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.)
I think I mostly address your questions in my reply to Roman below, but I do want to clarify one point: I don't think that pro-choicers are universally acting in bad faith when they either deny unborn personhood or deny unborn rights (even conceding unborn personhood, as JJ Thomson does). Some are, some aren't, most just haven't thought about it very much. After all, most people haven't thought very much about most issues, and there are good and bad-faith defenders for all positions!
In my reply to Roman, I intended to accuse only those who deny the *biological identity* of the fetus of bad faith. To this day, you get people who say that the child in utero is simply a "clump of cells," or an "extension of the mother," or who otherwise deny that an organism of the species homo sapiens (the very same human organism that will, if nothing prevents it, continue on through pregnancy, childhood, and adulthood) is alive in the womb, and is killed by abortion. I think all these people are either woefully ignorant or arguing in bad faith, and are indeed making up arguments just to waste my time and/or stave off their own cognitive dissonance.
But people who argue that this clearly human organism is not a human *person* with a human *soul* are at least making honest arguments. I don't agree with it, I don't think any of the arguments are especially good, and I obviously think the consequences of it are quite horrifying, but these are arguments plausible enough that people can and do really buy into them.
Sorry, just wanted to clarify that because I think you thought I was accusing you and others who think like you of bad-faith thinking, which was not my intention!
Your conversation with Roman seems to revolve around arguments and counterarguments for zygotic personhood. But the core questions of my comment assume the correctness of your position on this. They're about the moral consequences of the ideas you explore, and I don't see your answer to them with Roman:
"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."
The first paragraph is inherent to zygotic rights. The second paragraph relates to your particular story here, and it's similar to saying someone ought to go around murdering people right after they're baptized, or right after confession, if you believe that either of these puts someone into a state of grace. Except you can murder thousands of people at scale, and they're *definitely* in a state of grace, without the opportunity for mistake. It's ridiculous, but it seems like a rational moral position if we accept your ideas about the Mass of Innocents. So why isn't it?
Sorry, I meant River! I got mixed up. My reply to Roman was where I accused people of bad faith, but my reply to River was where I talked about, well, mass extermination programs. :) Too many R-names, my bad.
Oh! River did ask the same question! And your response that it's the same question as "why not murder all the six year olds" is pretty much what I just said too.
I'm not sure I'm persuaded by your argument not to kill the six-year-olds, but it's very consistent with other moral arguments you've made that I haven't agreed with: don't vote for the slightly less evil candidate, or don't lie to the Nazi looking for Jews, for example. This kind of virtue ethics seems more about keeping your own hands clean than actually doing good. (Conversely, of course, this question rose to begin with because utilitarianism plus eternal afterlives goes completely haywire.)
Obviously, we agree about not killing six year olds (or people in general), but for different reasons.
I would only say in my defense that my concern is very much with doing good; I just don't think it's *possible* to do good by intentionally doing evil, because the thing you're actually doing is evil. It's not merely a hygienic concern, though I can appreciate how it might look that way from an outside perspective.
(FWIW, I am also very much anti-Sisko in "In The Pale Moonlight." I adore the episode anyway for showing his descent one step at a time, and for those wonderful final lines -- I *can* live with it! -- but I do wish the lingering costs of ITPM had been explored more later on.)
I appreciate this thoughtful article and the hopeful vision you imagine. As someone who shares a hope in God's salvation but doesn't share your views on abortion, I hadn't encountered or engaged with the miscarriage argument before, and I appreciate your response to it. Below is my attempt to engage in good faith with your theodicy as it relates to questions of abortion. I can only hope that good faith comes across.
You say: “For the pro-lifer who believes in God, the pro-choice argument from fetal death rate does reveal a problem. It’s just not a problem with the pro-life position.”
Perhaps that’s so, but it seems to me that your massa innocens “story” in fact does present a potential problem for abortion—or at least raises more questions than it answers.
If we assume unbaptized, unborn children die to a contemplative life that is “simply superior” to the active life before they are aware of that active life alternative, that must be a good thing for that child. As you say for those whose deaths are unintentional: “Perhaps half the human race is jumping for a chance to return to their true home country.”
Indeed, per Paul, we all in some sense ought to be desiring to return to the home country—yet we remain (and refuse to kill ourselves) according to a sense of duty and sacrifice, for “to live is Christ; to die is gain.” But as you note, an unthinking, unborn child simply cannot know Christ as we do. So for that child, to die is gain, and there is no counterweight.
Further, under the salvation scheme you’ve postulated, whether the unborn child arrives at their true home country by act of God or act of man (or woman) makes no difference to that child. They are home with God.
So, if massa innocens is right, we must condemn abortion by some other metric than what is good or not good for the unborn child.
And you do that. Re: abortion, you conclude: “Of course, none of this would make abortion okay. Quite the contrary: if the relatively small number of humans sent into this suffering world were only sent here because each of them is somehow vital to the fate of humanity, then tearing some of those small humans limb from limb (or poisoning them, or suffocating them, or starving them) turns out to be not just barbaric, but self-destructive. We’re killing our own reinforcements!”
Setting aside the purported barbarism (which to me seems somewhat undermined by the theodicy but in any event doesn't bear on the theodicy / begs the broader ethical question(s) of abortion), you conclude that abortion is wrong because it deprives humanity—us—of our fellow active laborers.
I see two challenges with that:
First, you appear to acknowledge some doubts about that premise, both objective and subjective: objectively, you cast doubt on whether we who remain are somehow worse off without those children: "looked at from a wider perspective, abortion does not change the human reality all that much." You also note that, even from an emotional or psychological standpoint, the effects of such a death toll may be relatively constrained to a select few (including yourself) who in fact can feel those effects. While for you, it is "shocking to contemplate the magnitude of the crime we have inflicted upon ourselves," you acknowledge that "Most don’t. From observation, it seems to me that many can’t." Of course, I am not suggesting the subjective response alone is a basis to draw an affirmative ethical conclusion one way or the other. But it does give me pause. If the question is whether we (not the children) are worse off, and we (not the children) don't feel worse off, that collective subjective response (or lack thereof) bears some significance. Accepting those doubts, we might conclude that, if there is a wrong done to us who remain, it would need to be in something other than either objective human terms or our collective, subjective response. I suppose it would need to be in some theological terms—in God's accounting, not ours.
Second, even if the premise (that we who remain are worse off) is correct, perhaps along that unknowable theological metric, it still doesn’t seem to me to be conclusive as to whether abortion is evil in the scheme of this theodicy. For starters, we’d have to measure our societal deprivation against the individual improvement of the unborn child's station. More precisely, we'd have to measure it against the collective accumulation of such individual improvements, which, given the volume of abortions you cite, could be quite large. Simply put, if it is better for the child but worse for the living humans when a child dies in utero, each time a child is born, we would be performing a minor sacrifice—subjecting the child to an inferior active life instead of the contemplative life in the name of God’s plan for humanity writ large.
Again, that balance may be toward the good—God and humanity may need a certain amount of active laborers, despite the cost to them individually of performing that service. But I don’t know that we can simply conclude that a fortiori.
Instead, to draw that conclusion, we’d have to make at least several other assumptions—assumptions that I think are glossed over by your use of the word “vital” above: that God wills for those specific unborn children to live and labor (as opposed to the others that die in utero without abortion); that God deliberately subjugates His will for them to live to the will and agency of the humans who abort them; and that God’s will and ability to preserve humanity writ large is somehow hindered by that subjugation in a material way.
Again, those assumptions may be right (or, for our purposes, conceivable). But I can’t help but think that, by posing these questions, this particular theodicy doesn’t avoid the problems related to the question of abortion—it just flattens them.
Rather, it seems to me that we wind up in the same place, asking the same fundamental questions about the same fundamental issues—the issues you identify: "the human right to live and the fetus’s humanity." Even if “there is no logical connection between a population’s natural death rate and its right not to be killed intentionally," we still have to ask the same questions: How do we define murder? Is it better for a particular human to be alive than to die? Is that answer the same depending on whether that human has chosen God and become a saved Christian? Is it the same if that human never had the opportunity to choose God?
Ultimately, I suppose that means I don't see this miscarriage argument to be quite as vapid as you do. My takeaway from your article and this effort at responding is that our views on abortion are probably more directly linked to our theodicies than we are first inclined to think.
To be sure, if the theodicy I propose doesn't seem helpful, discard it! The argument against abortion is much more straightforward, and requires no wild speculation about the ineffable Divine Plan:
1. It is always wrong to intentionally kill an innocent, non-consenting human being. (common legal and moral principle; see, e.g., Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 3, the Fifth Commandment, STTNG 2x9 "The Measure of a Man")
2. Abortion kills an innocent, non-consenting human being. (observed fact)
3. Therefore, abortion is always wrong.
If some loose speculations on God's will obscure any of those points, my theodicy has lost its flavor; toss it out and trample it underfoot!
That being said, the problem you raise with it seems familiar to me. I don't know which specific Christian tradition you hail from, but, as a Catholic, it strikes me as very similar to the "Why don't we kill all the six-year-olds?" problem.
In Catholic thought, no one under the age of reason is capable of culpability for actual sin. The legal age of reason in Catholicism is 7. So any baptized Catholic who dies under the age of 7 is certain to go to Heaven. It's not any of this hopeful speculation I did in this blog post; it's a guarantee.
In this blog post, I speculated that those who die in utero are given the *opportunity* to choose Christ, but, for the baptized six-year-old, the choice has already been made. Dead at 6 --> straight to Heaven. Zero risk. Eternal happiness. They even get nearly everything they missed out on here on Earth when the resurrection of the body finally occurs, so they aren't even really losing anything -- except the danger of mortal sin and condemnation to Hell for all eternity, which they would experience, starting at age 7, for the remainder of their mortal lives.
So why don't we kill all six-year-olds? This would spare them the risk and reap enormous benefits for them. If we love them, it reaps enormous benefits for us, too!
Perhaps you don't share this particular view of the age of reason, which is peculiarly Catholic (and, relatedly, peculiarly legalistic). But I suspect that your tradition does have some form of this issue. At the very least, a baptized infant who is killed goes straight to Heaven, right? So why don't we kill all of them, for their own sakes? Or, if we don't have a moral obligation to kill them all, then is it not at least morally *permissible* to kill them if they are (for example) unwanted?
I don't know how your particular tradition answers this problem, but it seems to me that, whatever answer it has, it probably provides most of the answer to the question, "Assuming arguendo that God is generous to unborn children, why shouldn't we kill unborn children?"
Catholicism, for its part, tends to answer the problem by arguing that, under the law of human nature, the law "written on our hearts" (Rom 2:15), killing people is bad for *us,* even if it's ultimately works out quite well for the victims in some important way. In order to become the kind of person who kills a lot of six-year-olds with a clean conscience, one must destroy something fundamental in oneself that will turn one into a moral monster (which will come out in all kinds of other ways). This is bad.
(This generally comes with a side order of "utilitarianism is a bad ethical theory; have you tried virtue ethics? or at the very least divine command theory?" Indeed, you can see a certain affinity between your argument here and the utilitarian argument for the Repugnant Conclusion. Catholicism likes utility, but is very leery of utilitarianism.)
Moreover, we aren't God. We don't get to take a good gift God gave to a person away from that person because we think it would be better for that person not to have it. That's up to God, and His plan appears to be very big and complicated, and involves Him killing everyone in His own good time... while He tells us very clearly not to kill *anyone.* (He may or may not be maximizing utility when he brings down the axe.)
However, that's only (a short version of) Catholicism's answer to the kill-all-the-six-year-olds problem. Your tradition may have a very different line of thinking about it. But I suspect that, whatever your answer is to that problem (or its nearest equivalent), it will also serve as an answer to at least many of your difficulties with my speculation in this article. (I could be wrong, of course!)
Thanks for reading, and for writing a very long, thoughtful reply!
I'll quote a line from H. Lyman Stebbins here, whose correspondence with C.S. Lewis I just recently came across (and which I imagine you would approve of, given its pro-Catholic conclusions): "Now I find myself in something of a quandary. Not to write to you again would be ungracious... Yet if I do write to discuss the points you raise, you may with some justice think I am going beyond the original terms." Although Stebbins proceeded to respond, I am declining to do so for now, in part because I imagine there will be other opportunities for it. I've been enjoying your newsletter via email for awhile, but am new to the platform and have just started dipping my toes into actually engaging instead of just lurking. So I appreciate your fulsome response. For what it's worth, I grew up in the Episcopal tradition, and though I was wed in that tradition, I don't feel wed to it, for the reasons I outline in my most recent essay: https://open.substack.com/pub/riverallen/p/all-theologies-are-wrong-but-some?r=r7xf6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true. (Shameless plug!) But in any event, I'm glad to have corresponded.
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.)
I think I mostly address your questions in my reply to Roman below, but I do want to clarify one point: I don't think that pro-choicers are universally acting in bad faith when they either deny unborn personhood or deny unborn rights (even conceding unborn personhood, as JJ Thomson does). Some are, some aren't, most just haven't thought about it very much. After all, most people haven't thought very much about most issues, and there are good and bad-faith defenders for all positions!
In my reply to Roman, I intended to accuse only those who deny the *biological identity* of the fetus of bad faith. To this day, you get people who say that the child in utero is simply a "clump of cells," or an "extension of the mother," or who otherwise deny that an organism of the species homo sapiens (the very same human organism that will, if nothing prevents it, continue on through pregnancy, childhood, and adulthood) is alive in the womb, and is killed by abortion. I think all these people are either woefully ignorant or arguing in bad faith, and are indeed making up arguments just to waste my time and/or stave off their own cognitive dissonance.
But people who argue that this clearly human organism is not a human *person* with a human *soul* are at least making honest arguments. I don't agree with it, I don't think any of the arguments are especially good, and I obviously think the consequences of it are quite horrifying, but these are arguments plausible enough that people can and do really buy into them.
Sorry, just wanted to clarify that because I think you thought I was accusing you and others who think like you of bad-faith thinking, which was not my intention!
Your conversation with Roman seems to revolve around arguments and counterarguments for zygotic personhood. But the core questions of my comment assume the correctness of your position on this. They're about the moral consequences of the ideas you explore, and I don't see your answer to them with Roman:
"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."
The first paragraph is inherent to zygotic rights. The second paragraph relates to your particular story here, and it's similar to saying someone ought to go around murdering people right after they're baptized, or right after confession, if you believe that either of these puts someone into a state of grace. Except you can murder thousands of people at scale, and they're *definitely* in a state of grace, without the opportunity for mistake. It's ridiculous, but it seems like a rational moral position if we accept your ideas about the Mass of Innocents. So why isn't it?
Sorry, I meant River! I got mixed up. My reply to Roman was where I accused people of bad faith, but my reply to River was where I talked about, well, mass extermination programs. :) Too many R-names, my bad.
Oh! River did ask the same question! And your response that it's the same question as "why not murder all the six year olds" is pretty much what I just said too.
I'm not sure I'm persuaded by your argument not to kill the six-year-olds, but it's very consistent with other moral arguments you've made that I haven't agreed with: don't vote for the slightly less evil candidate, or don't lie to the Nazi looking for Jews, for example. This kind of virtue ethics seems more about keeping your own hands clean than actually doing good. (Conversely, of course, this question rose to begin with because utilitarianism plus eternal afterlives goes completely haywire.)
Obviously, we agree about not killing six year olds (or people in general), but for different reasons.
I would only say in my defense that my concern is very much with doing good; I just don't think it's *possible* to do good by intentionally doing evil, because the thing you're actually doing is evil. It's not merely a hygienic concern, though I can appreciate how it might look that way from an outside perspective.
(FWIW, I am also very much anti-Sisko in "In The Pale Moonlight." I adore the episode anyway for showing his descent one step at a time, and for those wonderful final lines -- I *can* live with it! -- but I do wish the lingering costs of ITPM had been explored more later on.)
I appreciate this thoughtful article and the hopeful vision you imagine. As someone who shares a hope in God's salvation but doesn't share your views on abortion, I hadn't encountered or engaged with the miscarriage argument before, and I appreciate your response to it. Below is my attempt to engage in good faith with your theodicy as it relates to questions of abortion. I can only hope that good faith comes across.
You say: “For the pro-lifer who believes in God, the pro-choice argument from fetal death rate does reveal a problem. It’s just not a problem with the pro-life position.”
Perhaps that’s so, but it seems to me that your massa innocens “story” in fact does present a potential problem for abortion—or at least raises more questions than it answers.
If we assume unbaptized, unborn children die to a contemplative life that is “simply superior” to the active life before they are aware of that active life alternative, that must be a good thing for that child. As you say for those whose deaths are unintentional: “Perhaps half the human race is jumping for a chance to return to their true home country.”
Indeed, per Paul, we all in some sense ought to be desiring to return to the home country—yet we remain (and refuse to kill ourselves) according to a sense of duty and sacrifice, for “to live is Christ; to die is gain.” But as you note, an unthinking, unborn child simply cannot know Christ as we do. So for that child, to die is gain, and there is no counterweight.
Further, under the salvation scheme you’ve postulated, whether the unborn child arrives at their true home country by act of God or act of man (or woman) makes no difference to that child. They are home with God.
So, if massa innocens is right, we must condemn abortion by some other metric than what is good or not good for the unborn child.
And you do that. Re: abortion, you conclude: “Of course, none of this would make abortion okay. Quite the contrary: if the relatively small number of humans sent into this suffering world were only sent here because each of them is somehow vital to the fate of humanity, then tearing some of those small humans limb from limb (or poisoning them, or suffocating them, or starving them) turns out to be not just barbaric, but self-destructive. We’re killing our own reinforcements!”
Setting aside the purported barbarism (which to me seems somewhat undermined by the theodicy but in any event doesn't bear on the theodicy / begs the broader ethical question(s) of abortion), you conclude that abortion is wrong because it deprives humanity—us—of our fellow active laborers.
I see two challenges with that:
First, you appear to acknowledge some doubts about that premise, both objective and subjective: objectively, you cast doubt on whether we who remain are somehow worse off without those children: "looked at from a wider perspective, abortion does not change the human reality all that much." You also note that, even from an emotional or psychological standpoint, the effects of such a death toll may be relatively constrained to a select few (including yourself) who in fact can feel those effects. While for you, it is "shocking to contemplate the magnitude of the crime we have inflicted upon ourselves," you acknowledge that "Most don’t. From observation, it seems to me that many can’t." Of course, I am not suggesting the subjective response alone is a basis to draw an affirmative ethical conclusion one way or the other. But it does give me pause. If the question is whether we (not the children) are worse off, and we (not the children) don't feel worse off, that collective subjective response (or lack thereof) bears some significance. Accepting those doubts, we might conclude that, if there is a wrong done to us who remain, it would need to be in something other than either objective human terms or our collective, subjective response. I suppose it would need to be in some theological terms—in God's accounting, not ours.
Second, even if the premise (that we who remain are worse off) is correct, perhaps along that unknowable theological metric, it still doesn’t seem to me to be conclusive as to whether abortion is evil in the scheme of this theodicy. For starters, we’d have to measure our societal deprivation against the individual improvement of the unborn child's station. More precisely, we'd have to measure it against the collective accumulation of such individual improvements, which, given the volume of abortions you cite, could be quite large. Simply put, if it is better for the child but worse for the living humans when a child dies in utero, each time a child is born, we would be performing a minor sacrifice—subjecting the child to an inferior active life instead of the contemplative life in the name of God’s plan for humanity writ large.
Again, that balance may be toward the good—God and humanity may need a certain amount of active laborers, despite the cost to them individually of performing that service. But I don’t know that we can simply conclude that a fortiori.
Instead, to draw that conclusion, we’d have to make at least several other assumptions—assumptions that I think are glossed over by your use of the word “vital” above: that God wills for those specific unborn children to live and labor (as opposed to the others that die in utero without abortion); that God deliberately subjugates His will for them to live to the will and agency of the humans who abort them; and that God’s will and ability to preserve humanity writ large is somehow hindered by that subjugation in a material way.
Again, those assumptions may be right (or, for our purposes, conceivable). But I can’t help but think that, by posing these questions, this particular theodicy doesn’t avoid the problems related to the question of abortion—it just flattens them.
Rather, it seems to me that we wind up in the same place, asking the same fundamental questions about the same fundamental issues—the issues you identify: "the human right to live and the fetus’s humanity." Even if “there is no logical connection between a population’s natural death rate and its right not to be killed intentionally," we still have to ask the same questions: How do we define murder? Is it better for a particular human to be alive than to die? Is that answer the same depending on whether that human has chosen God and become a saved Christian? Is it the same if that human never had the opportunity to choose God?
Ultimately, I suppose that means I don't see this miscarriage argument to be quite as vapid as you do. My takeaway from your article and this effort at responding is that our views on abortion are probably more directly linked to our theodicies than we are first inclined to think.
To be sure, if the theodicy I propose doesn't seem helpful, discard it! The argument against abortion is much more straightforward, and requires no wild speculation about the ineffable Divine Plan:
1. It is always wrong to intentionally kill an innocent, non-consenting human being. (common legal and moral principle; see, e.g., Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 3, the Fifth Commandment, STTNG 2x9 "The Measure of a Man")
2. Abortion kills an innocent, non-consenting human being. (observed fact)
3. Therefore, abortion is always wrong.
If some loose speculations on God's will obscure any of those points, my theodicy has lost its flavor; toss it out and trample it underfoot!
That being said, the problem you raise with it seems familiar to me. I don't know which specific Christian tradition you hail from, but, as a Catholic, it strikes me as very similar to the "Why don't we kill all the six-year-olds?" problem.
In Catholic thought, no one under the age of reason is capable of culpability for actual sin. The legal age of reason in Catholicism is 7. So any baptized Catholic who dies under the age of 7 is certain to go to Heaven. It's not any of this hopeful speculation I did in this blog post; it's a guarantee.
In this blog post, I speculated that those who die in utero are given the *opportunity* to choose Christ, but, for the baptized six-year-old, the choice has already been made. Dead at 6 --> straight to Heaven. Zero risk. Eternal happiness. They even get nearly everything they missed out on here on Earth when the resurrection of the body finally occurs, so they aren't even really losing anything -- except the danger of mortal sin and condemnation to Hell for all eternity, which they would experience, starting at age 7, for the remainder of their mortal lives.
So why don't we kill all six-year-olds? This would spare them the risk and reap enormous benefits for them. If we love them, it reaps enormous benefits for us, too!
Perhaps you don't share this particular view of the age of reason, which is peculiarly Catholic (and, relatedly, peculiarly legalistic). But I suspect that your tradition does have some form of this issue. At the very least, a baptized infant who is killed goes straight to Heaven, right? So why don't we kill all of them, for their own sakes? Or, if we don't have a moral obligation to kill them all, then is it not at least morally *permissible* to kill them if they are (for example) unwanted?
I don't know how your particular tradition answers this problem, but it seems to me that, whatever answer it has, it probably provides most of the answer to the question, "Assuming arguendo that God is generous to unborn children, why shouldn't we kill unborn children?"
Catholicism, for its part, tends to answer the problem by arguing that, under the law of human nature, the law "written on our hearts" (Rom 2:15), killing people is bad for *us,* even if it's ultimately works out quite well for the victims in some important way. In order to become the kind of person who kills a lot of six-year-olds with a clean conscience, one must destroy something fundamental in oneself that will turn one into a moral monster (which will come out in all kinds of other ways). This is bad.
(This generally comes with a side order of "utilitarianism is a bad ethical theory; have you tried virtue ethics? or at the very least divine command theory?" Indeed, you can see a certain affinity between your argument here and the utilitarian argument for the Repugnant Conclusion. Catholicism likes utility, but is very leery of utilitarianism.)
Moreover, we aren't God. We don't get to take a good gift God gave to a person away from that person because we think it would be better for that person not to have it. That's up to God, and His plan appears to be very big and complicated, and involves Him killing everyone in His own good time... while He tells us very clearly not to kill *anyone.* (He may or may not be maximizing utility when he brings down the axe.)
However, that's only (a short version of) Catholicism's answer to the kill-all-the-six-year-olds problem. Your tradition may have a very different line of thinking about it. But I suspect that, whatever your answer is to that problem (or its nearest equivalent), it will also serve as an answer to at least many of your difficulties with my speculation in this article. (I could be wrong, of course!)
Thanks for reading, and for writing a very long, thoughtful reply!
I'll quote a line from H. Lyman Stebbins here, whose correspondence with C.S. Lewis I just recently came across (and which I imagine you would approve of, given its pro-Catholic conclusions): "Now I find myself in something of a quandary. Not to write to you again would be ungracious... Yet if I do write to discuss the points you raise, you may with some justice think I am going beyond the original terms." Although Stebbins proceeded to respond, I am declining to do so for now, in part because I imagine there will be other opportunities for it. I've been enjoying your newsletter via email for awhile, but am new to the platform and have just started dipping my toes into actually engaging instead of just lurking. So I appreciate your fulsome response. For what it's worth, I grew up in the Episcopal tradition, and though I was wed in that tradition, I don't feel wed to it, for the reasons I outline in my most recent essay: https://open.substack.com/pub/riverallen/p/all-theologies-are-wrong-but-some?r=r7xf6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true. (Shameless plug!) But in any event, I'm glad to have corresponded.