Do miscarried babies have souls?

  • Thread starter Thread starter MP_Kid
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
M

MP_Kid

Guest
Before my mom had me, she miscarried a baby boy? Do miscarried babies have souls?

In the eyes of God is the miscarried baby boy that my mom had my brother?
 
Of course they do. 🙂

Any baby conceived in the womb, immediately has it’s soul infused into it by God.
 
MP_Kid said:
Before my mom had me, she miscarried a baby boy? Do miscarried babies have souls?

In the eyes of God is the miscarried baby boy that my mom had my brother?
Click to expand...
There is no official teaching of the Church as to when God joins the immortal soul to the body after conception. The Church errs on the side of safety, and recognizes conception, the beginning of the human body, as the beginning of life. For that reason we pray for the souls or miscarried and aborted babies, and some will honor the remains with Christian burial.
 
“Let it be done unto me according to thy word.”

“And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.”
 
A careful reading of 366, in the light of tradition, does not actually say the human immortal soul is created by God at conception. It does say the immortal human soul, when it is infused into the forming body, is done immediately. ie it does not “evolve” like the body…nor does it come from the souls of the parents.
We are only certain from the moment of quickening. Exactly when quickening occurs is debated.
 
Last edited:
I had a miscarriage and I fully believe that my daughter had a soul from the moment she was conceived. I’ve spoken with many priests about this and we are all in agreement - my baby is a child with a soul.
 
The Church has never defined when ensoulment takes place. We trust the mercy of God.
 
That depends what your ambiguous statement means.
The Church has certainly very strongly taught for many centuries that a child must be baptised after miscarriage if it is past the 40 day “quickening” mark. Before that time it was not necessary to baptise.

That does not mean that before the 40 day mark the child was not considered human and did not have all the natural rights of any quickened child. But it was generally held that God had not yet implanted the immortal intellectual soul that quickened babies possessed.

The Church has never denied that once mainstream position. But like Limbo, it is now on the backburner and other views predominate. A Catholic may still validly hold to this ancient scientific view… though the many theologians who do would put the time of quickening back to around two weeks in the light of modern embryological science.
 
Could you please clarify your statement? A ‘miscarried’ child by definition refers to a child born before 20 weeks, in which the child has died in utero. The Catholic church does not baptize the dead.
 
I was of course referring to spontaneous abortions but preferred to use the more euphemistic word “miscarriage” so yes you are correct.

Do priests baptise miscarried babies? It would not surprise me, it seems pastorally sensitive to do so and there is no harm but only pluses in erring on the side of caution.
 
The Church doesn’t have an official position on when ensoulment occurs.

Though if it was post-quickening then a very large weight of theological authority would back that ensoulment had occurred at some point.
 
Jeremiah 1:5, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you”.

Matthew 19:14, “Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come to me: for the kingdom of heaven is for such.”

A child in the womb is a child, why would he/she not have a soul?
 
Last edited:
A stillbirth is slightly different from a miscarriage, so I can see your point. The child is older, better able to survive outside the womb or indeed to survive the trauma of birth itself, and it is easier to ‘see’ and to test for when or if life is extinct. But in the case of many miscarriages, they take place when the child is perhaps 10 to 11 weeks gestation, in a situation where there has been no documented fetal movement, no activity, often for days, the amniotic sac has disappeared, and there are obvious tissue changes, etc. These poor little ones are obviously lifeless and could not be baptized but are still precious in God’s eyes. If we can trust in God’s mercy to us, most of us full of sin (I know I am, and struggling), how much more can we trust in His mercy to the most personally innocent of sin, the youngest and weakest? In my opinion, the idea that we have to baptize even when the criteria are not met in order to be ‘sensitive’ is one of the reasons we have so many UNREASONABLE Catholics today. They’ve never had to actually sit back and let GOD’S will be done, there has always been an obliging prelate or theologian or whatever to proclaim that 'we can get around that, you can go ahead and have it YOUR way". And so any time they get a teaching that, “This is what is required for Catholics” their first instinct is to dig their heels in and say, “Not for ME it isn’t!”
 
BlackFriar said:
The Church has never denied that once mainstream position. But like Limbo, it is now on the backburner and other views predominate. A Catholic may still validly hold to this ancient scientific view… though the many theologians who do would put the time of quickening back to around two weeks in the light of modern embryological science.
Click to expand...
It’s true that the Church has not formally repudiated this view. The problem I would have with it, and the reason why it is not as prominent today, is precisely that it is ancient science, and we know more about development in the womb now. “Quickening” is generally reckoned to occur when the mother can feel the child move, which at one time would indeed have been the first indication that one is carrying a living thing. Nowadays, though, we know that a child is alive, human, and distinct from the parents as soon as the gametes (which already have the “alive” part down) combine into a zygote. That doesn’t mean for certain that the rational soul is present, but since humans are soul-body composites by nature, it is sensible to err on the side of caution as guanophore notes.

Catholic writer Mark Shea points out frequently that it’s actually the pro-choice side of this discussion (supposedly free of religious mumbo-jumbo) that ends up invoking ensoulment and the Church’s past opinions based on older science at this point, while we can simply point at the findings of embryology and note that we are dealing with a living human individual that will, if provided with the proper environment, nutrition, and so on, develop into a human infant, child, adolescent, and adult just as all the rest of us have.
 
While researching Catholicism prior to coming into the Church, I did come across an account of a procedure for opening the amniotic membranes and baptizing a miscarried child if there was doubt as to whether it still lived or had died. I believe it involved a formula similar to conditional baptism: “If you are alive, I baptize you…” I don’t recall how official my source was, and I have no idea if that was ever actually done or if Rome approved of that method. But it seems at least one Catholic thinker somewhere considered how it might be done.
 
stpurl said:
If we can trust in God’s mercy to us, most of us full of sin (I know I am, and struggling), how much more can we trust in His mercy to the most personally innocent of sin, the youngest and weakest?
Click to expand...
Yes indeed.
 
Not now, but it used to. 40 days for boys, longer for girls.
Obviously approximate.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top