F
F_J_Woods
Guest
While browsing the news, I came across an article that asserts that Thomas Aquinas and Augustine both did NOT believe that foetuses in the beginning stages of life were human. The article is attached below. I would like to hear a refutation of this.
Thank you all.
Guardian (UK)Copyright 2005 Guardian Newspapers Limited.
March 29, 2005
[truncated]
G2: The church wants to stifle ethical debate
David Aaronovitch
Mitres to the left, birettas to the right; it’s been a faith-filled, polarising Easter. On Sunday it was Cormac Murphy O’Connor, head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, drawing a parallel between the Nazi extermination of the Jews and others, and Britain’s abortion policies. The cardinal even used the totemic figure, speaking of “the termination of six million lives in the womb since the Abortion Act was introduced”. And he also warned about where developments in stem-cell research, euthanasia and IVF are taking us. “That way,” he argued, “lies eugenics, and we know from German history where that leads.”
He has a point, and the Catholic church has a right to make it. The memory of eugenics - the science of human selective breeding - has an unpleasant way of intruding itself into modern debates on screening for disability, on the quality of life and on the definition of life itself.
Back in the 20s and 30s there were plenty of people on the intellectual left who took the view that some lives were not worth living. George Bernard Shaw advocated euthanasia for “the sort of people who do not fit in”, Aldous Huxley supported sterilisation to “prevent the sub-normal from having any families at all”, Fabian founder Sidney Webb warned about “the breeding of degenerate hordes of demoralised ‘residuum’ unfit for social life”, and the birth-control pioneer Marie Stopes disinherited her son for the genetic sin of marrying a girl with myopia.
All this argument had an effect. In 1934 a Department of Health report recommended compulsory sterilisation of the “feeble-minded”. It was in good measure that Catholic intellectuals such as G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, together with Labour MPs, blocked the attempt to bring in such appalling legislation.
They weren’t so fortunate elsewhere. Compulsory sterilisation laws were first passed in a majority of US states and - between 1928 and 1936 - in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Estonia. And in Germany, under the Nazis, a 1933 law on selective sterilisation became, by stages, a secret forcible euthanasia programme deployed against the severely handicapped.
One constant theme in all these developments was the opposition of the Catholic church, with its faith-based assertion that only God had the right to decide which life was worth living, and which was not.
This history is important because people sometimes talk as though they know everything. It is - on either side - an open and shut question as to whether we should permit euthanasia, choose the gender of a child, use foetal cells in research, screen out abnormalities, carry out or forbid abortions at a particular stage of pregnancy, switch Terri Schiavo off or keep her hanging on for ever.
But the story of eugenics suggests that we must never stop debating and agonising about these matters. That’s why I think it’s probably wrong to be angry with the cardinal. If you believe what the cardinal believes - that each zygotic entity is a human being equal to any other - then a Holocaust has indeed taken place.
If we concede that, however, then the cardinal should concede something in return. Which is that this belief is not at all an inevitable product of Catholic history and teaching, as he seems to suggest, but a relatively recent dogma. Indeed, the Catholic writer Daniel Dombrowski points out that “one of the best kept secrets in the history of Catholicism . . . is that Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas - two of the most important thinkers in the Catholic church - did not see the foetus in the early stages of pregnancy as a human person. In fact, Augustine remarkably compares the foetus in the early stages of pregnancy to vegetation.”
It wasn’t until 1869, and the Apostolicae Sedis of the reactionary Pius IX, that the church decided that all abortion was homicide. By 1974 the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith issued a “Declaration on Procured Abortion”, ignoring the first 1,800 years of Catholic history by arguing that not only was abortion forbidden, but that “one can never claim freedom of opinion as a pretext for attacking the rights of others, most especially the right to life.”
So the difficulty is that we may want a debate about all these questions. But too often the Church doesn’t really want to debate at all, it wants to instruct. It wants to pretend that it has the answers, and has known them all along. And in so doing, it turns its back on the people.
Thank you all.
Guardian (UK)Copyright 2005 Guardian Newspapers Limited.
March 29, 2005
[truncated]
G2: The church wants to stifle ethical debate
David Aaronovitch
Mitres to the left, birettas to the right; it’s been a faith-filled, polarising Easter. On Sunday it was Cormac Murphy O’Connor, head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, drawing a parallel between the Nazi extermination of the Jews and others, and Britain’s abortion policies. The cardinal even used the totemic figure, speaking of “the termination of six million lives in the womb since the Abortion Act was introduced”. And he also warned about where developments in stem-cell research, euthanasia and IVF are taking us. “That way,” he argued, “lies eugenics, and we know from German history where that leads.”
He has a point, and the Catholic church has a right to make it. The memory of eugenics - the science of human selective breeding - has an unpleasant way of intruding itself into modern debates on screening for disability, on the quality of life and on the definition of life itself.
Back in the 20s and 30s there were plenty of people on the intellectual left who took the view that some lives were not worth living. George Bernard Shaw advocated euthanasia for “the sort of people who do not fit in”, Aldous Huxley supported sterilisation to “prevent the sub-normal from having any families at all”, Fabian founder Sidney Webb warned about “the breeding of degenerate hordes of demoralised ‘residuum’ unfit for social life”, and the birth-control pioneer Marie Stopes disinherited her son for the genetic sin of marrying a girl with myopia.
All this argument had an effect. In 1934 a Department of Health report recommended compulsory sterilisation of the “feeble-minded”. It was in good measure that Catholic intellectuals such as G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, together with Labour MPs, blocked the attempt to bring in such appalling legislation.
They weren’t so fortunate elsewhere. Compulsory sterilisation laws were first passed in a majority of US states and - between 1928 and 1936 - in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Estonia. And in Germany, under the Nazis, a 1933 law on selective sterilisation became, by stages, a secret forcible euthanasia programme deployed against the severely handicapped.
One constant theme in all these developments was the opposition of the Catholic church, with its faith-based assertion that only God had the right to decide which life was worth living, and which was not.
This history is important because people sometimes talk as though they know everything. It is - on either side - an open and shut question as to whether we should permit euthanasia, choose the gender of a child, use foetal cells in research, screen out abnormalities, carry out or forbid abortions at a particular stage of pregnancy, switch Terri Schiavo off or keep her hanging on for ever.
But the story of eugenics suggests that we must never stop debating and agonising about these matters. That’s why I think it’s probably wrong to be angry with the cardinal. If you believe what the cardinal believes - that each zygotic entity is a human being equal to any other - then a Holocaust has indeed taken place.
If we concede that, however, then the cardinal should concede something in return. Which is that this belief is not at all an inevitable product of Catholic history and teaching, as he seems to suggest, but a relatively recent dogma. Indeed, the Catholic writer Daniel Dombrowski points out that “one of the best kept secrets in the history of Catholicism . . . is that Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas - two of the most important thinkers in the Catholic church - did not see the foetus in the early stages of pregnancy as a human person. In fact, Augustine remarkably compares the foetus in the early stages of pregnancy to vegetation.”
It wasn’t until 1869, and the Apostolicae Sedis of the reactionary Pius IX, that the church decided that all abortion was homicide. By 1974 the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith issued a “Declaration on Procured Abortion”, ignoring the first 1,800 years of Catholic history by arguing that not only was abortion forbidden, but that “one can never claim freedom of opinion as a pretext for attacking the rights of others, most especially the right to life.”
So the difficulty is that we may want a debate about all these questions. But too often the Church doesn’t really want to debate at all, it wants to instruct. It wants to pretend that it has the answers, and has known them all along. And in so doing, it turns its back on the people.