Why did the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issue the following in their Declaration on Procured Abortion:
**“This declaration expressly leaves aside the question of the moment when the spiritual soul is infused. **There is not a unanimous tradition on this point and authors are as yet in disagreement. For some it dates from the first instant; for others it could not at least precede nidation [implantation in the uterus]. It is not within the competence of science to decide between these views, because the existence of an immortal soul is not a question in its field. It is a philosophical problem from which our moral affirmation remains independent.”
It’s not my original teaching; it’s the Church’s. When the fetus receives a soul is the moment it become a “human being.” And Church teaching says no one knows exactly when that moment is.
No one doubts the soul is infused “immediately.” But “immediately” when? At conception? At implantation? At viability? At birth? Not one Church document has stated such. Write the National Catholic Bioethics Center. They will tell you exactly what I’m saying.
Maybe immediately upon the child’s first or second birthday?
Maybe immediately upon the child reaching the age of reason, around age eight?
Maybe immediately upon reaching functional consciousness, which mentally retarded people never attain?
Maybe immediately upon attaining functionality and a level of competence, which many people with genetic diseases, etc. never attain, and people with degenerative diseases eventually lose?
If the teaching is not clear upon what the immediacy refers to, then it is not clear. These are some of the possibilities that become open to us if the answer is that the Church just has not idea about these matters?
Science is clear enough though. There is no point immediately after the moment of conception that the unique individual does not exist. The chromosonal blueprint for that life that develops throughout the years is the same, and there is no point immediately after conception that marks an existence that is qualitatively or essentially different from what develops before, and what develops after.
From conception until death, even at a ripe old age, with all the degenerative aspects involved in that, the individual exists, one and the same with the individual that has always existed from the point of conception.
If the Church truly has no concept of what point in human development that “immediately” refers to, then that is that, as far as Church leadership goes.
But as for the latest scientific understanding of life, there can be no doubt The social construct of what it means to be a person with a soul may be arbitrary, but the existence of a human individual immediately upon conception is just a well-established scientific fact.
