"Abortion isn't a religious issue" by Garry Wills
Abortion isn't a religious issue - Los Angeles Times
He makes several claims in this essay:
* "But is abortion murder? Most people think not. ...
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."
* "
The subject of abortion is not scriptural. ... 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."
* "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."
* "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 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."
* "
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."
* "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."
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I respectfully disagree
