Hath Not a Jew Brains?

Gary Wills has recently written a remarkable op-ed piece for the LA Times (“Abortion isn’t a religious issue," Times, November 4). Remarkable as an indication of just how wild the anti-religious party has become.

A few highlights, with commentary:

GW:
The right-to-life people hold that [abortion] is as strong a point of religion as any can be. It is religious because the Sixth Commandment … says, "Thou shalt not kill."

Od:
No, it is not religious. Not according to Catholics. The obligation not to kill is a matter of objective morality. It doesn't matter whether you are religious or not. You still can't kill people.

GW:
Is abortion murder? 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.

Od:
No, the parallel is exact. Jews were not persons. They were "untermenschen." Subhuman.

GW:
Not even evangelicals act as if it were. ...a woman seeking an abortion … is killing her own child. But the evangelical community does not call for her execution.

Od:
The Catholic Church does not, because the Catholic Church opposes capital punishment, and believes in the possibility of human redemption. Why wouldn’t the “right to life” apply to adult women as well as unborn children? Why is it inconsistent that it does?

GW:
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.

Od:
I find it entirely within the realm of possibility that 10% of evangelicals are wrong; my guess is that the other 90% are more representative of the true Evangelical position. I remain unshocked that this is so.

GW:
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.

Od:
This is an absurd Catch-22. You cannot baptize someone who is already dead. And someone who is not baptized cannot be buried as a Christian.

Here's what the Catholic Encyclopedia (1911) says: "Whenever it is possible to baptize an embryonic child before it expires, Christian charity requires that it be done, either before or after delivery; and it may be done by anyone, even though he be not a Christian."

But of course, any woman aborting her child is not a good Catholic in the first place.


GW:
…abortion is not scriptural. … Abortion is not … in the Ten Commandments -- or anywhere in Jewish Scripture.

Od:
False. The Hebrew Scriptures address the killing of a foetus pretty directly:

Exodus 21:

22 If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely [e] but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman's husband demands and the court allows. 23 But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

Not in the Ten Commandments? Wills himself has already said it is. "Thou shalt not kill" covers it decisively--given that the Bible makes no distinction anywhere between born and unborn human life. John the Baptist "leaps in his mother's womb." God "knew us before he knit us together in our mother's womb." Jacob and Esau compete in the womb.

So expecting the Ten Commandments to mention abortion specifically and separately is rather like demanding they mention that thou shalt not bear false witness on a Friday.

GW:
It is not treated … anywhere in the New Testament. It is not treated in the early creeds. It is not treated in the early ecumenical councils.

Od:
False. It was banned by the Third Council of Constantinople (7th century), as murder plain and simple. And deserving of the same punishment.

True, it is not mentioned clearly in the New Testament. But no need, given that it was already clearly prohibited in Judaism, and assuming it was not a common practice. It is unnatural in the first place not to desire children. And it was probably obvious enough to the early, Jewish, Christians that it is murder.

It was, however, apparently practiced in pagan Greece and Rome. Hippocrates, therefore, though not a Christian, prohibits it in his oath for physicians, and Roman law prescribed exile for the crime. Several of the early Church Fathers, who were in contact with Greek and Roman culture, expressly say that it is prohibited: Tertullian, Athenagoras. None say it is permitted. The Fourth Century Council of Eliberis prohibited any woman soliciting an abortion from ever again receiving communion.

GW:
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. … Aquinas denied that personhood arose at fertilization by the semen. God directly infuses the soul at the completion of human formation.

Od:
This is a serious distortion of Aquinas. Is it clear from this that Aquinas expressly prohibited abortion at any stage of pregnancy?

I didn't think so.

Aristotle's view of ensoulment was popular in the late Middle Ages, but had no influence on Catholic doctrine on the matter of abortion. It is irrelevant.

GW:
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.

Od:
This is another serious distortion. All morality is a matter of natural law, according to Catholic teaching. It is equally binding on all, and accessible to all through reason and conscience. There is nothing special about abortion in this regard.

Nevertheless, the pope most definitely is, for Catholics, a legitimate arbiter of morality, as is the Catholic Church. Both are infallible in this matter. They are guided by the same God who created human reason.

GW:
John Henry Newman … 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. … Newman said: "I shall drink to the pope, if you please -- still, to conscience first, and to the pope afterward."

Od:
It is deceitful to pretend Cardinal Newman was speaking here of abortion. He was pointing out that you do not go to the pope to make it rain, that science is independent of religion. Nor is one supposed to obey even the pope against one's conscience.

So tell me, whose conscience honestly demands they kill their unborn child?

GW:
If we are to decide the matter of abortion by natural law, that means we must turn to … philosophers, neurobiologists, embryologists. Evangelicals want to exclude them because most give answers they do not want to hear

Od:
Wills contradicts himself. Did the Church ignore Aristotle, then? And it is precisely science that disproved Aristotle, and demonstrated that human life begins at conception.

GW:
… One cannot be indiscriminately pro-life.

If one claimed… that all life deserved moral respect, then plants have rights, and it might turn out that we would have little if anything to eat. …. Harvesting carrots… would constitute something of a massacre.

Od:
This is a classic straw man. Christianity has never held that animals and plants have the same souls as humans, or the same rights.

If the rights of humans must automatically be extended to all living things, Wills must also allow carrots the vote.

GW:
…. 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.

Od:
The difference can easily be explained in scientific terms. The complete code of the complete being is present in every nucleus of every cell, in the DNA. But semen and ova do not have the complete code. They are not, therefore, human beings. Hair clippings or saliva may have the complete code--though probably not--but are not stem cells. They lack the programming to be or to become a human being.

For analogy, I think any one of us can grasp the moral distinction between cutting off somebody's fingernail, and cutting out his brain. The one brings the processes of life to a halt. The other does not.

GW:
… in fact, two-thirds of … embryos produced … fail to live on because they do not embed in the womb wall. Nature … produces more embryos than are actually used. Are all the millions of embryos that fail to be embedded human persons?

Od:
Yes.

Wills’s science is a bit off; it’s 50%. But either way, the fact that half die is perfectly irrelevant. We all die. Does that prove we are not human?

No, it proves we are.

GW:
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?

Od:
GW clearly implies here that his answer is "yes."

This would be very bad news for the mentally or physically imperfect among us generally. If I cannot talk, I take it, I can be killed with impunity.

GW:
…. 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.

… 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.

Od:
This is all irrelevant, but Wills is even wrong here. A good number of infants born in the fifth month survive. One of my son's classmates did. At six, she is a perfectly normal child.

Moreover, here's an article discussing ultrasounds of fetal brains at 12 weeks. They obviously must exist by that time.

http://radiology.rsnajnls.org/cgi/content/full/215/1/205

Wills is not just looking for loopholes, he is inventing them.

GW:
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. …. 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.

Od:
The same argument could "prove" that Jews, let alone Terri Schiavo, are not really alive.

In either case, if one is not a foetus, or a Jew, the matter is essentially theoretical.