Church Fathers on the Beginning of Human Life

Catholic League: For Religious and Civil Rights

On yesterday’s NBC-TV show, “Meet the Press,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked to comment on when life begins. Here is what she said: “I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is, over the centuries, the doctors of the Church have not been able to make that definition.”

When Tom Brokaw told her that the Catholic Church “feels very strongly” that life begins at conception, Pelosi said, “I understand. And this is like maybe 50 years or something like that. So again, over the history of the Church, this is an issue of controversy.”

I have had high school students bring up this argument as well. Here is how I responded to them.

• The beginning of human life is in part a question for science. Church fathers and early theologians (even medieval theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas) did not have scientific knowledge. As scientific knowledge enlightened us about the beginnings of human life, the Church's ability to speak on the subject with greater confidence and clarity.
  
  
• [As stated by the author of the Catholic League article from which I drew the quote] when there is a doubt about human life, the proper response would be greater caution, not greater abandon.
  
  
• The philosophical / theological question is when the human soul exists. We can never know this spiritual, hidden reality for sure. However, the soul is the source of our nature so we can assume that it is present as soon as an organism is identifiable as a human being. Genetics tells us that we have human DNA at the moment of fertilization. That would indicate the presence of a human soul.
  
  
• Even the Church fathers and theologians who thought that the human soul was present only when the mother could feel the baby move (the period after 40-80 days called the "quickening" or "ensoulment") could not advocate termination of the pregnancy since such a termination would constitute contraception and the Church's teaching against contraception has been constant. It may be accurate to say that the early Church taught that terminating a pregnancy before ensoulment was not murder. However, it is not accurate to say that it was not considered a sin. It is also not accurate to say that the early Church did not consider abortion evil. Once the baby was identified as human to the best of their knowledge, terminating the prenancy was considered murder.

You can find websites that claim that the Church's teachings on abortion have changed. This is simly not true. What has changed is our scientific understanding of the beginning of life. If the early Church fathers and theologians had the scientific knowledge that we had today, they would have held the same conclusions about abortion that we hold today.