As Catholics and Christians, we believe that God breaths life into the cells that join together to form the human being (body) who is developing …life is developing and it is possible therefore at that moment in God’s time, a soul was created. I agree with you that quote “until God has breathed life into that body it doesn’t have a soul…” however, it’s important for us to not decide when God does this but to accept that He does do it. God is God and that says it all to me. Let us let God do the giving of the soul whenever He chooses and let us finally just give over and LET GOD BE GOD.
FWIW, Genesis and Exodus can sometimes be better understood in the context of Jewish law, or Halacha, from the time.
At the time of Jesus, Jews held that you became a full person (nefesh) at birth, or first breath. We see this in the language of Genesis and we still use similiar language in reference to the Holy Spirit in Catholic Canon today.
Abortion was generally forbidden, because the fetus was recognized as a potential person. The one exception was when the life of the mother, or her other children might be threatened. Then an abortion was not only permitted, but considered the correct moral decision. The fetus was then considered a ‘wanderer’.
Infanticide was the principle problem among gentile converts for the first millenia. And we know from Tertullian and others that a form of neonatal eugenics was a common practice among Christians by the second century. Sadly, a Pope still makes reference to a similiar practice in an Allocution to Midwives in 1951.
Your understanding of our teachings is correct, and important to understand. When we simply state ‘this is what we have always held’, then we are easily proved incorrect by our own written history. Similiarly, when we assert (falsely) that we teach simultaneous animation, we leave ourselves open to attacks both on the secular biology front (sometimes a single zygote becomes two people, other times it becomes something like a uterine cyst, complete with its own, seperate DNA), and on theological and moral consistancy.
Let’s face it, we cannot claim that we truly see zygotes as people and their demise as murder if our actions betray us. Only a very small segment of the population calls for treating women procurring abortions as murderers. Even fewer would call for treating woman who removes a malignant cyst or mole as one.
This is why I think our understanding is much more coherent and consistant. First, we have never held pro-choice beliefs. We have always held abortion to be a moral sin, we just made a distinction (up to the late 19th century) because for many centuries we believed we knew when the soul was infussed (quickening). Similarly, the Church did not reverse itself on abortions to save the mother’s life, it had largely remained mute, referring inquiries to theologians as late as 1869.
Second, we do not hypocritically elevate abortion to special status. Evangelium Vitae, Christifideles Laici, etc. hold a consistant message of every stage, every condition, tying it to our dogmatic beliefs of the inalienable rights of the human person. In other words, we do not rely on portraying the mothers as charactiture villians, we strive for people to have the proper understanding of the true value of human life.
Finally, we accept the teaching both when it is easy and hard. It is easy to waggle fingers and ‘drunken sluts using abortion as birth control’, it is much harder to state that we’d watch a beloved wife or sister die rather than procure an abortion. We even have tied abortion to euthanasia and the death penalty.
Peace
What was that baby doing leaping, when neither he nor Our Lord whom he leapt in response to had received the “breath of life” at birth?