Aborted/miscarried babies and the new Earth

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LeonardDeNoblac

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Catholic doctrine is crystal clear that every human being has a rational soul since the moment of conception, even if they never actually use their reason (like infants who die before reaching the age of reason and gravely handicapped people ). Therefore, every conceived human being has an immortal soul and will rise again on the Day of Judgment.
It is often said that in the new Earth everyone will have memory of everything that they have experienced in their mortal life. However, an infant who was aborted or died in a miscarriage before developing brain activities would have no memory of any experience.
So, how will they be in the new Earth?
 
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That is a very interesting question. Will they develop a personality in Heaven? Would they instantly become as a full grown adult with no childhood? I know the beatific vision gives us perfect understanding of God’s plan, but do we still have different levels of intellect and unique perspectives on other things? How would their’ s be?

I don’t know if anything has been revealed to us that we would know. Last I heard, we don’t even know that aborted children go to Heaven. Someone had tried to argue that abortion isn’t so bad because it sends children straight to Heaven without having to experience suffering in the world, and the killers can repent. The response was that since they die with original sin and no demonstrable freewill to judge, that is not a safe assumption to make, but we hope in God’s mercy.

Edit: Coincidentally, another thread seems to have emerged recently on the topic of what I mentioned in the 2nd paragraph.
 
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LeonardDeNoblac said:
It is often said that in the new Earth everyone will have memory of everything that they have experienced in their mortal life. However, an infant who was aborted or died in a miscarriage before developing brain activities would have no memory of any experience.
So, how will they be in the new Earth?
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God is perfectly capable of supplying any sort of knowledge they would need that other people would get from memory. God is not bound by whether somebody physically “developed brain activity” or not. How exactly God supplies for this is not known to us (i.e. whether he would let the person “grow up in Heaven” by experiencing the life of an infant, child, teen and adult, or simply restore them as a full grown adult) but we can trust him to take care of it.
 
The Church doesn’t teach when ensoulment takes place, for she doesn’t know.

However, the Church chooses to err on the side of life, that it’s possible that the ensoulment could take place at conception.
 
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Actually, I don’t think the Church condemns abortion just as a “better safe than sorry” matter. I think the Church does teach that ensoulment is known to be at conception, based on this from the catechism:

"365 The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the “form” of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.

366 The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God - it is not “produced” by the parents - and also that it is immortal"

That seems to suggest that the body can not exist without the soul, so as soon as the body exists, that means the soul is present.

Edit: Fixing format, not sure what happened when I copied out of an app.
 
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The Church doesn’t know when ensoulment takes place.

In Judaism, it’s believed that the ensoulment doesn’t take place until viability.

Either way, the Church always sides on being pro-life and chooses to err on the side of life which is why she condemns all direct abortions.

To believe that the soul enters at the moment of conception brings a problem when miscarriages take place and they happen more often than we’d like. My wife had three before she finally carried our first child to full term.

Did the bloody mess that ended up getting flushed down the toilet have a soul ?

Don’t know, but I kinda doubt it.
 
I’m pretty confident that the Church teaches certainty on the matter, but perhaps someone better versed in writings from the Vatican can point to the exact stance. I think miscarriages are considered to be losses of people, which is why they are so sad. I don’t think the number of miscarriages that occur contribute to the teachings of ensoulment, just like the number of born people that die early to illness/tragedy doesn’t create doubt that those people have souls.
 
Willing_Spirit said:
I’m pretty confident that the Church teaches certainty on the matter, but perhaps someone better versed in writings from the Vatican can point to the exact stance.
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The Church does not teach certainty on the matter. Jim’s correct, the question of when “ensoulment” takes place was explicitly left open; we don’t know, and an embryo being “ensouled” or not does not affect the Church teaching on abortion.

The National Catholic Bioethics Center has an informative article on this here:

https://www.ncbcenter.org/files/3914/7018/8754/MSOB033_Do_Embryos_Have_Souls.pdf
 
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If ensoulment occurred only after conception, Mary wouldn’t be the Immaculate Conception but the Immaculate Ensoulment. I think the notion that human beings receive their souls at the moment of conception has at least the highest probability of being true.
 
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Oh wow, I was mistaken. Although, it sounds like the dispute is in a very small fraction of time in the article you posted - I don’t understand what is meant by “first instant” vs nidation. I like what I just found in what Tim Staples makes of the lack of infallible teaching on ensoulment.


In summary, I think it is saying the presence of the soul can be reasoned by what science has discovered to be the existence of a unique human being. Going back to what the Catechism says, “The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the “form” of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body”. Science has confirmed the existence of the body at conception, so I’m not sure where the uncertainty lies.
 
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My friend believed that the soul existed before conception and he was using a part from the Catechism to support his belief.

I told him he was wrong and being we were going on retreat that week-end, I told him to bring it up to the retreat master. He did and was told, that material has to be present for the soul to enter into it. However, when exactly that takes place is not known.

Either way, the human life begins at conception and if nature and human beings allow the fertilized egg to develop, a human person with a soul will develop in the womb and eventually be born.
 
Makes sense to me, but it seems Catholic doctrine is not quite so “crystal clear” on the subject. Regardless, I’m still hoping to see more answers to your actual question about unborn souls.
 
It is.
The Immaculate Conception is a dogma of the Catholic faith. It has the highest degree of infallible magisterial authority. If you don’t believe it, you are not a Catholic.
The point of the doctrine is that Mary has been preserved, by a unique grace of God, from contracting the original sin since the first moment of her existence - the moment of her conception.
The doctrine of later ensoulment was a matter of theological speculation before the proclamation of the dogma, but I think it is now untenable.
 
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LeonardDeNoblac said:
It is often said that in the new Earth everyone will have memory of everything that they have experienced in their mortal life. However, an infant who was aborted or died in a miscarriage before developing brain activities would have no memory of any experience.
So, how will they be in the new Earth?
Click to expand...
Perhaps memories from in the womb?
 
I don’t think the Church teaches anymore that the souls of unbaptized babies go to Limbo, or if that ever was an official Church teaching. I’ve heard that it was, for awhile, accepted and promoted by some theologians, but seems to have been dropped after Vatican II. I know I was taught that in Catechism classes as a child. I could never fully accept that God would banish innocent little babies to Limbo just because they died before an adult could get them baptized. But then, who am I to say?

Limbo is supposed to be a place of complete natural happiness, but no beatific vision is possible. Some folks believe that’s where the spirits of our pets and other animals go when they die. If so, it could mean permanent separation from humans in the afterlife. Or, it could simply be a level of consciousness, while actual contact would still be possible.

Perhaps, babies who are aborted or miscarried live perpetually as innocent newborns in the new earth, and God in his love might erase original sin from them, because their dying before being baptized is through no fault of their own. Having not yet developed free will, they never chose to die without being baptized. So, why would God punish them?

I never could accept this Limbo business as the fate of newborn or unborn babies. It never has sounded right to me in view of God’s infinite love. I believe he pardons newborns of original sin, and they do indeed experience all the glories of heaven.

But, that’s just my take on it. I could be sadly wrong.
 
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JanR said:
I don’t think the Church teaches anymore that the souls of unbaptized babies go to Limbo, or if that ever was an official Church teaching.
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Limbo of infants was never an official Church teaching. Vatican II declined to adopt it as an official teaching.

The Church’s official teaching is that we entrust the souls of unbaptized babies to the mercy of God.
 
Much better, and much more likely to be true. It certainly makes more sense.
 
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