centuries on such crucial issues as slavery, separation of church and state, freedom of conscience, and the status of women illustrates the damaging effects of this ingrained resistance to change.

In the light of this resistance, the standard line on abortion has a significance beyond a concern for the status of the unborn. The standard line has led, for instance, to official Catholic opposition to in-vitro fertilisation and most other forms of artificial birth technology. It is an important element in the campaign against research using stem cells (which can only at present be got by destroying embryos), even though this holds out hope for the treatment of major diseases. (5) It is connected to the rejection of all forms of human cloning. Some of the issues in this area are legitimate causes for public concern and debate both with regard to their ethical and health aspects. The fact that a project is aimed at promoting human good does not immediately guarantee that it has no moral flaws. Nonetheless, a thread that runs through the church's comprehensive oppositional stance is a disturbing lack of compassion for human misery and suffering. One prominent church spokesman, rejecting recently the idea of genetic testing of embryos for tendencies to cancer used the "what next?" device to suggest that scientists might next want to reject the implantation of embryos that had a tendency to asthma. The spokesman no doubt did not intend this as a gratuitous slight to those who suffer from this terrible disease, but this sort of insensitivity emerges all too readily in the polemical context of the abortion debate. A church known for compassion, humility and openness is more likely to achieve a deep and impressive identity than one marked by a passion for stringent metaphysical dogmatism in the face of complexity and suffering.

NOTES

(1) Peter Geach, The Virtues: The Stanton Lectures 1973-4, Cambridge University Press, 1977, p147.

(2) Norman M. Ford, When Did I Begin? Conception of the Human Individual in History, Philosophy and Science, Cambridge University Press, 1988.

(3) When Thomas speaks of `ensoulment' he does not--or should not--mean that an ethereal substance is injected by God into the foetus, but rather that a new stage in foetal development has emerged in which the organism now has rational capacities (if not abilities) and hence a new moral status. He also thinks this requires a special act of God, but this is another matter.

(4) Lest this be thought too dismissive of an important line of moral critique, I would refer the reader to my more developed critique of Peter Singer's view on speciesism in `Morality and Species', Res Publica, vol. 8, no. 2, 1999. Copies can be obtained from the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne (email:irena@ unimelb.edu.au).

(5) Recent scientific developments suggest that it may become feasible to get healthy stem cells from living adult humans without damaging the adults. Were this possible it would bypass the problem of embryo status.

First published in Eureka Street, January-February 2002, pp33-37

PROFESSOR TONY COADY is an ARC Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne.