This theory of yours aligns well with my theory that the millions of millions of victims of Abortion, across the millennia, are a distinct set of martyrs similar to the Holy Innocents. I think that the world would greatly benefit from Pope Somebody the Somethingth declaring these souls to be saints...
"We know our mission here in the Church Militant is special and essential because one-half to two-thirds of our brothers-in-arms weren’t even deployed. We are a skeleton crew who has been asked to run the world and keep humanity going at no better than half-strength."
It brings to mind images like Helm's Deep, and the idea that Spirituality really is warfare. We need more of that. Lots more of that...
Great article, I haven't seen much Christian engagement with the apparent horror of the human condition assuming embryonic personhood - you present some compelling ways one can grapple with it. What about the science makes a strong positive case to you that conception is the appropriate initial moment of humanity/personhood/ensoulment? Do you think that if medeivals were shown everything we currently understand about fetuses and embryos that they would agree? I am inclined to use conception as the line because it's the only line I am 100% certain prevents all murders, but find it generally likely that the true line is sometime between conception and birth, and that the embryo-person relation is analagous to the seed-tree relation.
Footnote 4 was striking in highlighting your relative confidence in embryonic personhood vs Christianity, probably the most surprising statement in the essay to me.
Forewarning: I'm sick today, so not sure my brain is firing on all cylinders!
For the claim that humanity begins at conception, I think the case is pretty straightforward. Before conception, there is no human organism. After conception, there is. (Sperm and egg cells, like toenail cells, *belong to* a human organism, but they are not, by themselves, a human organism, and you can tell because, if you nurture a zygote for 20 years, you get an adult human being, whereas if you nurture a toenail cell for 20 years you just get a really big toenail.)
The only people who seem to have any doubts about this are people who are financially or ideologically committed to developing doubts, and they keep forgetting to continuing having those doubts in non-abortion contexts. For example, WhatToExpect.com's week-by-week pregnancy tracker is very clear that, at 1-2 weeks (pre-conception) there's "no baby," briefly remembers to refer to the zygote as "soon to become your baby," and then refers to him as "your baby" throughout the rest of the article anyway. Everyone knows baby starts at conception. At an early point in your life, you were a zygote (then an embryo/fetus/child/tween/teen/adult) (assuming you're an adult), but you were never an ovum.
EDIT: I forgot about this paper from 2021, which found that biologists broadly agreed with life-at-conception, which provoked a controversy because some his survey subjects felt they had been "tricked" into admitting something they were ideologically committed to not admitting, they tried getting him blacklisted for being a "right-to-lifer", and so on: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36629778/ . An amusing installment in the annals of modern academia however you slice it.
So they're human. Animate, self-assembling humans, at that, just like you and I.
Do they have human *souls*? For the Thomist, at least, yes, by definition. An animate, self-assembling human body has a human soul. The end. I have no doubt Thomas Aquinas, given modern embryology, would agree with immediate ensoulment.
I should admit that this was a subject of debate during the 20th century. I should also admit that my own father authored one of the key papers in the debate, which (as I understand it) largely brought that debate to its end: https://www.scribd.com/document/993042762/TheThomist-AquinasAndThePresenceOfTheHumanRationalSoulInTheEarlyEmbryo?secret_password=wIRFeWzPCFsfWvxM56oj . This probably biases me. Indeed, I must confess to never having read the middle of this article, and mostly imbibed its arguments at the dinner table. On the other hand, delayed hominization was a pretty common view among Thomists a hundred years ago and seems to be a pretty rare one today! I also can't really speak for Scotists or Neoplatonists, because I don't grok them, although my limited understanding is that their view of the matter was similar enough to Thomism's that they'd draw the same conclusions from modern biology.
The argument against fetal "personhood" usually runs something like: "To be a human person with rights (a soul), one must have such-and-such capability. At least some unborn children do not have that capability. Therefore those unborn children, while biologically human beings, are not human persons with rights / a soul." It's very hard to refute every version of this argument, because people who make this argument tend to have HUGELY divergent reasons for embracing the major premise, even when they agree on the decisive capability, which they don't. In light of these many different perspectives, I think your own view is extremely sensible: in cases of doubt, we should err on the side of not killing. That is the view I would take if I were less convinced of zygotic personhood. Broadly speaking, though, I tend to have three general responses to this kind of argument.
First, they tend to prove too much. "To be a human person with rights, one must have the capacity for reason." This is eminently sensible, focusing as it does on the quintessential human act. However, babies don't have this capacity until about a year postpartum anyway, so the argument proves infanticide is hunky-dory. To be sure, some people will accept this conclusion, and infanticide certainly has a long history in human culture. "To be a human person with rights, one must have the capacity to suffer." This leads one down a short road to animal personhood and the Shrimp Welfare Debate. Again, some people will accept this invitation, and are not irrational to do so! But enough people instinctively recognize animals are non-persons that pointing this out can defuse their argument. "To be a human person with rights, one must not be wholly dependent on another to survive." This is usually intended to make the cutoff viability, but actually makes the cutoff something like age 3, or possibly never. (Bad news for the elderly and infirm!)
Second, anticipating the first objection, some of these arguments are gerrymandered to fit a conclusion. "To be a human person, one must be able to hear." Why? Just because the fetus doesn't develop that capacity until after the interlocutor's preferred abortion cutoff. (Bad news for the deaf, of course.) "To be a human person, one must not be wholly dependent on one specific person to survive." Why? Just because the first viability argument made it okay to kill old people, and this one's been arbitrarily rewritten to avoid that. (Bad news for a one-year-old marooned on a desert island with exactly one adult!)
Third, if we really go deep into it, I'll sometimes make my real argument, which is that the human organism has every human capacity *in potency* from the moment of conception, even though it doesn't have those capacities *in actuality* until much later. If you draw the "personhood" line at the moment the human organism has every human capacity *in actuality*, then nobody has rights until puberty, when they develop the key human capacity to reproduce. It makes sense to instead draw the line where that capacity begins to develop in a self-sustaining, self-assembling human organism: at conception. But you've got to have a lot of time and patience to invest (on both sides) if you're going to get into act and potency in an abortion discussion, and it commits you to certain metaphysical claims that are (to say the least) not universally accepted.
But I admit that, for me as a Thomist, the question begins and ends with, "Is that a biological human? Okay, then it's got a human soul." Ensoulment/persnhood/humanity all begin at conception.
One caveat just for fun: of course, conception is a process. I do think it's an unsettled question when exactly *during conception* the sperm/egg become a new human being. I am personally sympathetic to the second-of-fusion view (defended here: https://www.bdfund.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wi_whitepaper_life_print.pdf ), but I'm open to arguments up to first cell division.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, hope you get well soon! I'm anticipating a long night with a slightly sick baby, and appreciate the thinking material. I read the linked essays by yourself and your father and find both well reasoned - but I'm not 100% convinced of the axioms of Aristotelian metaphysics underlying your dad's paper and what exactly is meant in all cases by effects not being greater than their causes (or what options remain for a causal role of parent or God in forming a body fit for a rational soil if the axiom is true as presented). The quotes he pulled from opposing positions were fascinating, and I was particularly intrigued by the thoughts on splitting and recombination.
Regarding the meat of your comment here, I agree that defining necessary and sufficient conditions for the moment of human personhood that include and exclude everyone I'd prefer is likely impossible. This doesn't seem fatal to the view that there is nonetheless a time when a zygote is not a person and a later time when a fetus is a person. I am similarly skeptical of the existence of necessary and sufficient definitions of porn, sex, or heaps - but can nonetheless successfully categorize most media as porn or not porn.
Potentiality uncarefully defined seems like it may exclude some impaired persons, but this seems possibly surmountable with careful definition. At which point the only inclusion/exclusion I currently find questionable is the earliest stage zygotes, which is a lot better than other attempts at necessary and sufficient definition.
Minor update: my father, hearing me brag about him online, insists that his paper was largely "a summary of others' work" and that he merely "helped complete a motion that was already well underway," both because of currents in Thomism and because of currents in Catholicism (e.g. Evangelium Vitae's definition of abortion as "the deliberate killing of an innocent human being").
My mother, however, thinks he is being too modest, and pointed out that he *knows* firsthand that his paper changed some minds in the field.
One of my favorite articles of yours for a while! As Roman said, I haven't seen much anyone who believes in embryonic personhood confronting the reality that the overwhelming majority of embryos throughout human history never got beyond the earliest stages of development.
I see two ways in which the pro choice argument on this operate in good faith:
1. If you really believed in embryonic personhood, you would be morally compelled to act regarding the natural loss of life that far exceeds deaths from abortion. But you don't even think about it. Therefore you don't even believe what you are saying. (And your real goal is to control women).
2. If embryonic personhood were true, it would mean God has designed a universe that slaughters most of humanity before they are born. This is absurd, and therefore worth rejecting. (Alternatively, without invoking God: this would be a universe too unjust for me to believe in.)
Your argument addresses #2. It does so within a specifically Catholic framework, which won't work for all Christians or for non-Christians. But it's so interesting! We, the born humans, are in fact a support structure for the eternal experience for the overwhelming majority of humanity.
Because you conceptualize pro-choicers as denying a truth that they actually know, and thus formulating arguments to waste your time, you maybe don't consider that *not* believing in embryonic personhood is the human default. As you say, it's quite recent that we even know what an embryo is, or how it works. Most humans throughout history have not believed in embryonic personhood (nor was such belief even possible) and most humans today still do not. Their questions raise real problems.
I want to return to argument #1, to the moral question it raises rather than the gotcha, and then circle to a concern about whether your response to #2 brings us to absurd conclusions in addressing #1.
Is there a moral imperative to act on behalf of the Mass of Innocents? To save their lives? To do whatever we can to reduce those deaths that far outnumber abortion? Leaving God out entirely, shouldn't this be the highest priority? Every medical advance ever made reduces death or suffering that was simply natural, until it wasn't. Something happening naturally is not a reason to accept it.
But then if we put God in, as you do, shouldn't we reverse this goal and try to generate as many embryos as possible that never see implantation? We should use the methods from IVF to create as many embryos as we can, from every fertile born human on earth, then destroy them all every day. This calls the most people to contemplation. The maximum number of people go to eternity with God, with no risk of screwing up their chances while born. Even if this is a sin, even if it is a mortal sin, then we are sacrificing ourselves for the good of so many others. Our moral imperative is to create and abort as many people as possible.
This position is clearly what you had in mind, and I see no flaws in it.
(There are several other tidbits that call my attention. For example, accepting that the Bible argues against fetal personhood wouldn't even mean you'd need to cease being Christian; you'd just need to stop seeing the Bible as inerrant or as divinely inspired. Plenty of Christians don't see the Bible that way.)
This theory of yours aligns well with my theory that the millions of millions of victims of Abortion, across the millennia, are a distinct set of martyrs similar to the Holy Innocents. I think that the world would greatly benefit from Pope Somebody the Somethingth declaring these souls to be saints...
I particularly like this line:
"We know our mission here in the Church Militant is special and essential because one-half to two-thirds of our brothers-in-arms weren’t even deployed. We are a skeleton crew who has been asked to run the world and keep humanity going at no better than half-strength."
It brings to mind images like Helm's Deep, and the idea that Spirituality really is warfare. We need more of that. Lots more of that...
Great article, I haven't seen much Christian engagement with the apparent horror of the human condition assuming embryonic personhood - you present some compelling ways one can grapple with it. What about the science makes a strong positive case to you that conception is the appropriate initial moment of humanity/personhood/ensoulment? Do you think that if medeivals were shown everything we currently understand about fetuses and embryos that they would agree? I am inclined to use conception as the line because it's the only line I am 100% certain prevents all murders, but find it generally likely that the true line is sometime between conception and birth, and that the embryo-person relation is analagous to the seed-tree relation.
Footnote 4 was striking in highlighting your relative confidence in embryonic personhood vs Christianity, probably the most surprising statement in the essay to me.
Forewarning: I'm sick today, so not sure my brain is firing on all cylinders!
For the claim that humanity begins at conception, I think the case is pretty straightforward. Before conception, there is no human organism. After conception, there is. (Sperm and egg cells, like toenail cells, *belong to* a human organism, but they are not, by themselves, a human organism, and you can tell because, if you nurture a zygote for 20 years, you get an adult human being, whereas if you nurture a toenail cell for 20 years you just get a really big toenail.)
The only people who seem to have any doubts about this are people who are financially or ideologically committed to developing doubts, and they keep forgetting to continuing having those doubts in non-abortion contexts. For example, WhatToExpect.com's week-by-week pregnancy tracker is very clear that, at 1-2 weeks (pre-conception) there's "no baby," briefly remembers to refer to the zygote as "soon to become your baby," and then refers to him as "your baby" throughout the rest of the article anyway. Everyone knows baby starts at conception. At an early point in your life, you were a zygote (then an embryo/fetus/child/tween/teen/adult) (assuming you're an adult), but you were never an ovum.
(I wrote somewhat more about this in 2015: https://ropersanchor.jamesjheaney.com/2015/09/30/bill-nyes-big-lie-and-sciences-bigger-problem/ )
EDIT: I forgot about this paper from 2021, which found that biologists broadly agreed with life-at-conception, which provoked a controversy because some his survey subjects felt they had been "tricked" into admitting something they were ideologically committed to not admitting, they tried getting him blacklisted for being a "right-to-lifer", and so on: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36629778/ . An amusing installment in the annals of modern academia however you slice it.
So they're human. Animate, self-assembling humans, at that, just like you and I.
Do they have human *souls*? For the Thomist, at least, yes, by definition. An animate, self-assembling human body has a human soul. The end. I have no doubt Thomas Aquinas, given modern embryology, would agree with immediate ensoulment.
I should admit that this was a subject of debate during the 20th century. I should also admit that my own father authored one of the key papers in the debate, which (as I understand it) largely brought that debate to its end: https://www.scribd.com/document/993042762/TheThomist-AquinasAndThePresenceOfTheHumanRationalSoulInTheEarlyEmbryo?secret_password=wIRFeWzPCFsfWvxM56oj . This probably biases me. Indeed, I must confess to never having read the middle of this article, and mostly imbibed its arguments at the dinner table. On the other hand, delayed hominization was a pretty common view among Thomists a hundred years ago and seems to be a pretty rare one today! I also can't really speak for Scotists or Neoplatonists, because I don't grok them, although my limited understanding is that their view of the matter was similar enough to Thomism's that they'd draw the same conclusions from modern biology.
The argument against fetal "personhood" usually runs something like: "To be a human person with rights (a soul), one must have such-and-such capability. At least some unborn children do not have that capability. Therefore those unborn children, while biologically human beings, are not human persons with rights / a soul." It's very hard to refute every version of this argument, because people who make this argument tend to have HUGELY divergent reasons for embracing the major premise, even when they agree on the decisive capability, which they don't. In light of these many different perspectives, I think your own view is extremely sensible: in cases of doubt, we should err on the side of not killing. That is the view I would take if I were less convinced of zygotic personhood. Broadly speaking, though, I tend to have three general responses to this kind of argument.
First, they tend to prove too much. "To be a human person with rights, one must have the capacity for reason." This is eminently sensible, focusing as it does on the quintessential human act. However, babies don't have this capacity until about a year postpartum anyway, so the argument proves infanticide is hunky-dory. To be sure, some people will accept this conclusion, and infanticide certainly has a long history in human culture. "To be a human person with rights, one must have the capacity to suffer." This leads one down a short road to animal personhood and the Shrimp Welfare Debate. Again, some people will accept this invitation, and are not irrational to do so! But enough people instinctively recognize animals are non-persons that pointing this out can defuse their argument. "To be a human person with rights, one must not be wholly dependent on another to survive." This is usually intended to make the cutoff viability, but actually makes the cutoff something like age 3, or possibly never. (Bad news for the elderly and infirm!)
Second, anticipating the first objection, some of these arguments are gerrymandered to fit a conclusion. "To be a human person, one must be able to hear." Why? Just because the fetus doesn't develop that capacity until after the interlocutor's preferred abortion cutoff. (Bad news for the deaf, of course.) "To be a human person, one must not be wholly dependent on one specific person to survive." Why? Just because the first viability argument made it okay to kill old people, and this one's been arbitrarily rewritten to avoid that. (Bad news for a one-year-old marooned on a desert island with exactly one adult!)
Third, if we really go deep into it, I'll sometimes make my real argument, which is that the human organism has every human capacity *in potency* from the moment of conception, even though it doesn't have those capacities *in actuality* until much later. If you draw the "personhood" line at the moment the human organism has every human capacity *in actuality*, then nobody has rights until puberty, when they develop the key human capacity to reproduce. It makes sense to instead draw the line where that capacity begins to develop in a self-sustaining, self-assembling human organism: at conception. But you've got to have a lot of time and patience to invest (on both sides) if you're going to get into act and potency in an abortion discussion, and it commits you to certain metaphysical claims that are (to say the least) not universally accepted.
But I admit that, for me as a Thomist, the question begins and ends with, "Is that a biological human? Okay, then it's got a human soul." Ensoulment/persnhood/humanity all begin at conception.
One caveat just for fun: of course, conception is a process. I do think it's an unsettled question when exactly *during conception* the sperm/egg become a new human being. I am personally sympathetic to the second-of-fusion view (defended here: https://www.bdfund.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wi_whitepaper_life_print.pdf ), but I'm open to arguments up to first cell division.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, hope you get well soon! I'm anticipating a long night with a slightly sick baby, and appreciate the thinking material. I read the linked essays by yourself and your father and find both well reasoned - but I'm not 100% convinced of the axioms of Aristotelian metaphysics underlying your dad's paper and what exactly is meant in all cases by effects not being greater than their causes (or what options remain for a causal role of parent or God in forming a body fit for a rational soil if the axiom is true as presented). The quotes he pulled from opposing positions were fascinating, and I was particularly intrigued by the thoughts on splitting and recombination.
Regarding the meat of your comment here, I agree that defining necessary and sufficient conditions for the moment of human personhood that include and exclude everyone I'd prefer is likely impossible. This doesn't seem fatal to the view that there is nonetheless a time when a zygote is not a person and a later time when a fetus is a person. I am similarly skeptical of the existence of necessary and sufficient definitions of porn, sex, or heaps - but can nonetheless successfully categorize most media as porn or not porn.
Potentiality uncarefully defined seems like it may exclude some impaired persons, but this seems possibly surmountable with careful definition. At which point the only inclusion/exclusion I currently find questionable is the earliest stage zygotes, which is a lot better than other attempts at necessary and sufficient definition.
Minor update: my father, hearing me brag about him online, insists that his paper was largely "a summary of others' work" and that he merely "helped complete a motion that was already well underway," both because of currents in Thomism and because of currents in Catholicism (e.g. Evangelium Vitae's definition of abortion as "the deliberate killing of an innocent human being").
My mother, however, thinks he is being too modest, and pointed out that he *knows* firsthand that his paper changed some minds in the field.
One of my favorite articles of yours for a while! As Roman said, I haven't seen much anyone who believes in embryonic personhood confronting the reality that the overwhelming majority of embryos throughout human history never got beyond the earliest stages of development.
I see two ways in which the pro choice argument on this operate in good faith:
1. If you really believed in embryonic personhood, you would be morally compelled to act regarding the natural loss of life that far exceeds deaths from abortion. But you don't even think about it. Therefore you don't even believe what you are saying. (And your real goal is to control women).
2. If embryonic personhood were true, it would mean God has designed a universe that slaughters most of humanity before they are born. This is absurd, and therefore worth rejecting. (Alternatively, without invoking God: this would be a universe too unjust for me to believe in.)
Your argument addresses #2. It does so within a specifically Catholic framework, which won't work for all Christians or for non-Christians. But it's so interesting! We, the born humans, are in fact a support structure for the eternal experience for the overwhelming majority of humanity.
Because you conceptualize pro-choicers as denying a truth that they actually know, and thus formulating arguments to waste your time, you maybe don't consider that *not* believing in embryonic personhood is the human default. As you say, it's quite recent that we even know what an embryo is, or how it works. Most humans throughout history have not believed in embryonic personhood (nor was such belief even possible) and most humans today still do not. Their questions raise real problems.
I want to return to argument #1, to the moral question it raises rather than the gotcha, and then circle to a concern about whether your response to #2 brings us to absurd conclusions in addressing #1.
Is there a moral imperative to act on behalf of the Mass of Innocents? To save their lives? To do whatever we can to reduce those deaths that far outnumber abortion? Leaving God out entirely, shouldn't this be the highest priority? Every medical advance ever made reduces death or suffering that was simply natural, until it wasn't. Something happening naturally is not a reason to accept it.
But then if we put God in, as you do, shouldn't we reverse this goal and try to generate as many embryos as possible that never see implantation? We should use the methods from IVF to create as many embryos as we can, from every fertile born human on earth, then destroy them all every day. This calls the most people to contemplation. The maximum number of people go to eternity with God, with no risk of screwing up their chances while born. Even if this is a sin, even if it is a mortal sin, then we are sacrificing ourselves for the good of so many others. Our moral imperative is to create and abort as many people as possible.
This position is clearly what you had in mind, and I see no flaws in it.
(There are several other tidbits that call my attention. For example, accepting that the Bible argues against fetal personhood wouldn't even mean you'd need to cease being Christian; you'd just need to stop seeing the Bible as inerrant or as divinely inspired. Plenty of Christians don't see the Bible that way.)