An exceptionally thorough analysis from the Los Angeles Times -

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Abortion isn't a religious issue

Evangelicals are adamant, but religion really has nothing to say about the issue.

By Garry Wills
November 4, 2007

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.

Cause like, Jesus said that the government should allow Abortion.

You are a retard as is the La Times. No wonder their readership is down and they keep going through so many problems.

Dearest San,

I worry so. Once again you don't offer any actual substance to the discussion put forth but merely succumb to name calling. I am sure that your theological position is a valid beleif for you and I totally support your right to it even though we may not agree. Sadly, I am not certain what your position is other than that you think making sarcastic and abusive comments is in and of itself a reasonable discussion.

Yours,

Translation of wifeofjgc: I'm a retard who doesn't have a point, but I will try to put as much condescending fluff in a post as possible because I feel compulsed to stalk others. I have no life, and since my uterus doesn't work because God hates me, I feel the need to be a whore and then bitch about people calling out my moral decay on this board.

Abortion is murder. You can argue 6 ways to Sunday that a baby is not a baby but argument does not make it so. Religious issue or not this country is supposed to be ruled by the majority and not the promiscuous minority.

A terrific post to a brilliant piece by Garry Wills. It remindad me of a great analogy by philosopher Warren Quinn, whose ethical philosophy class I took at UCLA about 25 years ago. He posited that the concept of what is a 'human being"--- the fundamental concept to a rational approach to the abortion question (one that doesn't devolve simply to reflexive, ersatz religious pronouncements) -- is an inherently vague one.

Quinn's analogy was, if I pluck a single hair from my head every day, at what point will I be "bald?" There will be some point where almost everyone will say that I am bald. But there is almost certainly not a definitive point from one plucked hair to the next where I went from being not a bald man to being a bald man. And therefore, a rational effort to discern the moment when an embryo or fetus becomes a "human being" (as opposed to what Wills properly calls human life) is something that we can never have a normative rule for, let alone one that criminalizes a woman's exercising control over her own body.

Of course, this sort of analysis is lost on the subliterate, talk radio spoon-fed evangelical to whom we must profess to accord respect, viz, our execrable friend San.

The embryo or a fetus is not part of the woman.

Its only 50% of her genetic material.

So you cannot really make that kind of argument.

Sorry.

Its not her own body. The fetus is independent. If a man has to pay for it under child support, then its not hers.

I care not whether abortion is legal or illegal. My choice for which person to vote will not depend upon his/her stand on abortion. I believe in the separation of church and state such that it just doesn't matter.

If I had to vote one way or the other as to whether abortion could be legal, I would vote to keep it legal up to the point where the fetus is viable outside the womb. I have no problem with the "morning after" pill.

I believe that politicians use this issue as a wedge because they can, because we allow them to do so. Christians should wake up and understand that it is almost silly to try to mold a secular government (especially one where church and state are separate entities) into their own way of thinking. Jesus didn't do it, neither should they.

Of course, abortion is murder. To me it is, anyway. But that is a spiritual/ religious perception.

But there is nothing in the teachings of Jesus or Yaweh that tell us we must have our nation's government reflect religion of any kind.

The laws of this nation do not determine my personal way of thinking and I feel I would be naive to expect my nation's laws to always reflect my own moral compass.

That abortion is legal doesn't in any way make it less of a murder than it would be if it wasn't legal. But God gave us choices just as our legal rights in this country do.

I am good with that.

"I believe in the separation of church and state such that it just doesn't matter."

The First Amendment says that Congress cannot pass a law determining religion.

It does not say that religion connect determine how you view an act as proper or not.

The Constitution does not grant a woman the right to abort a baby that is only 50% genetically hers, especially without the permission of the father.

"But there is nothing in the teachings of Jesus or Yaweh that tell us we must have our nation's government reflect religion of any kind."

Christianity says that murder is wrong.

Do you think that means that the State shouldn't ban murder?

No.

Therefore, you cannot use seperation of Church and State to determine not passing such a law.

San:

Allah knows I've read the lunatic shit smearings of people so creepy I couldn't believe they really existed, but none of them comes close to your level of malevolent idiocy, cocksucker. How many Planned Parenthood clinics have you called in bomb threats to, and how many doctors have move you anonymously threatened with murder? I suspect there are several.

Come out of your shithole, fuck, and identify yourself. I hope everyone that was ever close to you died in unspeakable agony, and that you endure the same fate. Preferred mode of protracted death for you: HIV from being raw dogged by Larry Craig or Ted Haggard.

What I have said is that the way abortion can be done, the rules surrounding it, whether or not the male half has any rights, are rules of law.

In making those laws, however then end up being made, there is no obligation on the government's part, to apply any religious laws.

And my own feelings about abortion (which are that abortion is murder) in no way dictates the way that our government should decide to look at or deal with abortion.

The State has the right to define "murder" in any way it chooses. I may agree or disagree with the State's definition.

A baby is a baby. The bigger argument is at what stage the ZEF (zygote-embryo-fetus) is a baby. Would you advocate that women taking a morning-after pill be tried for murder and get life sentences? That there be police investigations into every miscarriage right from day after pregnancy?