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There is a great deal of confusion in the public discussion of abortion. A lot of the confusion centers on a definition of when human life begins. Some pro-lifers argue that life begins at conception, which they define as the moment when the sperm enters the ovum. Others argue that life begins with implantation, that is when the fertilized ovum embeds itself in the lining of the woman’s uterus. And then there are those who would argue that life begins in the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, or whatever month of the pregnancy. And then there are those who argue that life begins at birth. There may even still be some who would argue that life begins at puberty.
The arriving at a definition of when life begins that ordinary, educated people can use in debate is complicated by the esoteric language of embryologists. They would point out, for example, that not all human life now originates through the human sex act that enables the penetration of an ovum by a sperm in a woman. They point to agamogenesis, such as cloning and other developments in the laboratories of medical research facilities, that do not involve human sexual activity.
All of which has prompted me to try to develop a simple metaphysical definition of when human life begins. I offer it here in the hopes that embryologists will comment on this post and offer constructive opinions on this definition. I say “constructive” because my experience has been that embryologists get so involved in the technical scientific jargon that they leave us common folk stupefied.
Here it is:
Human life begins when a cell produced by a woman’s ovary after being either penetrated by a spermatazoon or manipulated in a laboratory and now containing 64 chromosomes begins to divide becoming a zygote.
– Abyssum
ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP 
Nan H
The greatest majority of people believe that there is a God and that when we die, there is life after death. Although I am not an intellectual, my perspective is that on the last day, all will be judged on the basis our actions, our lack of action and the MOTIVES BEHIND whatever choices we make.
As to whether an embryo is alive or not, it would seem that ultimately, those who choose to continue the pregnancy to term, do so in an effort to avoid the destruction of the possibility of life and those who choose to abort, even an embryonic pregnancy, do so for no other reason than to insure the destruction of the possibility of life. Here’s the catch. It doesn’t matter what WE want. It does matter what GOD wants. One day we will have to answer to the ultimate creator of all life for the decisions we have made.
We then must ask ourselves, is God more interested in our convenience? Or is He more interested in how we deal with the consequences of our actions, or the difficulties or obstacles that are placed within our paths? Are we so caught up in our own lives that God no longer has any relevance in them? Heaven is real and so is hell. Everyone wants to go to heaven, but how would one be invited in without having a vital relationship with the One who decides who gets in and who does not. Odd thing, relationships. Communication is vital or the relationship fades away. Other important traits develop in true relationships as well: trust is one of these. Are we ready to trust God, the author of love, with our lives so completely that we take a deep breath, and vow to make the moral decision that would please Him, even if it would be more difficult for us?
I know people that have struggled with this decision and I can tell you that those who chose life for the developing living tissue within them (although it was a struggle initially) ended up being much more at peace and happier individuals than those that aborted their babies. Thank God, I chose life. My son’s best friend chose life, my doctor’s wife stood up to her husband and chose life. We are at peace and are better for having these lovely babies that have become fantastic individuals. My husband’s friend, on the other hand “chose” abortion thirty-two years ago and is tormented, sterile and usually drunk to this day. About 15 years ago, two young lady patients of my doctor sat in the waiting room waiting to see him. Their discussion was such that they made a pact: which ever one of them got pregnant first could have the boyfriend, then they would abort the babies. Flippant and irresponsible, taught by whom…society? movies? mom? All of the above? Does it matter? Is this the path we want humanity to travel? Is this God-centered? How could one possibly think that this would be pleasing to God. That must be the crux of our decision. He will honor morality, integrity, honesty, unselfish love, etc. Immorality, selfishness, dishonesty, drunkenness and the like…You know where that comes from. But God loves us too much to take away our free will. We can, however, ask for wisdom and use it to choose wisely.
Is an embryo alive or not? Are you willing to throw the dice and lose?
Yes, your Grace: I feel you are right and that I have been guilty of misunderstanding the purpose, the noble purpose of the posts. I feel badly that I have perhaps not sufficiently appreciated the fine work of the embryologist who posted on this site. She went to so much effort and trouble.
Thanks to the fact that science is exact and that it offers the possibility of tangible verification, there is a common opinion especially in the United States that science has rendered philosophy obsolete. I think this is false but at the same time I realize that neither Your Grace nor the embryologist said or implied it. So I’m sorry, really sorry about that.
I want to be sure that it is accepted by Catholics that given its nature, natural science can never encompass the whole of knowledge because 1) however many objects science may grow to encompass, these are merely an aggregate and never constitute a whole; 2) every bit of newly acquired empirical knowledge demands a reappraisal of what was formerly known making it subject to endless revision and 3) that science tends to proceed along a “methodologically” atheistic trajectory which manifests itself in a tendency to restrict reality to the empirical. Although drawing upon and embracing truth from every science including embryology, the questions and methods of philosophy and theology need not and cannot be legitimized at the bar of natural science.
Questions of the ensoulment of twins before fissioning, cerebrumless embryos, the poor souls of not only the intentionally aborted, but even the souls of the spontaneously aborted: these are questions that cannot be solved by science alone. May the Holy Spirit help and guide us to always say and do what is right according to the Roman Catholic Church!!
Curt,
In your comment that begins “Yes, you are right, Your Excellency…..” You may indeed have misunderstood the purpose of this series of posts on this blog. I have not really been pursuing a philosophical goal of trying to determine the exact moment when the soul is united with the body. I consider that a Quixotic pursuit. Rather, I have been searching for a simple definition of when human life begins because there is so much confusion in the public square over the meaning of such terms as “fertilization”, “conception” and “implantation” with respect to the beginning of life. Perhaps searching for such a simple definition is itself a Quixotic pursuit.
– Abyssum
Abyssum, this is the FINAL version of my comment. Please, if you will, remove my previous comments and post this final one:
The way I see it, if some entity, E, will indeed by natural processes come at some future moment in Time, T, to exist as a human person, then E must not be destroyed under any circumstances, simply because T is a temporal reality whose eventual existence has to be upheld by inductive logic. For we can say, “All the moments of the past, Tp, were in fact at some point on the temporal continuum of Time ‘future moments’, the existence which were uncertain. But they came into existence, and thus they became reality”. And so if some say that T might not come into existence, then we must respond that we cannot prevent the rise of personhood simply because we are unsure about the extent of Time itself. And in fact, all the moments of history were at one time “future” moments, moments the existence of which could easily have been called “uncertain” by those who existed prior to each “future” moment in the set of all such moments. But since all moments Tp came to be, we have no reason to doubt the existence of the future moment, T.
And since we hold that T exists, we can say that we also hold that our future selves at T exist as well. This future moment, T, is the present moment in Time, P, to our future selves. Here, E has now become a person and is accepted as such by our future selves at T. And our future selves are equally real in metaphysical terms as our current selves. Thus, by association, the future person who emerges from E, EP, must be considered just as real to our current selves. Therefore, since EP is metaphysically real to our current selves, we must not prevent E from becoming EP.
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The principle is, “If a thing is not yet human, and if the existence of this thing is posterior in time to the union of sperm and egg, and if this thing will indeed by natural processes come into personhood, then we must not prevent the emergence of its personhood, regardless of the moment when it does become a person, simply because it will by natural processes become a person at some future moment in time, a moment the existence of which we have no reason to doubt.
And this “future moment” at which personhood happens is in fact the “present moment” to the future selves of not only those who would destroy this thing, but also to the future selves of those who would not. And since our future selves are just as real as our current selves, by association this “future person” must be considered just as real to our current selves. Thus, since this “future person” is real to us as our current selves, we as our current selves must not prevent the emergence of this “future person”.
Yes, of course you are right your Excellency. I long for an end to legalized abortion on demand and confess that emotion clouds my judgment on this. Sorry! Maybe part of the problem is that biology is an empirical science that gets uncomfortable when speculation begings to lean too heavily on logic. Scholasticism is a philosophy that gets uncomfortable when speculation becomes too reductionist on the issue of verifiability or falsifiability based on empirical data. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t believe that empirical data is ever going to settle issues of the human soul since the soul is by definition invisible. Pope Benedict, even as a young theologian, acknowledged the difficulty moderns have with the very concept of invisibility. I am not as smart as I think I am and I leave myself completely open to correction, your Excellency. Please jump in and correct me when I am wrong!!! I feel what Marie feels. At the same time, I know that as you say, in the public sphere it is very important that we be as precise as is humanly possible. I personally feel that philosophy is better equipped to solve this than science. Perhaps I am prejudiced. I worry that science which abstracts from questions of final causality is liable to push the question further and further back into an infinite regress; or least a finite regress that is going to eat up a lot of time. If I am wrong I will gladly stand corrected. I have no antipathy to science whatsoever. I thank God for science!
I believe strongly that Truth is one and that scientific truth cannot contradict philosophical or theological truth. I know that science in general does not take into consideration questions of final causality. My memory isn’t what it used to be but I remember a Catholic philosopher noting that a physicist will give you every cause of why a pot of tea is boiling but will never say that one of the causes is because the person boiling the water wanted a cup of tea. And yet that is also very important! This philosopher said that science has nothing to fear from Catholicism nor does Catholicism have anything to fear from science because they are both dealing with different aspects of the same reality.
It is also true that science sometimes comes around to a philosophical position. Discoverer of the Uncertainty Principle in physics, Werner Heisenberg in later life stated that he didn’t think physics could continue to be robustly explicative without a recourse to something akin to Aristotle’s distinction between potency and act or matter and substantial form. And I once attended a lecture by a neurologist who compared the human brain to a book. He said that a book is entirely a material object. It is paper, ink, cardboard, binding cloths, glues and threads . . . molecules and atoms. And yet if that was all that books were, their most important characteristic would be ignored because books “mean” something and “meaning”, he said is something non-material. What an interesting remark from a neurologist! All analogies limp of course.
If you use light to make a shadow of the side of a cylinder on a wall, the shadow will have the shape of a rectangle. If you use light to make a shadow of the bottom of the same cylinder on a floor the shadow will have the shape of a circle. The same cylinder casts a rectangular shadow in one dimension and a circular shadow in another. These two shadows are of two distinct plane geometry forms and might seem contradictory. Forgive this crude analogy. I use it only to point to the idea that both science and philosophy have limited perspectives. The cylinder that casts the image of a circle when illuminated from above is the same cylinder that casts an image of a rectangle when illuminated laterally. A circle is not a square and there is no such thing as a square circle. And yet taken in three dimensions the cylinder has circular properties and linear ones.
Please do not take any of this to mean that I am not interested in how embryologists will reply to your question, your Grace. It is a vitally important question. I apologize if you think I have trivialized it. That wasn’t my intention. I am of the completely uneducated opinion that upon becoming a being of 64 chromosomes, the entity is a human being. Perhaps I am not understanding your question correctly???? When will science determine the moment that a human being exists? Will the answer be pushed back to milliseconds, nanoseconds, yoctoseconds? And what do pro-life people like me do until science makes its ex cathedra pronouncement? Science [unlike scientism] never does make infallible pronouncements because science, dealing with non-necessary continent things and using inductive logic is always subject to further revision. Have I completely misunderstood what you were trying to say???
Abyssum, if I may edit my comment as follows:
The way I see it, if some entity, E, will indeed by natural processes come at some future moment in Time, T, to exist as a human person, then E must not be destroyed under any circumstances, simply because T is a temporal reality whose eventual existence has to be upheld by inductive logic. For we can say, “All the moments of the past, Tp, were in fact at some point on the temporal continuum of Time ‘future moments’, the existence which were uncertain. But they came into existence, and thus they became reality”. And so if some say that T might not come into existence, then we must respond that we cannot prevent the rise of personhood simply because we are unsure about the extent of Time itself. And in fact, all the moments of history were at one time “future” moments, moments the existence of which could easily have been called “uncertain” by those who existed prior to each “future” moment in the set of all such moments.
The principle is, “If a thing is not yet human, and if the existence of this thing is posterior in time to the union of sperm and egg, and if this thing will indeed by natural processes come into personhood, then we must not prevent by abortion the emergence of its personhood, regardless of the moment when it does become a person, simply because it will by natural processes become a person at some future moment in time, a moment the existence of which we have no reason to doubt.
AND THIS ‘FUTURE MOMENT’ AT WHICH PERSONHOOD HAPPENS IS IN FACT THE ‘PRESENT MOMENT’ TO THE FUTURE SELVES OF NOT ONLY THOSE WHO WOULD DESTROY THIS THING, BUT ALSO TO THOSE WHO WOULD NOT. AND BEING THE PRESENT MOMENT OF REALITY TO OUR FUTURE SELVES, WE CANNOT DESTROY THIS THING WHICH WILL COME TO BE A HUMAN PERSON ONE DAY, BECAUSE OUR FUTURE SELVES ARE JUST AS REAL AS OUR CURRENT SELVES”.
The way I see it, if some entity, E, will indeed by natural processes come at some future moment in Time, T, to exist as a human person, then E must not be destroyed under any circumstances, simply because T is a temporal reality whose eventual existence has to be upheld by inductive logic. For we can say, “All the moments of the past, Tp, were in fact at some point on the temporal continuum of Time ‘future moments’, the existence which were uncertain. But they came into existence, and thus they became reality”. And so if some say that T might not come into existence, then we must respond that we cannot prevent the rise of personhood simply because we are unsure about the extent of Time itself. And in fact, all the moments of history were at one time “future” moments, moments the existence of which could easily have been called “uncertain” by those who existed prior to each “future” moment in the set of all such moments.
The principle is, “If a thing is not yet human, and if the existence of this thing is posterior in time to the union of sperm and egg, and if this thing will indeed by natural processes come into personhood, then we must not prevent by abortion the emergence of its personhood, regardless of the moment when it does become a person, simply because it will by natural processes become a person at some future moment in time, a moment the existence of which we have no reason to doubt”.
Curt,
I sympathize with your impatience with those who engage in philosophical speculation about life as sort of a game. That is not what I am about. My blog is not, like many blogs a vehicle for ruminating about what my personal likes and dislikes are. Nor is my blog about intellectual speculation for the fun of it. My blog exists to offer help to those who are trying to bear witness to Jesus Christ and his Gospel in the market place.
Many people, like Marie Czarnecki above, are willing to just assert that life begins at conception. But that is not enough to assert in the public square. Conception is too broad a term and it admits of too many openings for pro-abortion advocates to dismiss it.
Pro-life advocates in the public square need to use precise language that cannot be dismissed out of hand.
I am not interested in engaging on my blog by writing posts that amount to extended philosophical speculation about life; I am interested in doing that in private with friends, but not on my blog.
I value your comments and your philosophical observations, keep them coming.
– Abyssum
I will be interested to see what embryologists say. I remember with both anger and sadness the trip that fallen away Catholic theologian Hans Kung made to Mexico to promote his position that the pro-life movement is a form of extremism. His use of Saint Thomas Aquinas and other Scholastics to justify his position was disturbing. He seems to use St. Thomas the way some Biblical Fundamentalists use Sacred Scripture, picking and choosing “proof texts” to establish whatever position he favors. I mention him because I feel he is still a hero to many liberal Catholics. One thing one learns from St. Thomas is that one can learn from everyone. Thomas was not shy about quoting from pagan Aristotle, Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides or even the great Islamic scholastics. So I would never go so far as to condemn every thought of every man including Kung. But I think Kung is just muddying the waters when the question is about abortion.
As a Franciscan Tertiary I think we should perhaps take a wider approach to the question of abortion. Liberal Protestant theologian Albert Schweitzer felt that Christians should have a certain reverence for life. He was a physician who fought disease with all his might and did not think animals were equal or higher than men [as many environmentalists do.] St. Bonaventure, a Franciscan asked whether if absent the Fall of Adam, Nature would still be a predatory system. He did not think so. St. Thomas being perhaps less sentimental and more hardheaded felt that the predatory system was willed by God even before the Fall. Form follows function. Every biological aspect of a tiger is based on the tiger being a predator. And St. Thomas, perhaps rightly so, saw no place for a tiger that would lie down with gazelles. Albert Schweitzer also believed in the predatory system as a manifestation of the will of God. But he thought that ‘unnecessary killing’ for amusement or whatever was evil and that people shouldn’t just kill without good reason. His inspiration was Jainism and vitalism, two things a Roman Catholic should not follow. But there is something ‘Franciscan’ in his teaching. My father used to rescue spiders trapped in a drain. And I have felt a kind of sadness watching small children step on hundreds of red ants “just for fun.” I was surprised to learn that at animal experimentation centers in Japan, workers assemble each morning to pray for the animal souls of the animals they kill to provide life-saving drugs for human beings. A little remnant of Buddhism is a secular society? Since Descartes we have had a sort of mechanistic view of life. I’m not complaining. I wouldn’t have survived many childhood diseases without this stark unsentimental view. But something of St. Francis has certainly been lost: respect for God’s creation.
To be quite honest I cannot say whether the final answer to the question of the ensoulment of the unborn human child will be resolved scientifically or philosophically. I believe in the development of dogma so I believe that our understanding of the truths of faith can deepen and I hope for a deepening of the scholastic ideas of hylemorphism. In the meantime I am irked that the liberal intelligencia, including the Catholic liberal intelligencia has such a deep attraction to environmental causes, new age philosophies and Asian worldviews about animals and yet completely abandons that spirit on the question of abortion. St. Francis had such a love of the little, the “minores.”
And what is more little than the fetus, the zygote. All those liberals who want to ban the cutting down of trees and saplings, protect endangered species, rescue the little white mice from medical laboratories . . . why are they so pro-abortion? Some are out and out pantheists who believe that everything is God, everything, that is, except the unborn child. Their position, even by their own principles is self-contradictory.
I don’t believe we can wait for metaphysicans and embryologists to decide this. Babies are being killed while we debate and the issue of time of ensoulment is being used by pro-abortionists as a stalling tactic. Let’s use the farthest example from St. Francis of Assisi that we can think of . . . A man is out hunting with his buddies and sees a bush move. Can he shoot, hoping that it’s a deer and not another hunter. Never. If you are not sure that a human fetus is human, you still cannot murder it! Biology teaches that the life of every individual member of every animal species begins at the moment of conception. This was taught by all biology textbooks before Roe v Wade and none after? Why? The answer is the sexual revolution and the lucrative abortion business.
LIFE BEGINS AT CONCEPTION, AND THAT IS MY FINAL COMMENT..All these so called SCIENTISTS think they know it all, and they are CRAZY..