The Weekly Screed (#734)

God’s great afterthought
by David Benjamin

“...the unborn, though enclosed in the womb of his mother, is already a human being, and it is an almost monstrous crime to rob it of life which it has not yet begun to enjoy. If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man's house is his most secure place of refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy the unborn in the womb…”
                                                          — John Calvin

It seems inevitable that sometime in the near future, a Republican presidential candidate will piously declare that every time a woman menstruates, flushing a womb that’s prepared and ripe for childbirth, she commits a little murder, ending a human life that should have been — if only she’d bothered to go out and get laid.

The logical extreme from this new wrinkle in conservative orthodoxy would be something like a tribal council of elders, possibly handpicked by Reince Priebus, Republican Chairman. Once a month, the GOP Fertility Board would be tasked to gather in a tent (or perhaps a Motel 6), while devout young women — each at the peak of ovulation — were lined up, stripped down, covered in pure white robes and sent in, one by one, to come to the aid of their Party.

This utopian fancy tickled me as I was reading Thomas B. Edsall’s recent essay in the Times about theological nuances on abortion among this year’s throng of Republican candidates. Among the 17 aspirants, Edsall noted that only one, George Pataki, supports the Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion legal in America 42 years ago. The others, including a childless woman who has practiced some form of contraception through all of her adolescent life and two marriages, agree that life begins at conception. A wavering minority among these foolish divines would allow an abortion in cases of incest, rape or to save Mom’s life.

In light of this unanimous absolutism — which isn’t shared by the American public — I couldn’t help but think of St. Augustine.

You see, women have been quietly aborting their unwanted feti since long before Augustine took up the topic in the 4th century. Aristotle, for example,  theorized 800 years before Augustine that a freshly fertilized embryo has a “vegetable soul.” In this formulation, we all start out as more of a soybean than a person. From that point on, it takes 40 days for a male fetus to be “ensouled” with human life. (Little girls, being inferior, need 90 days to grow a soul.)

Aristotle’s theory superseded Pythogoras’ earlier belief that a fully ensouled human life begins when the sperm cracks the egg. In early Christianity, the Aristotelian view took hold and dominated for centuries. According to St. Jerome, writing in the 4th century A.D., “The seed gradually takes shape in the uterus, and it [abortion] does not count as killing until the individual elements have acquired their external appearance and their limbs.”

Augustine added a fresh wrinkle to Aristotle and Jerome by discussing the phenomenon of “quickening, ” a concept that legal scholar William Blackstone defined like this: “Life… begins in contemplation of law as soon as an infant is able to stir in the mother’s womb. For if a woman is quick with child, and by a potion, or otherwise, killeth it in her womb; or if any one beat her, whereby the child dieth in her body, and she is delivered of a dead child; this, though not murder, was by the ancient law homicide or manslaughter.”

A long series of saints, popes and councils, from the Apostolic Constitutions of 380 A.D. to St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, stuck with this definition, agreeing life that begins more or less in the second trimester of pregnancy. This friendly consensus began to wobble in 1588 when Pope Sixtus V officially revived the Pythagorean concept of ensoulment-at-conception.

Three years later, Pope Gregory XIV smelled trouble and went back to quickening. But things would never be quite as cut-and-dried around the Vatican. By the 19th century, Pythagoras and Sixtus were heroes again, their beliefs promoted by Pope Leo XIII. In 1886, Leo etched in granite the position that the Catholic Church — and now many conservative Protestant denominations — deem to be Gospel. Leo’s historic decree prohibited all procedures that directly kill a fetus, even to save the mother’s life. According to Leo — and ever since — a woman who had an abortion at any stage of pregnancy had to be booted from the Church and condemned for all eternity.

The cruelest irony of this rule is that if both the mother and fetus are certain to die unless a doctor performs an emergency abortion, that’s cool. It’s fine with the Church if little Freddy Fetus dies, as long as he doesn’t give his life to save Mom’s.

It’s also ironic, at least to me, that we have to refer to sources like St. Jerome, Pope Sixtus and hardass Leo XIII to trace the ethical history of abortion. As big a deal as it is today among churchmen and politicians, there’s no mention of abortion in the Jewish Bible, in either Testament or any translation of the Christian Bible, in the Jewish Mishnah or Talmud. In all his sermons and parables, Jesus didn’t mention abortion once, nor did his main apostle, Peter. Paul would seem a likely guy to bring it up, but he didn’t. And it doesn’t show up in the Koran, either.

Abortion is like God’s great afterthought.

If you dig into abortion history, as it swings back and forth between Aristotle and Augustine on one side, and Pythagoras and Tertullian on the other, you get tons of deliciously abstruse testimony — from Philo and Clement of Alexandria, Barnabas, Athenagoras, Saints Hippolytus and Basil the Great, Minicius Felix, Saints Ambrose and John Chrysostom, some outfit called the Didache, the Synods of Elvira and Ancyra, the Apostolic Constitutions, Popes Stephen V and Innocent III, Aquinas and Sixtus, Pope Gregory XIV, Hieronymus Florentinius, Pope Pius IX and even Bill Blackstone. These arbiters of uterine orthodoxy have one thing in common.

That’s right. They’re all guys — just like the right reverend candidates Bush, Carson, Christie, Cruz, Gilmore, Graham, Huckabee, Jindal, Kasich, Paul, Perry, Rubio, Santorum, Trump and Scooter. (Let’s give Carly a break and call her an Honorary Guy.)

From Pythagorean times ‘til around 1916, when Margaret Sanger started kicking the hornet’s nest, women pretty much weren’t allowed to utter a peep about what they should do about the unwelcome seeds that careless consorts and Roman rapists had planted in their bodies. It’s been, like, 2,600 years, and the all-male clergy are still arguing about how many zygotes can sing “Mammy” on the head of a pin.

Why not just shut up and let women decide for themselves?