IS ABORTION WRONG BECAUSE THE EARLY BABY IS OR HAS A SOUL?

When trying to work out when the unborn child has a right to life, you meet a difficulty that also comes up when you are trying to decide when somebody is now an adult and free to make adult decisions. Everybody knows when a child is not a child even though you cannot put an exact age on it. It is not a scientific question but a conceptual one. Science cannot tell you so you have to look at a wide range if indications and make your decision. You go with what seems reasonable or true or plausible.   It is very easy to go wrong with that so the Church plays on that and tries to tell us what the answer is.

The Church approaches abortion from the standpoint that life supposedly begins at conception and that you are as much you when you are conceived as you are when you grow to adulthood. The Catholic Church forbids abortion under all circumstances and even when it could save the mother's life. It is seen as robbing a person of life and future life.

The Psalm says, "Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect; and in thy book all my members were written,” 139:16.  God then is defied if an embryo is aborted.

It is not clear if the Church is thinking that a person is a person and their stage of development is irrelevant or if there is presumed to be a soul. The soul idea allows the Church to say that your main faculties as a person are in an undetectable soul so if the body can hardly be seen that has nothing to do with implying you are not a person or fully a person. As the first idea is totally odd and does not ring true or seem natural to believe, we can assume that those who assert that idea are trying to get at the soul idea.

What if the foetus has a soul? A soul cannot be one with a body that has no mind. Abortion would just be removing a pile of cells that a soul is waiting to control. To say a speck is a person is really to say the soul is the real person for the body does nothing that a body does. This leads to dualism which degrades the body in favour of an alleged soul. It is a theory that is very dangerous in its implications.

The correct terminology is that the blot is a soul not has a soul. The idea is that body and soul both make up the person and the soul is like the lifeforce that is distinguishable from the body but is not separate from the body.

The Church says that unborn children have souls and should not be aborted. How does she know that the same is not true of animals? She can’t know so her condemnations and showing off her pro-life badge make many think it is about self-righteous power games. Plus the Church allows life-support to be turned off when people are brain-dead which only signifies that the person will never recover and that some of the brain is damaged not that the brain is totally dead. The brain dead person will have more consciousness than an embryo in the womb in the first months and they say it is all right to end the life of one and not the other. The Church is just making a difference based on dogmatic grounds and is just assuming for the sake of those grounds. People come before dogmas.

Catholicism claims that the Holy Spirit preserves it from error. The constant teaching of the Church is thought to be without error. The Church says that new doctrines are novelties and are necessarily wrong. It was only in the nineteenth century that the Church started to think that the soul was infused at conception (Vicars of Christ, page 523). Since the Church only makes a tradition into a dogma when it is questioned so that nobody can doubt that it is a part of what God who doesn’t lie has revealed, it follows that this doctrine denying that the soul is infused at conception is an infallible revelation from God that the Church has turned her back on. The pope is a hypocrite and would know from Aquinas that his doctrine of life starting at conception is false.

The doctrine that Mary was conceived in her mother's womb free from original sin which was dogmatised in 1854 by Pius IX does not necessarily imply that the newly fertilised egg is a human person. God might simultaneously make the soul but not join it to the foetus until it is sufficiently developed. Killing it would still be murder just like it would be murder to kill a person who could leave their body when they were out. Or perhaps the egg gets the power to transmit original sin to the soul though the soul won't appear yet. The idea of a cell that is not a person being guilty of original sin is no sillier than a person having the sin because the person is as innocent as the cell. Even if the sinless conception of Mary does not imply that abortion is murder it has done much harm to women for it seems to do that to many and is allowed to seem that way. The Devil would have had good reason to promote the doctrine by appearing to Catherine Laboure and Bernadette of Lourdes and pretending to be Mary when it cause such a brutal and tremendous catastrophe for women have had abortions or considered having one.

The Church never properly disapproved of abortion as seriously wrong for the Church for centuries did not officially teach that the human being was a person from conception.

The Roman Church tell us that the unborn child might be a human person and that this proves abortion to be wrong for it might be killing a person. But this only proves abortion to be evil when done for a trivial reason. If the foetus is abnormal or if the mother-to-be could die then it would be right to have an abortion in case the unborn child is not a human person. Religionists like to forget that the embryo might not be a human person.