johnbyronkuhner.com

http://cjni.com/when-sweeps-never-end        In my two previous essays on abortion, I discussed abortion and the vote, and abortion and the Catholic hierarchy.  In both of them I took for granted that abortion is a sin and that it should not occur.  I will not backtrack from that position.  But many people feel much less certain about the moral wrong of abortion, and I wanted to transcribe my thoughts on why this is so.
       Abortion opponents note that there have been forty-seven million abortions in the United States, which by sheer mathematical reckoning would mean that the United States is the most murderous country in human history (even without adding the millions that have died in U.S. wars).  Instead of Hitler being the image of human evil, that image should be replaced, by this reasoning, by Ronald Reagan – the man who presided over more cold-blooded murders of his own people than any other leader in world history.
       And yet most people are not willing to accept this picture.  Very few Catholics would be willing to call the United States the most evil and murderous society in human history.  In fact, many Catholic Churches even have American flags in them.
       In order to explain this discrepancy, there must be something different about abortion – something morally different.  It simply does not feel like murdering, let’s say, a four-year-old child.
       Let us start with the formula most often used against abortion.  The formula is, “Life begins at conception.”  Consequently, any action leading to the death of an embyro or fetus is murder.
       The most obvious thing to say about the phrase “life begins at conception” is that it is not true.  Both the sperm and the egg, to any impartial observer, are, before conception, alive.  Sperm are obviously alive – they even move.  If you looked at a microscope slide which contained various unicellular organisms, bits of dust, and sperm, you would have no trouble categorizing the sperm with the amoebas and not the dust.  On the biological level, I see no way that an intelligent thinker can after reflection say that life begins at conception. 
       The next level would be to say that individual life begins at conception – that the qualities we associate with an individual, such as a soul, and rights, begin at conception.  Egg and sperm are alive, but they have a kind of sub-human existence, and God does not put a soul in them.
       The difficulty with this argument is that for a while after conception the zygote is divisible, i.e. in theological terms man can make it have one soul, or two souls, or four souls, or more.  You may get around this problem by saying, “Well, yes, God ensouled this zygote with four souls, and he merely made me do the three divisions in order to give expression to these four souls,” – which would destroy the free will of man – or you may say, “Every time I divide the zygote I can make God create a new soul, precisely as a man and woman do via the marital act.”  This makes the lab scientist something like the equivalent of parent to the new children created.
       Let me also note that the role of God in ensoulling is very peculiar.  God’s appearance to ensoul – and let me note again that this event cannot be considered the same as “life,” because life predates conception – is a curious instance of God subjecting his own will to man’s.  And furthermore, God’s choices in this regard are, as we know, bizarre to the point of horror.  Why he would withhold conception from good, loving couples but bestow it on the encounter of rapist and victim is utterly incomprehensible.  This does not appear to be God’s special act in the universe – instead, this appears to operate according to scientific rules, those horrible rules that are both gift and curse.
       And in fact, we should call into question, right here and now, whether the normal operative conception of soul that we have is at all accurate.  We won’t find any evidence of “soul” scientifically – making conception the visible sign of ensoulment, as I have indicated, simply won’t work – and we won’t find it Biblically either.
       The Greek word for “soul” would have to be psyche, whence we get psyche and psychology, but it clearly does not mean what we think of as soul, i.e. the portion of a human being which is personal and unique but also eternal.  It is usually translated “life” in the Bible, but not always.  Jesus says that it would be better for a man to gain the whole world than lose his psyche, but he also says that no man has a greater love than laying down his psyche for his friends.  Paul explicitly attacks the psyche-driven man (usually translated “natural man,” but sometimes “psychic man”) as not having pneuma or spirit.  And there is no doubt that the early Christians felt a strong distinction between “soul” and “spirit” (psyche and pneuma), even within an individual, which simply jars with the dominant mythology of today.
       I believe in all this is the underlying reason why abortion, birth control, cloning, and the scientific study and manipulation of fertility pose such immense difficulties to traditional Catholic morality.  This morality had been predicated on the idea of a simultaneously highly individuated and eternal soul.  But human life may simply be much more fluid than that.  Aquinas thought ensoulment took place at five months (which, ironically, is a Catholic saint’s opinion which probably represents the moral intuition of most people but is rejected by the hierarchy), but admittedly that seems arbitrary – fetuses make movements long before they can be felt by the mother around five months.  But the boundaries may all be arbitrary.  The creation of new life seems to be more like a recombination of the old.  It’s somewhat like naming rivers.  It seems legitimate to bestow a new name on the meeting of two great rivers, like the Alleghany and the  Monongahela becoming the Ohio.  And that’s the way it normally works.  But when the river divides again, and can be divided further, the name appears in a truer light, as a convenient collective noun placed on a very large and complicated set of phenomena.
       Because in the end, it’s all one river – the Alleghany, Monongahela, Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri – and all human life all shares one origin and one destiny.  Paul harps on this unity again and again – it is the body of Christ.  We are all “in Christ,” like water molecules in a river.  And life simply flows out of our genitals continually, looking to recombine and become new life.  Most of it never occurs – if a billionth of a man’s sperm becomes children, he will be a father many times over.  And even when that recombination does occur, the conceived child must cleave to others in order to grow at all.  And often that does not occur.
       These are the conditions of life, of psyche.  And that is why most people are simply unwilling to equate abortion and murder.  Given a fluid reality and a somewhat arbitrary set of boundaries, people will tend to draw them on the side of their convenience.  There are reasons for this, not least of which is that this increases the role of reason in reproduction and makes family planning easier.  These are both worthy goals, as there are many instances when reason is simply overpowered by the forces of human sexuality.  Sexuality as a whole requires reconsideration in itself, which I will attempt to sketch out later.  But I think the best answer for all of these problems is to look forward to the day when the hierarchy will accept chemical and scientific forms of birth control – which it is said ninety-five percent of Catholics (at least in America) use – to strengthen the role of reason in family planning.  Let us remember that for centuries the same hierarchy forbade the printing, translation, or investigation of the Bible – all three of which things we would now say strengthen reason’s role in our religious lives.  Let us remember that for centuries the same hierarchy forbade a free press, which has helped to bring reason to many many areas of human life where it had little sway before.  And now the hierarchy has no problems with chemical treatments such as medicines which alter our bodies in other ways, though they are not natural.  There are precedents in these things and reason to hope.