The Catholic View

Opposition to abortion is one of the clearest and oldest moral preachings of the Roman Catholic Church; it dates back to the 1st century. The destruction of the fetus, the church teaches, is a morally indefensible attack on human life. The only exception is "indirect abortion," or abortion as an incidental byproduct of a necessary attempt to save the mother's life. Ectopic pregnancy and cancer of the uterus are grounds for indirect abortion. Rape and incest are not exceptions, because the fetus conceived has the same right to life as any other fetus.

The Catholic view is based on a general respect for all human life, but it does not depend exclusively on the belief that a separate human being appears at the instant of conception. The teaching is that precisely because no one knows when the soul enters the body (or in secular terms, when the fetus becomes a person), the baby-to-be should be given the benefit of the doubt and be fully protected. One blunt analogy: no one would think it morally correct to heave a grenade into a room that is probably empty but just might have a human being in it, so why destroy a fetus that might be a person?

Some dissenters within the church, however, have zeroed in on this element of doubt. For these Catholics, including a few theologians, the primary questions are: When is a fetus a person, and how do we know it? The implication, that there may be a brief period during which abortion is licit, is not new in the church, though it has been a minor refrain in Catholic theology and explicitly rejected many times by the Vatican. An influential 17th century theologian named Torreblanca taught that before the fetus is animated by the soul, a woman may have an abortion if she is in danger of death or in danger of losing her reputation. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the medieval theologian-philosophers, had opened the same door in the 13th century with his view that the soul does not enter the body immediately upon conception. On the basis of the sketchy biology of the era, theologians estimated that the soul joined the body at the 40th day of pregnancy. Church law, for a long period, offered different penalties for abortions before and after the entry of the soul, though both kinds of abortion were considered wrong. Citing these examples, the Rev. Charles Curran, professor of moral theology at the Catholic University of America, argues that there is room for the church to modify its stance on abortion, at least concerning the first few weeks of life. That possibility, however, is unlikely.

For the past two hundred years, the view that the embryo may not be fully human has been in near total eclipse. All modern Popes have opposed abortion from the instant of conception, and the Second Vatican Council termed abortion "an unspeakable crime." In recent years the church has shown a willingness to cast a fresh eye at the morality of nuclear war and capital punishment, a trend that may reinforce its desire to protect embryonic life.