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I was baptized Catholic when I was three weeks old and my parents raised me in that faith. However, due to lack of accessibility, I didn’t finish childhood catechetical development. Making matters worse, my family disintegrated around the same time, with a predictable result: I got pretty angry at God. By the end of high school, I was still nominally Catholic, but I hadn’t ever started Confirmation preparation and I saw no reason to do so. This situation persisted for the next decade or so, during which I was married and divorced; and during which I also started my career in employee benefits.
During that time, I had several personal experiences that caused me to actually think about my position on the abortion debate. It was obvious to me that the developing embryo/fetus was a human being — it certainly wasn’t anything else — and genetically distinct from both parents. But when did it actually become a human life and worthy of defense?
At that point, I was familiar with the idea that viruses are either the most complex form of non-life or the simplest form of life. There didn’t seem to be any scientific consensus on that fact, because there didn’t seem to be any scientific consensus on the definition of “life.” A cursory check on the subject clearly showed that the concept of life is actually philosophical, not scientific, and thus open for moral interpretation. There’s no way to tell, from a scientific standpoint, where the threshold between “alive” and “not alive” actually exists. Thus, there’s really no way to tell whether something is a life or not.
Embryos and fetuses, however, have something that viruses don’t: cells. Thus, they’re clearly more biologically complex than viruses from the moment they come into being. Given that viruses might be alive, it stands to reason that even a single embryonic cell also could be — and, in fact, it was more likely to be alive than a virus. There was no way to be absolutely certain. But the reason for that uncertainty couldn’t be resolved by applying scientific criteria; and thus, the debate over when the embryo became a “life” couldn’t be resolved via science.
From there, my stance became not moral, but pragmatic. Since embryos might be alive, and since they were genetically distinct from their parents, the only way to be absolutely sure that we weren’t killing a human life was not to kill an embryo. That’s why I oppose abortion. Since it’s not clear when a developing, but not yet born, human being comes to life, I’m choosing to err on the side of caution. Yes, that means I potentially could be protecting non-alive beings. But the alternative would be allowing the destruction of a living being.
Understanding embryonic development also means I clearly understand the difference between conception and pregnancy. The embryo actually becomes a genetically distinct being prior to the beginning of its mother’s pregnancy. Thus, ending a pregnancy could never not mean the potential of destroying a living human being. Again, if one errs on the side of caution, the only logical position is to oppose intentional terminations of pregnancy. That’s what abortion procedures do: they end pregnancies early. They themselves don’t actually terminate the developing human being’s life.
This framework lays bare the difference between an induced abortion and a spontaneous miscarriage. In the latter, the developing human dies first. In the former, it dies second. That, I understood, was why the the Church doesn’t have funerals for miscarried children. It’s not because they were never alive in the first place; it’s because they died prior to being born. At the same time, this also explained why the Church considered induced abortions to be the moral equivalent of murder. The order of the two events (end of the pregnancy and death of the human being) mattered. In fact, it made all the difference.
The only way, then, to state that abortion is never murder is to rely on a philosophical stance: that the end justifies the means.
Do you notice anything in this line of thinking?
That’s right. There’s no mention of a God or similar divine being. This argument about abortion is philosophical in nature, but it’s also based solely on human reasoning. In other words, the pro-life stance does not depend on one’s belief in a deity. It can be justified without it! In fact, the argument that there’s no way to tell whether induced abortions end human lives is, and the conclusion that they should be avoided because they might, is an entirely rational argument.
Thus, I transitioned to the pro-life stance well before I came back to active practice of my faith. I’m willing to admit that I may be protecting human beings that are not alive, but the alternative — the potential unjust killing of human beings that are — is the far less preferable option.
That led me to the next question: if the Church was right about its stance on abortion, then what else might it be right about? Rationalizing out a position on abortion like this, combined with the scientific understanding that conception and pregnancy are two different events, begins to explain the Church’s reasoning for opposing artificial birth control.
But that’s a subject for another post. The bottom line is that once I realized that agreement with Church teachings could come about through rational means, I began to look into the Church’s teachings again. I started out looking for inconsistencies, but in the end, the only ones I found involved incredibly minor issues. Except for one big one: the Church’s insistence that a divine being existed.
Despite my anger at God, I’d never doubted his existence. I’ve had too many personal experiences to think that the universe is only composed of what we can perceive with our human senses; and, as St. Thomas Aquinas puts it: for those with faith, no evidence is necessary; for those without it, no evidence will suffice. The presence or absence of a divine being isn’t a matter of reason. It’s a matter of belief, and that meant that whether or not I was Catholic came down to whether or not I believed there was a God. I did, and the Church was not going to require me to give up my ability to reason in order to live accordingly.
It wasn’t an easy road after that, not by any means. But after reasoning out my stance on abortion, it was the only road that made any sense for me to follow. At the same time, while I am religious, I can (and do) honestly point out that my stance on the abortion issue is not based in a religious belief, and it never has been. It’s based on reason. The fact that the same line of reasoning led me back to religious belief isn’t important; that came later.
My pro-life stance came first.