An Odd Work of Grace: August 2023

Introduction

We have seen that until relatively recently there was a wide consensus in the Christian tradition that the life in the womb is not a fully ensouled human until later in the pregnancy. For many that has meant what is called “delayed animation,” meaning God imparted the soul into the body after it was sufficiently developed. A related understanding is called “gradual animation,” meaning the soul develops along with the body until both together are fully human. We saw in the last post that that was the teaching of Gregory of Nyssa, along with his sister, Macrina, who he called his teacher. It is an approach that also makes biblical sense given passages like Job 10:11-12 and Psalm 139:12-14.

We’ve looked at scripture and tradition for wisdom to inform our understanding of the beginning of life and the morality of abortion. Another place Christians have looked for wisdom is in the rest of creation. For example, according to the great Anglican theologian, Richard Hooker (1554-1600), we should seek wisdom in the “the glorious works of nature”:

"Some things [Wisdom] openeth by the sacred books of Scripture; some things by the glorious works of nature; with some things she inspireth them from above by spiritual influence, in some things she leadeth and traineth them only by worldly experience and practice. We may not so in any one special kind admire her that we disgrace her in any other, but let all her ways be according unto their place and degree adored.”[1]

Wisdom opened to us in the study of embryology and pregnancy reveals not just the conception, development, and eventual birth of a new human being. It also reveals the fundamental maternal-fetal biological connection. The gestating mother is not just an abstraction. “Gestation is not just a temporary nutritive dependency analogous to a patient on a feeding tube or connected to a ventilator. The fetus is a developing human being uniquely interconnected with its mother, within her body.”[2] And she is not a passive vessel. We will come back to that.

In this post, we will look at the beginning of life at conception through pregnancy and what light that might shine on the questions we have been asking. Wisdom opened to us in the science of embryology gives us information that can help us discern when the life in the womb has developed sufficiently to be an actual human body and soul. I am going to suggest that it can shed light on the “gradual animation” approach which I argue is most faithful to the Church’s tradition. I will suggest that there are milestones along the way.

Science Can Reveal Much, But Cannot Answer All the Questions

However much we know from science about the process of conception, pregnancy, and birth, it remains an awe-inspiring wonder. Two human beings come together, giving themselves to each other in sexual intimacy, one hopes in the context of commitment and mutual affection. And from that union, there is new life. One of those two, the mother, nurtures this new life with her own body. It is a sacred mystery – not because we don’t understand the biology of it, but because there is a holy depth to it all.

Science does not remove the sacred mystery and wonder of new life. But it also, on its own, cannot answer the basic questions we’ve been asking in this series of posts. It can describe the process of fertilization and conception and subsequent development. It can describe the interplay of the life of the mother and the life in the womb. But it cannot tell us when the life in the womb becomes a fully human person. Or, to use the theological language, it cannot tell us when it is fully ensouled. Nor can it answer for us the difficult moral questions related to abortion.

This uncertainty is acknowledged even by the Roman Catholic Church in its official documents. In its Declaration on Procured Abortion, The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith “leaves aside the question of the moment when the spiritual soul is infused. There is not a unanimous tradition on this point [whether or not the soul is fully present at conception] and authors are as yet in disagreement. . . it suffices that this presence of the soul be probable. . .”[3] But they do not make a case for why it is probable. “Probable” is a technical term in the Christian moral tradition. But Catholic bioethicist, Carol A. Tauer, “argues that there are fallacies in the way these documents assign certainty to the notion of fetal personhood . . .”[4]

When and How Does a Human Person Develop?

Given what we know, it actually seems unlikely that a fully human soul is present from conception. First of all, fertilization itself is more complicated than simply sperm meets egg and is more of a process than a singular event. It is significant that for the first days to two weeks after fertilization the embryo is not a stable entity. In those early days before the embryo has implanted on the uterine wall, it is possible for it to split into identical twins or quadruplets. Strange as it sounds, it is possible for those twin embryos, or for two separate eggs fertilized as in fraternal twins, to “fuse” into back into one, producing one person.[5] It is hard to see how the fertilized egg can be one person or one soul at this point if it can split into two or more or, where there were two, fuse into one.

Adding to this fundamental instability is the fact that a large percentage of early embryos do not survive to implant in the uterus for natural causes. Though some estimates are much higher, careful analysis of research indicates that as many as 40% of embryos do not survive this early stage under natural conditions.[6] Even many who generally oppose abortion have pointed out that it is problematic to imagine such a high percentage of human souls never seeing the light of day. Others point out that if we really believed these were truly human souls, we would invest lots of money in research to determine how to save them.

Further, about 2% of fertilized embryos end in ectopic pregnancies in which the embryo attaches somewhere other than the uterus’ The most common place this can happen is inside the fallopian tubes. This means that not only can the embryo not survive, but it can also be deadly to the mother.[7]

Given that in the early days after conception the embryo is a ball of cells and not a stable entity, it is hard not to agree with the majority view in the Christian tradition that “it would not be possible to style the unformed embryo a human being, but only a potential one.”[8] So, implantation is something of a milestone. It is also about the same time a pregnant woman misses her period and may begin to feel different due to the release of the hormones associated with being pregnant. Still, at this point, the embryo can hardly be recognized as “formed” as a human being.

Some Milestones Along the Way

Around the same time as implantation, gastrulation occurs, at which point various cells of the developing embryo begin to be “assigned” the role they will play in the organism, e.g., part of the digestive tract. Implantation and gastrulation make for a basic milestone on the way to being formed as a human being. What might some other milestones be? The beginning of a heartbeat at about four weeks of gestation is an emotional milestone for many. But, as all but the most primitive animals have a heartbeat, it does not seem to be a particularly significant milestone.

A more significant milestone is reached around the fourteenth week at the beginning of the second trimester. At that point, the fetus looks proportionally like a newborn human baby. This is significant because our bodies matter. We communicate with our bodies, and we recognize one another as fellow human beings because we share the human form.

Another important milestone occurs between weeks sixteen and twenty-one. It is somewhere in that range that a mother first begins feeling the fetus moving. Traditionally this is referred to as “quickening.” Due to modern scientific observation, we know that the fetus is moving before that. But some have argued that when the woman feels the life stirring within her something changes in their relationship and a sort of moral covenant is formed between them. Abortion was legal in Wisconsin before"quickening" until 1858 [9]

Viability is another significant milestone. But viability is something of a moving target. Generally, obstetricians set viability at between 20 and 26 weeks of gestation. The earliest premature baby to survive was born at just 21 weeks.[10] But a high percentage of babies born before the 27^th week do not survive and only then with extensive medical intervention. This is because their basic organs, particularly their brains and lungs, have not fully developed.

By week twenty-six, the end of the second trimester, the fetus’ brain has the essential structure of a post-natal brain. We know that the brain continues to develop from then through birth and into young adulthood. But the basic structure is in place at this point. The fact that some babies born earlier prove to be viable, however, suggests that the brain is developed enough several weeks earlier.

The final milestone is when the baby is born. It takes its first breath which is biblically significant.[11] With birth the baby is physically separate from the mother.

Conclusion

Earlier, I noted that during pregnancy the mother is not a passive vessel housing the developing baby, doing no more than providing nutrition, oxygen, and space for growth. Even before conception, no sperm cell would make it to the egg without the active assistance of the woman’s body. From there on there is an intimate interaction between the mother’s body and that of the fetus. They might not be exactly the same body. But neither are they totally separate bodies. In any event, pregnancy takes place within the particular body of a particular woman. Therefore, pregnancy and the life in the womb should not be talked about without accounting for the lived reality of the pregnant woman and her agency. I will say more about that in the next post.

Toward the end of the second post in this series, I wrote,

“the holy mystery of becoming fully human is a gradual process in the womb and that the pregnant woman is not merely a passive vessel of that process of becoming. The moral balance at first tilts toward the agency of the pregnant woman (usually along with the father) and gradually tilts to include the baby developing in her womb.”

It might seem simpler to say that we are fully human from the point of conception. But we have seen that conception alone does not create a stable enough entity to be considered a person or a soul. And, in any event, that has not been the teaching of most of the Church for most of its history. It might also seem simpler to set birth as the demarcation of when we become actual persons. Though that is closer to the Jewish understanding, we have seen that even in Judaism it is not that simple. And that has never been the Christian view. For most of the Church’s history some version of delayed or gradual animation (being given or becoming a human soul) has been the teaching.

I believe this remains a persuasive and faithful understanding. Thus, if abortion is ever the taking of a person’s life, it is not so in the early weeks or months of a pregnancy. Given the combination of a body that looks like the human form, the quickening, and the earliest point at which there is enough brain and lung development for any hope of survival outside the body of the mother, I would argue that 20 weeks of gestation is when we can with some confidence say a human person is fully formed, body and soul. Before that, we are talking about a potential human being. As such, it is still sacred and perhaps increasing so. But until that point, the burden of deciding to bear it is mainly that of the mother, ideally along with the father.

The question of whether at 20 weeks and beyond the rest of society also has a stake in protecting the life in the womb along with the life of the mother is part of what we will look at in the next post.

[1] Richard Hooker, On the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book II, par. 4

[2] Margaret D. Kamitsuka, Abortion and the Christian Tradition: A Pro-Choice Theological Ethic (Westminster John Knox) p. 106

[3] Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Declaration on Procured Abortion, (1974), n. 19

[4] Margaret D. Kamitsuka, Abortion and the Christian Tradition: A Pro-Choice Theological Ethic (Westminster John Knox) p. 109. The article itself can be found at Carol A. Tauer, “The Tradition of Probabilism and the Moral Status of the Early Embryo,” Theological Studies 45 (1984)

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[5] Rachel Hosie, “Woman with rare birthmark discovers she is her own twin”, The Independent, Friday 02 March Dec. 13, 2018 (https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/woman-birthmark-rare-twin-discover-blood-types-taylor-muhl-america-chimerism-chimera-a8236411.html)

[6] Jarvis GE.” Early embryo mortality in natural human reproduction: What the data say”. F1000Res. Nov 25, 2016 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5443340) A summary of this essay is here: University of Cambridge. "Human reproduction likely to be more efficient than previously thought." ScienceDaily. June 13, 2017. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170613101932.htm)

[7] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9687-ectopic-pregnancy

[8] Gregory of Nyssa, On the Holy Spirit, Against the Macedonians (https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2903.htm) See the previous post in this series (https://anoddworkofgrace.blogspot.com/2023/05/an-episcopal-bishops-teaching-on.html)

[9] Lloyd Steffen, Life/Choice: The Theory of Just Abortion, (Pilgrim Press, 1994) p. 113-116

Abortion was legal in Wisconsin before"quickening" until 1858. See: Bridgit Bowden and Evan Casey, ‘How Wisconsin's 1800s-era abortion ban came to be: While the letter of the law remains the same, the conversation around abortion has changed,” Wisconsin Public Radio, August 7, 2023 (https://www.wpr.org/wisconsin-1849-abortion-ban-history-began#:~:text=Under%20Wisconsin's%20original%201849%20abortion,quick%20child%22%20to%20be%20manslaughter)

[10] https://www.uab.edu/news/health/item/12427-uab-hospital-delivers-record-breaking-premature-baby

[11] Many passages in the Bible seem to equate breath and life, e.g., Genesis 2:7, 2 Maccabees 7:21-23, Ecclesiastes 11:5, Job 12:10, Job 27:3, Job 32:8, Job 33:4, Job 34:14, Ecclesiastes 11:5, Ecclesiastes 12:7, Isaiah 42:5, Acts 17:25