You know, something occurred to me. I’m not sure how I feel about it, but I thought I should throw it out there for discussion:
The Church is very strongly anti-abortion (obviously). The vast majority of practicing Catholics would not get an abortion themselves under any circumstance, regardless of the state of the law. The same is true for the members of a number of other mainstream Christian denominations.
This means that the “babies” that would be “saved” by making abortion illegal would be predominantly raised not by Catholics, and likely not by members of any other Christian denomination either.
These children will probably not have an upbringing in any sort of church that you see as “correct”, not receive any of the sacraments, and not be brought up to have faith in God or Christ.
If we take as given the whole of Catholic theology and not just its position on abortion in isolation, doesn’t this mean that most of the “children” whose lives would be saved by the anti-abortion movement would go on to lose their *souls *to Hell?
In your minds, does this factor into the abortion debate at all?
Again, like I said, I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’m just throwing it out for discussion.
Fascinating point. I would put it this way. Catholics win by default if they follow their own teaching (we know that many who claim to be, or are baptized Catholic do not follow Church teaching) because they are the ones left populating. Kind of like the Israelites in Egypt. The Pharoah got worried that they were becoming too populous and would eventually rise up and take over.
This is somewhat the scenario in Europe with the Muslim population. They will eventually just out-populate the non-Muslims if things follow the current trajectory. Which also goes to show what is really going on with Catholics in Europe with respect to following Church teaching.
However, the children of non-Catholics, if they are born, are offered the same opportunity to receive the sacraments as children of Catholics. That is the point of evangelization, that is the meaning of the term “gospel”. Whether they accept the good news is their choice, also Church teaching, but they are not written off per se just because they are not born into a Catholic family. If that was the case there would be no Church today at all, because the Apostles would not have preached, and the Roman empire would passed into pagan oblivion without Christendom arising out of the ashes.
Church teaching on the innocence of the child (voluntary acts, not original sin) is also played out in the fact that any immoral act of the parents is not held against the child. This is an extension of the same teaching. That is to say, throughout history, a child born out of wedlock (the result of an immoral act in the eyes of the Church) is welcome to be baptized on condition that the child will be raised in the faith, by either the single mother or some other guardian. All baptisms of infants are supposed to be done on that same principle, by the way, recognizing the fact that the infant has not attained the age of reason. But although they have not attained the ability to feed themself or think rationally for themself, they are still a human person by virtue of their human soul and therefore can receive baptism, and clearly cannot be killed.
And that also gives the Catholic case for pro-life added authenticity in my opinion. It is not just about
us vs them and preserving our group, because we believe in the sanctity of human life even if that human being grows up to be an atheist humanist, a Muslim, an agnostic or whatever. That individual person’s intrinsic value is their humanity, right from conception. On that, the Church is consistent and adamant. And by
human we mean that unique, integrated body and soul, unlike any other living thing in heaven or on earth, and each unique individual case of that humanity which we call person.
(refering back to other posts) That is why the chromosome discussion is relevant to the extent that it is the scientific biological description of the individuation that we know physically as a person, although the personhood also contains that integrated soul which differentiates it as a human person as opposed to a hair, which is human, in the sense of a human artifact, and biologically unique to one human being. Personhood depends upon more than chromosomes, as you have pointed out, but it is the biological indicator that differentiates the child from the parents as a unique individual.
Leaving aside the question of the soul for a moment it is still disingenuous to compare that zygote shortly after conception to any other human artifact based upon the chromosomes, because left alone, that is a fetus, a baby, a child, a girl or boy, a woman or man. Left alone, a human hair is still a hair. The point is, there is a continuum from that point right to adulthood, and the continuum is that of a unique human person, however you define it. At any point along that continuum prior to adulthood, that adult, that autonomous rational human being is there in potentiality, whether it seems obvious or not. Thus the zygote, the fetus, the baby, the child are all the same adult in potentiality. It is a unique organic self-contained developing unit, all of its life. If it is not a human person in the womb at any point, it is not a human person as an adult. If it is not OK to kill it for our own convenience as an adult, it is not OK to kill it at any point along that continuum except prior to when it became that unique human individual. That point is conception because we know that is when the continuum started.
