Customer Reviews

A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion

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This piece of pro-abortion propaganda, charading as scholarship, is seriously misleading. Some problems:

1) The authors ignore the anti-abortion position of the early, patristic church. The Didache, Tertullian, and Athenagoras categorically condemn all abortion, regardless of what stage at which it is performed.

2) The authors rightly show that Augustine and Aquinas supported the theory of delayed animation, but they fail to show that these authors also categorically condemned abortion at all stages. Later abortion was more gravely evil than an early abortion (just as first-degree murder is more evil than second-degree murder), but all abortion was condemned as wrong. The canon law of the same period showed the same graded but clear condemnation of all abortion.

3) The authors fail to explain to the reader the absurd biology on which delayed animation was based. Aquinas (following Aristotle), thought the female fetus became "human" later than a male fetus because the woman contributed nothing to conception! He also thought that the early human fetus was some sort of vegetable! No one today disputes the fact that from the moment of conception a huam fetus is purely human. It is not a tiny grapefruit or cat that suddenly becomes human at some later stage of gestation.

4) From the beginning of its existence the Catholic Church has strongly condemned abortion at every stage. While its reasons for condemnation and the degree of condemnation have varied, its position has remained remarkably consistent. Its strengthened opposition to abortion at every stage is completely justified by new knowledge in genetics and gestation. Every human person's history has a radical beginning at the moment of conception.

The authors of this book go into great detail on the history of abortion in the Catholic Church and Catholic tradition. They look at the views of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and trace thinking on abortion throughout history. They show how Catholic thinking has changed as scientific and medical knowledge increased and changed as well as looking at the views of society. Although the book can be slow in places, the author's points are very interesting and show that the abortion debate within the Catholic Church is not a simple, clear-cut issue. While the authors are not theologians, and do not pretend to be, their discussion is interesting, informative and relevant.

It's enlightening to learn the gradual ensoulment of the fetus was Catholic dogma before the 17th cent, taught by Augustine & Thomas Aquinas.After that time the immediate infusion of the human soul was taught to occur at conception. A strong case can be made for a vegetative soul, then an animal soul, preceding to the human soul in the last trimester. "the moral permissibility of abortion in the early stages of pregnancy is, AT THE VERY LEAST, an intellectually respectable view when the history of Catholic thought on abortion is considered in its relation to the history of science" the philosopher authors conclude. While some of this is difficult to follow, it is well worth the effort.

[...]
For an excellent rebuttal of Dombrowski and Deltete's pro-abortion position, see the first chapter of Robert P. George's 'The Clash of Orthodoxies.' George, a Roman Catholic, is a professor at Princeton University.

The following is an excerpt from the Seattle Catholic article by Anne Barbeau Gardiner:

The authors make a sharp distinction between the unborn child being "merely human" (i.e., having human parents and genes) and being "a human person in some morally relevant sense." Their most striking and pervasive analogy in support of this distinction is the one between an unborn child and vegetation, as when they say, "The early fetus is obviously alive, as is grass."

In their view, the unborn child is like vegetation until very late in the pregnancy when sentience begins, a term they define as the capacity to perceive pain. They argue that sentience arises only when the central nervous system is functioning. Oh, but what a slippery slope this is! They keep shifting the date when the unborn child attains this mysterious quality. First they say it is hard to tell if there is "a morally considerable being at twenty-four weeks of pregnancy or not until twenty-eight weeks." As it turns out, they are unsure the unborn child has sentience until the eighth month. Even then they declare vaguely that "the fetus becomes morally considerable between twenty-four and thirty-two weeks when sentiency, and then the cerebral cortex, starts to function." The thirty-second week verges on the ninth month!

The authors inform us that performing an abortion on a "nonsentient" child (which, as we have just seen, can be up to the eighth month) is like mowing the lawn. Here are their very words: "It is unclear to us, however, why killing a nonsentient being is rash or precipitous. We do it all the time with equanimity when we mow the grass." Elsewhere they say that an abortion is "like pruning one's rose bush." These are chilling analogies. But do they actually work as analogies? No. For when one prunes a rosebush, it is to make it bloom more abundantly; when one mows the grass, it is to make it grow thicker and stronger. But when one aborts a child, does that child's capacity to grow improve? Not a bit. Little wonder that the authors attack the pro-life film The Silent Scream as being "at best, misleading, and, at worst, fraudulent." This heartrending film shows an unborn child in the throes of an abortion and makes it plain that there is no likeness here to grass or a rosebush. As ultrasounds reveal, a child in the womb reacts to touch after eight weeks, something that grass and a rosebush cannot do at any stage. ...