The Rationale

No, this is not about the rare vestment. Sorry, liturgical geeks. Not this time.

Rather, I am talking about the rationale behind a solid pro-life stance. Frankly, my experience has been that there are a good many Catholics in the Church who, rightfully enough, oppose abortion, but, sadly, are unable to defend their stance. To be a little harsh, these are the people who make the rest of us look like idiots when our beliefs are challenged. Of course, they don't do nearly so bad a job as folks like Nancy Pelosi, who knowingly give scandal by making it appear as if the Church's position were somehow debatable or unofficial. That is not the case.



That, my dear friends, is exactly the right example of what we are up against in the contemporary Church. Nancy Pelosi is an "ardent, practicing Catholic" only in the make-believe world where Catholicism is a religion without codified doctrine or morals. However, please understand that I, for one, do not believe that Nancy Pelosi is actively opposing a doctrine that she knows and understands to be true. Rather, I believe that Nancy Pelosi, like so many others, is the product of the tremendous confusion that overwhelmed the Church in the 1960s. When the Second Vatican Council closed, she was a mere 25 years old, and that was in 1965, right in the middle of social turmoil that has yet to be completely resolved.

Speaker Pelosi is one of millions of Catholics in this kind of predicament. It is our job, as Catholics, to be able to explain to her what the Church believes and why. Additionally, it is our job, as opponents of abortion, to be able to explain our case to anyone who denies it or wants it clarified. Since the latter task is more general (and often the one more necessary), I shall begin there.

Why do I believe that abortion is wrong? The answer to that question comes in two parts. First, I believe that it is always wrong to directly end an innocent human life. Second, I believe that abortion directly puts an end to innocent human life.

Now, it may seem like that first claim will probably go uncontested in any debates you may have on the matter. Do not be fooled, however. There are plenty of people who think they believe that it is wrong to directly end an innocent human life who are really not as solid on it as they may seem. Off the top of my head, I can cite the examples of people who usually oppose abortion, but advocate it or tolerate it in cases where the mother's life is at risk, where the child is the product of rape or incest, where the child is not likely to survive birth, where the mother may not be able to provide an adequate existence for the child, and where the child is known to have a high probability of mental or physical handicap.

These are often cited by what I call "soft pro-choicers" as circumstances that mitigate the severity of the act of abortion. At face value, I think we can all understand where they are coming from, here. No, it is not "fair" for a woman (probably a young girl) to have to carry, deliver, and raise a child that she never intended to have, and that she would not have were it not for a sexual crime perpetrated against her and against her will. That is by no means fair. It is not easy to raise a child with physical or mental disabilities, and to do so may well be beyond the abilities of many women. Justice is supremely denied when a mother has to work multiple jobs to cover the bills and can barely scrape together enough money to feed her child. No pregnant woman wants to die during delivery. All of the situations noted above as potential mitigating circumstances are understandably painful and difficult to handle. They do violate an inherent human understanding of justice and right.

Nevertheless, what we as opponents of abortion must always contend is that abortion does not decrease the injustice of the situation, but rather it increases the injustice. It is better to exist than not to exist. It is better to be alive than dead. Furthermore, if we truly believe that it is wrong to directly end an innocent human life, we must also acknowledge, then, that it is better to let a child be born who will die during delivery (that is, indirectly), than to kill it beforehand. Likewise, it is better to let a child be born whose birth will kill its mother (indirectly, again) than to kill the child beforehand. It is better to let a child be born into a life made difficult and risky by disability or poverty than to deny that child the possibility of any life at all. It is better for a woman to allow her brother's or father's or uncle's or anonymous rapist's child to be born than to impose on that child a death sentence for a crime committed by someone else.

We are not talking, here, about the application of principles. We are talking about the principles themselves. Thus, while some may accuse us of being harsh and our ideals too lofty for implementation, while we may come off as favoring the life of the child or as having some wicked desire to impose further suffering on a woman already going through a difficult time, we must always keep in mind that these beliefs are necessarily implied by the principle that it is morally wrong to directly end an innocent human life. Anyone who denies our claims denies that principle, and it is on that ground that these differences of opinion must be argued. Do not allow yourself to be caught up in difficult questions of application, many of which are designed to make you seem (and feel) like a heartless attempt at humanity. Rather, remember that the principle is worded in such a way that it protects as much life as possible from direct harm. To encapsulate that thought briefly: To carry the child to term is the only way that both mother and child could possibly both live good, happy lives.

The second principle is one that will be much more commonly and easily opposed, with the claim that abortion does not bring a direct end to an innocent human life, because the zygote/embryo/fetus is not a human being. This is a question entirely outside the realm of religion. Therefore, your argument cannot be based on the Bible, on Church teaching, on documents of the USCCB, or on apparitions in a slice of toast, unless you are arguing with people who accept that those things have authority. If you are not, if you are arguing with, say, an atheist (a worst-case scenario for which you ought to be prepared, as its reasoning carries over easily to discussion with other groups), then you will have to base your argument on science and common sense. Mine goes something like this:

Scientifically speaking, there is one sure-fire way to know what species even a single animal cell belongs to. All that needs to be done is to count the chromosomes in the nucleus. That is to say, no two animal species have the same number of chromosomes in the nuclei of their cells, so you could give a qualified scientific professional the skin cell (for example) of any animal, and counting the number of chromosomes in its nucleus will reveal its species of origin. For human beings, that number is 46. So, if you give a scientist a cell and ask him what species it came from, he'll count the chromosomes in its nucleus, and, if that number is 46, he'll say that it's a human cell.

Now, in species that reproduce sexually, there are two kinds of cells (for our purposes), diploid (body) cells and haploid (reproductive) cells. Diploid cells include things like skin, bone, muscle, blood, etc., and they form constitutive parts of an individual organism (an individual person). Haploid cells, on the other hand, are meant only for reproduction, and include ova (egg cells) for women and sperm cells for men. Haploid cells contain half the number of chromosomes found in diploid cells. So, a human gamete (haploid/reproductive cell) will have 23 chromosomes. Why half? Well, that question is answered in considering the process of sexual reproduction. If everything goes according to plan, what eventually happens is that the sperm, containing half the chromosomes of a body cell, and the egg, also containing half the number of chromosomes, will united, to the point that their two nuclei fuse together, and the result is a cell with a nucleus containing 46 chromosomes, a human diploid cell, called a zygote (the process of uniting them was called fertilization).

At that point, it is of paramount importance to note that the zygote has a full complement of 46 human chromosomes, thus giving it a complete set of genetic code. What does it do after that? It rapidly begins to divide, splitting in half, and then in half again, and then in half again. The number of cells keeps on doubling and doubling and doubling. Eventually, some of those cells begin to take on specialized purposes, and it is not long before scientists can identify heart, lungs, bones, skin, muscles, and a brain. In essence, once the sperm and the egg are united and their nuclei become one nucleus, the zygote can be determined as the beginning of a years-long process of unbroken, systematic growth, resulting in something that everyone identifies as a human being, given enough time. If you trace the growth of any person on earth back far enough, you cannot but arrive at the zygote where it all began. On the other hand, there is no human zygote (i.e., one with 46 chromosomes) in existence that can become anything but a human being.

This is the part where many pro-abortion contenders will claim that the zygote is indeed a human cell, complete with its 46 chromosomes, but that it is not an organism distinct from the woman in which it is found. That, really, is a claim that ought to be pretty easy to handle. All that need be done is note two simple things:

1.) If this claim is correct, then there is (or was, at fertilization) a cell inside every pregnant woman that had the ability to grow into a distinct human organism, despite being a part of her body in the first place. How can this be explained, if the zygote is indeed part of the woman? At what point does the "cellular mass" (as they call it) cease to be a part of the pregnant woman, and why?

2.) The genetic code of the zygote is distinct from that of the mother. Only half of the zygote's genetic material comes from her, the other half coming from the father. How can the zygote be a part of the woman's body if it has distinct DNA? Where did this distinct DNA come from? Is it not a bit conspicuous and coincidental that this zygote has exactly the same DNA as the "cellular mass" (as they call it) which, upon birth, we now call a child, and that that DNA never changed from the moment of fertilization?

Follow these two lines of reasoning voraciously, and it seems to me that anyone will be forced to admit that the zygote, at the very least, is not a part of the mother's body, nor of the father's body. It should not be a hard sell, given the fact of continuous traceable development from that stage forward, to argue that the zygote must, therefore, be a distinct human organism, albeit one of only a single cell. The alternative to that conclusion is to claim that a "mass of cells" that is neither a part of the mother nor a distinct organism somehow "becomes" a distinct human organism at some point in its development. If that idea comes up, I usually just ask how the "mass of cells" (as they call it) can "become" a human being without any change whatsoever in its genetic code. To get a bit philosophical, one might also ask what the cause of that "change" from non-organism to organism might be, in other words, what's different?

At this point, we've laid out that we believe that the life of a new, distinct organism begins at fertilization, and that we believe it is morally wrong to directly end an innocent human life, and so more argument should not be necessary. Those are the two pillars of the argument. The claim that the zygote (and every developmental stage thereafter, of course) is a human being may be a hard sell, but it is one that can be made to a greater number of people, since it requires no religious bias or faith, simply reason, which we all have. The claim that it is wrong to directly end an innocent human life, actually, may be the harder sell. Somehow, there are people who believe that the zygote is not a human being/organism. They should not be too hard to sway. Harder to believe, though, is that there are people who accept this and still support abortion. I suppose we'll get into that subsequently, since this rant has been rather long.