I have examined in The Magisterium's Dilemna: A Test Case1 the sorry tale of a poor girl of nine years of age who was raped by her step-father and how the Magisterium's reactions to it caused scandal among the ordinary people.
In this case at least the Church's law concerning all abortion cases, viz. the automatic excommunication of all concerned with it, was considered intolerable by people in general and many grass-roots Catholics. It was also totally unpalatable to many in the Magisterium.
This brings me to suggest that the official Church policy on abortion is in dire need of review.
I intend to put forward here an Alternate Catholic View on Abortion although I am but a concerned laïc who thinks he can bring some new (!) ideas to this difficult question.
I have provided in Appendix a text (amended from some points of no interest here) taken from Wikipedia on human gestation2. It is not that I consider Wikipedia to be the most trustworthy source of information, but that I consider that what is found there is usually the result of some form of consensus. It is also available free of charge.
The first step to trying to build a new Catholic view on Abortion is to determine the principles it must be based on. Each must be clearly seen as a correct Catholic Concept, firmly based on Catholic Theology.
The first area I want to examine is the Church's theology concerning the foetus. This might seem to be a rather strange thing to do, as the Church's teaching about it has been made very clear. Indeed, but has this always been the case? And why is it so clear now if it was not before?
I first intend to prove that even in the quite recent past the foetus' status was quite different from the one given now.
As is well known, a foetus has to this date no legal standing in what are or were Catholic countries. In all these countries, a human being's life legally starts at birth and ends at death. If the Magisterium present teaching that a human being's life starts at conception to end at death, would not our legal system reflect those views? After all, this is exactly what some people want to do now, bring this new idea about life of a human being into today's legal code.
Someone could argue that the Church's ideas on the foetus' life did not need to be clarified before as abortion was not then prevalent, that abortion is a new phenomenon. This is simply false. In fact abortions under a different name were performed in Catholic hospitals with nuns as nurses not that long ago.
Indeed, a married woman of good society who found that she had missed her period could go and query her state of affairs with her doctor. As there were then no test to determine pregnancy, pregnancy could not be ruled out, but neither infections and cancer. The only way to know what the matter was consisted in curetage, which would be performed in the hospital. That procedure consists in scraping from the uterus' lining all possible causes of this interruption of her periods and thus find out what the problem really was.
Poor women could not afford such a procedure to be done by a doctor in what was a more or less sterile environment and had to rely on whoever would attempt it, with unfortunate consequences in many cases.
It is a fact that abortion was not practiced by the early Christians as Julian Martyr clearly states that one difference between Christians and others in the Roman Empire is that they do not abort foetuses nor expose newborns to die. So we see that respect for the human foetus' life was one of many characteristics of Christians. But one should also note that the same text does not judge the ways of non-Christians. Julian, for instance, states that Christian men do not have sex with each others' wives like non-Christians, but does not judge this form of échangisme. Nor does he state why the Christian ways are different from the non-Christian.
Julian permits us to note that abortion was not a done thing among the early Christians. But it does not permit us to state that they believed that human life started at conception. In fact, I strongly believe that they did not.
I have showed in My Body, My Self that Christians, just like Jews, believed that we are our bodies, and so saw the resurrection of the bodies as imperative for us to exist anew after death. For them and us, the main way to check if a human being is alive was to check if she breathed or not, or put in different terms, if she had a soul or not, as their word for soul originally means breath. Indeed without breath, there is no human life. And a human being starts to breathe at birth and not before.
A human being is being fashioned, created in the womb. She is not yet a human being, but she is slowly becoming a human being in the womb. It is at birth that the baby is born if she takes her first breath.
So it should be clear why a human life starts at birth and ends at death, just like the law of the land says, and as the Church taught. But the process by which a human being is created starts at conception to end at birth. We take nine months in our mother's womb to be created.
Of course this has profound implications on abortion as the foetus is not a human being, as it has no soul if we keep to the meaning of the term as used in the Bible. On the other hand, the foetus should normally become a human being just after birth. And so we see why the Church teaches that a foetus' life is precious.
A problem in terminology was created when the word "soul" started taking enhanced meanings as philosophies foreign to the Bible were used with it. And this is why we have the present false statements about human life starting at conception as this is not what the Bible teaches, and the Magisterium is bound by the Bible.
A second problem of terminology is that of "foetus". It is not at all certain that for Julian a foetus' existence was of nine months; it might have only started its existence when something remotedly like a human being appeared in the womb. This is the kind of argument often used to permit early abortions and deny late ones: the more human-like is the foetus, the less permissible becomes the abortion.
Of course, as the Early Christians' reverence for life implies that they would not willingly cause abortion. But many an abortion happens without it being willed by the pregnant woman, and the very early ones cannot be identified as such if no pregnncy test was done previously; and there were no such tests in Julian's days.
Furthermore, until quite recently in the West, women had to do lots of physical labors that cause help cause their foetus to abort without them willing it. Still today, it happens that a pregnant woman must take to her bed for nine months if she wants to avoid an abortion, and this is not something that most can afford to do.
Any theology of the foetus that is worth its salt must be able to take all these considerations into account. And so any which places the onus of a successful delivery on the pregnant woman puts on her shoulders a huge and unfair burden. No one can know ahead of time if a pregnancy will reach completion and what measures must be done to safegard it while permitting the woman to live a normal life, something she is entitled to as after all, pregnancy is not an illness.
Any attempt to give human status to a foetus could force the pregnant woman to
take drastic measures to prevent an interruption of the pregnancy; it could also force
life style changes on the pregnant woman, changes that she would have to agree to or face
jail. This would severily restrict the freedom of the pregnant woman and have as an effect
to reduce the number of women giving birth.
When semen is deposited in the vagina, the spermatozoa travel through the cervix and body of the uterus and into the Fallopian tubes. Fertilization of the ovum (egg cell) usually takes place in the Fallopian tube. Many sperm must cooperate to penetrate the thick protective shell-like barrier that surrounds the ovum. The first sperm that penetrates fully into the egg donates its genetic material (DNA). The egg then polarizes, repelling any additional sperm. The resulting combination is called a zygote. The term "conception" refers variably to either fertilization or to formation of the conceptus after uterine implantation, and this terminology is controversial.
Prior to fertilization, each ovum contains a complete human genome, including a single X but no Y chromosome. Likewise, each spermatozoon contains a complete set of autosomes and a single sex chromosome, either X or Y. The resulting zygote is similar to the majority of somatic cells because it contains two copies of the genome in a diploid set of chromosomes. One set of chromosomes came from the nucleus of the ovum and the second set from the nucleus of the sperm. If the spermatozoon contributes a Y chromosome then the zygote will develop as a male. Unlike the X chromosome, the Y chromosome contains very little genetic information. However it does contain a gene, SRY, which will switch on androgen production at a later stage, leading to the development of a male body type. In contrast, the mitochondrial genetic information of the zygote comes entirely from the mother via the ovum.
The embryonic period in humans begins at fertilization (2nd week of gestation) and continues until the end of the 10th week of gestation (8th week of development).
The zygote spends the next few days traveling down the Fallopian tube. Meanwhile it divides several times to form a ball of cells called a morula. Further cellular division is accompanied by the formation of a small cavity between the cells. This stage is called a blastocyst. Up to this point there is no growth in the overall size of the embryo, so each division produces successively smaller cells.
The blastocyst reaches the uterus at roughly the fifth day after fertilization. It is here that lysis of the zona pellucida, a glycoprotein shell, occurs. This is required so that the trophectoderm cells, which give rise to extra-embryonic structures such as the placenta, of the blastocyst can come into contact with the luminal epithelial cells of the endometrium. It then adheres to the uterine lining and becomes embedded in the endometrial cell layer. This process is also called implantation. In most successful pregnancies, the conceptus implants 8 to 10 days after ovulation . The inner cell mass forms the embryo, while the outer cell layers form the membranes and placenta. Together, the embryo and its membranes are referred to as a conceptus, or the "products of conception".
Rapid growth occurs and the embryo's main external features begin to take form. This process is called differentiation, which produces the varied cell types (such as blood cells, kidney cells, and nerve cells). A spontaneous abortion, or miscarriage, in the first trimester of pregnancy is usually due to major genetic mistakes or abnormalities in the developing embryo. During this critical period (most of the first trimester), the developing embryo is also susceptible to toxic exposures, such as:
- Alcohol, certain drugs, and other toxins that cause birth defects, such as Fetal alcohol syndrome
- Infection (such as rubella or cytomegalovirus)
- Radiation from x-rays or radiation therapy
- Nutritional deficiencies such as lack of folate which contributes to spina bifida
Generally, if a structure pre-dates another structure in evolutionary terms, then it often appears earlier than the other in an embryo; this general observation is sometimes summarized by the phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." For example, the backbone is a common structure among all vertebrates such as fish, reptiles and mammals, and the backbone also appears as one of the earliest structures laid out in all vertebrate embryos. The cerebrum in humans, which is the most sophisticated part of the brain, develops last. The concept of recapitulation is not absolute, but it is recognized as being partly applicable to development of the human embryo.
The fetal period begins at the end of the 10th week of gestation (8th week of development). Since the precursors of all the major organs are created by this time, the fetal period is described both by organ and by a list of changes by weeks of gestational age.
Because the precursors of the organs are formed, fetus also is not as sensitive to damage from environmental exposures as the embryo. Instead, toxic exposures often cause physiological abnormalities or minor congenital malformation.
From the 8th week until birth (around 38 weeks), the developing organism is called a fetus. The fetus is not as sensitive to damage from environmental exposures as the embryo, and toxic exposures often cause physiological abnormalities or minor congenital malformation. All major structures are already formed in the fetus, but they continue to grow and develop.