Extremely Lame

This is something I found really interesting as a recovering Catholic. One gets the feeling that the Roman Catholic Church is and has always been against abortion because of their belief that a soul is present at the time of conception. Interestingly enough, they didn’t always believe that, and there are popes who issued decrees that state quite the opposite.

Did you know that for over 800 years in the history of the Catholic Church, human life did not begin at conception, but instead began at some point later in the pregnancy? Yeah, like I said, interesting stuff.

The idea for it began with Aristotle. Aristotle believed that early in gestation, a potential human would be inhabited by a vegetable soul, then later on it would develop into an animal soul, and then only after 40 or 90 days (depending on the sex-40 days for males, 90 days for females) would it be inhabited by a human soul. This phenomenon was known as delayed ensoulment.

The early Christian Church was pretty much against this view, as were many Jews. This is despite the fact that in Exodus 21-22, the punishment for accidentally causing a miscarriage is a fine, not an eye-for-an-eye forfeiture of the person’s life if it were considered murder. But that’s neither here nor there.

Well, they were against it at first. A couple hundred years later, you had theologians like St. Augustine falling back on this idea of delayed ensoulment and other groups from around this time allowing abortion until the fetus took human shape.

Around the 800s, penitentials began circulating regarding abortion. Penitentials were basically Cliff notes for priests for confession (the Sacrament of Penance). It was a list of sins and the appropriate punishments for said sins. Some of the sins considered worse than abortion? Pulling out (coitus interruptus), oral or anal sex, and sterilization. Then again, this is back in a time where having sex for pleasure (even if you were married) was considered a Hell-worthy trespaass.

It was around the early 1200s where you get a bonafide Pope decreeing that there is a distinct difference between early term and late term abortions. Pope Innocent III decreed that a fetus gained a human soul during the Quickening (the point when you can feel the baby move, not that awful awful Highlander movie). This is where I started the clock for when the Catholic Church differentiated between a what was and was not considered a human.

Pope Sixtus V went back on this and decreed that all abortions were murder in 1588, but the next Pope, Gregory XIV, went back to the quickening test three years later. It wasn’t until 1869 that Pope Pius IX removed the distinction between moving and non-moving fetuses, and it wasn’t until 1886 that we got the Catholic Church’s current stance on abortion, where Leo XIII considered an abortion for any reason punishable by excommunication from the Church, even if doing nothing would kill both mother and child. This is actually opposite of Jewish law from 2000 years ago, who typically were against abortion and infanticide, but it wasn’t wrong to save the life of the mother since she was here first and had more of a right to live. It’s Jewish law’s version of calling dibs.

So, there you go. A short history of the Catholic Church’s stance on abortion. They’ve been pretty much all over the place on where human life begins. So, next time you get into a deep philosophical discussion on the beginnings of life with a Catholic, drop this in their lap. It should be fun.