Above Their Pay Grade

If someone were to write a set of talking points entitled, "How to brag about being 'a devout Catholic' while supporting abortion rights," right at the top of the list would be: "Claim that you've studied the matter at length and that the Church has taught many contradictory things on the topic over the centuries."

Senator Biden made a valiant attempt at this in his primary season interview on with Tim Russert saying:

Even within our own church, there’s been debates about life, you know, from, from “Summa Theologica,” Aquinas, and 40 days to quickening and right to, you know, you know, Pious [sic] IX, animated fetus doctrine and so on.
Meet The Press, 4-29-2007

Over the weekend Representative Pelosi tried the same tactic on Meet The Press with Tom Brokaw:

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. And Senator–St. Augustine said at three months. We don’t know.... And so I don’t think anybody can tell you when life begins, human life begins.
Meet The Press, 8-24-2008

Perhaps my native cynicism is taking over, but I find it unlikely that Pelosi has really spent that much time reading St. Augustine, or that Biden sits down with a copy of the Summa on a rainy afternoon. However, even if they do, they are suffering from some basic mis-apprehensions of the sort that often occur when people attempt to read works outside their field.

Throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the best available understanding of human biology came from the Aristotelian school of science. According to this set of theories, in order for matter to take on a given form, it had have a "form". And in order for something to grow or change or move, it had to have a "soul". Plants were thought to have vegetative souls, which allowed them to grow but not to move. Animals had animal souls in addition to vegetable souls, which allowed them to move and have sensory perception, but not "think" in the sense that humans do. Humans had a "rational soul" as well as an animal and a vegetable soul.

As an early Christian, Augustine was very much concerned about explaining Christian moral teachings in terms of the most current science of the day -- Aristotelian science. (In Confessions V: 3-5, Augustine describes how he originally hesitated to accept Christianity because a prominent Christian apologist he encountered did not understand the modern Astronomy of the 4th Century A.D.) In this regard, he sought to explain the development and "ensoulment" of the human fetus according to the best science available to him in the 4th Century.

Late Roman embryology was very primitive by modern standards. Aristotelian natural scientists had very little understanding of where new organisms came from. Believing in spontaneous generation, they thought that maggots spontaneously generated from rotten meat, that worms spontaneously generated from mud, etc. According to this theory, certain propitious substances came together under the right conditions, and they formed an un-animated body or seed. A soul then entered into this inanimate body and thus allowed it to begin to grow and move. (According to Aristotelian science, an organism could not being to move until in was "animated" by a soul -- thus the term "quickening" and the phrase "the quick and the dead".)

Augustine used this Aristotelian science (the best available in his day) to provide commentary on a section in Exodus in which the Israelites establish a law that if a woman miscarried as a result of being physically assaulted, her attacker will be fined if the fetus was "unformed" but executed if the fetus was "formed". Augustine reasons that if the soul had not yet entered into the fetus, it was thus an unformed, unmoving, non-living "potential human" -- this must be the reason that the Old Testament lawmakers prescribed only a fine for causing the miscarriage of an "unformed" fetus. A "formed" fetus must be one that had been "ensouled", which to Augustine's mind explained why capital punishment was prescribed for someone causing the miscarriage of a formed fetus.

By doing this, Augustine was using the best science available to him at the time to explain an otherwise arcane passage in the Old Testament. However, we no longer live in the 4th Century A.D., and modern science shows us that unborn humans are unique and living organisms from the moment of their conception. While Augustine's 4th Century understanding that an early stage embryo was an "unformed" lump of inanimate tissue fits well with modern abortion rhetoric, it is clearly false.

Why, then, are modern politicians citing Late Roman and Medieval understandings of biology (which completely contradict our modern science) in order to position their dissent from their own Church's teaching on the sacredness of human life?

Only they can know. But perhaps it's time for them to come in out of the Dark Ages.