And yes, pretty soon it will be possible to take ordinary cells and turn them into zygotes.
any evidence to back up your confidence?

As for the rest, read George’s book. It’s not the number of chromosomes that determines ontological individuality, though it is a necessary condition–rather we can know that something is an individual human person from the operations that it performs–in this case development and differentiation into a complete human being, not just parts.

No one makes the error of identifying the soul with the body; they may emphasize material prosperity as a sign of divine election or some other teaching, but your attempt to collapse this into some fundamental error regarding the soul is untenable.

Independent ontologically, even if it depends upon the mother’s body for nutrients and raw material. Big woop. It is not a part of it, as it has a different genetic code. Mere physical continguity does not mean no ontological distinctiveness. Just look at the example of siamese twins and such.

Yes, there are old church teachings against infanticide. I’m not
aware of any widespread doctrine about abortion from the early days, however. I’m curious what your references are.

Regarding bodily resurrection, yes, I consider these fantasies to be based on materialism, both in the past and especially in the present. Resurrection is a spiritual matter. Heaven is not somewhere else. As Jesus taught, the Kingdom of Heaven is within. Physical bodies decay and die. They cannot live forever or be made perfect. Only the Spirit is eternal and undying. To know oneself in Christ and in Spirit is the true resurrection.

Tedschan,

Genetic twiddling is shorthand for what you said. And yes, pretty soon it will be possible to take ordinary cells and turn them into zygotes. Regardless of that, the point is that each cell has the same genetic material as the original egg-sperm combination. There is nothing sacred about that. The Spirit is not contained in our genetic code. These doctrines, however old they might be, are simply materialism made holy. But you are right, modern Christians do not divide the body from the soul. Instead, they pretend that the body is the soul, which is even worse. That’s where we get the Osteens and the prosperity consciousness and the constant desire to acheive endless comfort and pleasures here on earth in the name of Christ. Daniel seems to understand this to a degree, but I don’t think he’s examined it deeply enough and seen all its implications. Identification of the soul with the body is the root of materialism. How can we argue against scientific materialism if we assume the material body to be the same as the soul?

And yes, the embryo is distinct at the cellular level. But it is not distinct and independent from the mother’s body. But so are all the organs within her body. The embryo grows within it, as a part of it. It does not separate until the placental cord is cut after birth.

By recent, I assume you mean within the last 1,600 to 1,700 years? That probably understates how far back church teachings against abortion/infanticide go.

There is no worship of the flesh going on, at least not with generally theologically orthodox Christians, and the belief in the real resurrection of the body is one of the most ancient and fundamental doctrines. Gnosticism came later and has enjoyed a semi-revival in the modern fixation on the fate of the soul apart from the body, while the promise of Pascha is the promise of resurrection.

No. “Genetic twiddling” cannot reverse differentiation and specification into somatic cells. You’d have to reverse development and endow that cell with the complete pluripotentiality of the embryo (not just the ability to become any part of the body, but to have the requisite different parts which are further differentiated), which cannot be done.

See Robert George’s Embryo: A Defense of Life, which is an extension of his arguments on the ontological distinctiveness of an embryo that he has given previously in shorter articles.

As for your understanding of the Apostolic Tradition, you should read up on that as well, since your ignorance is obvious. You give a dualistic understanding of the body-soul relationship–Christians do not divide the “body” from the “soul” and “worship the body”–it is because of the soul that the body has life, and we are committed to not taking innocent life away.

That’s a very creative and imaginative defense of the Pro-Life position, and I think it’s worthy of a lengthier reply than is suitable here, but I don’t think it really washes. Equality does not impose anything like a direct burden on others, and it’s a social policy, not something regulating the most intimate and private aspects of our sexual and reproductive lives. It’s not based on religion in any case, it’s simply a social ideal that our founding fathers felt was important for a democracy to uphold under the law. .

A fetus is of course genetically human, and so is my foot, my hair, my kidneys, my blood. We don’t generally consider it murder when a foot is amputated, or when I give blood at the bloodbank. Yet every one of those cells could be turned into a baby with a little bit of genetic twiddling. A fetus is not an independent human, it is a part of a woman’s body, it is grown within her body, from out of the stuff of her body, and like every one of her cells, it contains the genetic code of a human being. When it becomes independent of her body, you can treat it as a unique and independent human being. Until then, it’s part of the woman’s body, it’s feeding off her blood and food like any other organ or limb. So I’m sympathetic to the notion that an aborted live fetus should be treated as having rights, while one inside the woman does not. The fetus inside a woman’s womb is not an other, so the argument for “just treatment for others” doesn’t wash. The woman has the right to decide what she does with every part of her own body, including a growth that might turn into an independent human being some day.

I agree that it’s logical to say one doesn’t have to be religious to be against abortion, but it’s simply the case that most of the support for the pro-life position comes from strongly religious people acting on their strongly held religious beliefs. It’s really that simple. You can argue that secular atheists should be even more pro-life than religious people, but that only suggests that you don’t understand them very well, and the weakness of your argument for that view, absent the emotional and spiritual belief in a soul, should tell you why it doesn’t go very far.

Now, I agree with your last part, that we don’t quibble over whether people have souls when we bomb them. That’s because even secular atheists would consider an indepenend human being to have “soul” or “spirit”, if not in the religious sense, at least in the humanist sense of the word. That’s why such people object to murder. It’s also why few of them consider abortion to be murder. A fetus simply isn’t in the same class as an independent human being. Most people know this. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Christianity never even had a policy about such things until quite recently. Recent theological views on the matter are only authoritative to those who belong to authoritative churches. Jesus had no such view, nor did the early Christians. It is only in the recent, materialistic days of Christianity that the literal belief in the life of the flresh, rather than of spirit, has made it seem rational to protect life, brith, etc., at all costs. No such ethic every existed previously. A young child who died was considered fortunate in spiritual terms, if not in living ones, for they would go to heaven that much more quickly. But in our day and age Christianity is not oriented towards heaven, it is oriented towards earth, and the flesh, and fantasies of being bodily resurrected into heaven, and so forth – all materialistic. In fact, I’d argue that such Christians are the only real materialists we have, that the secular atheists aren’t really materialists at all. And that is why they have come to worship the flesh even of fetuses, and strive with all diligence to preserve every brain-dead accident victim, rather than just let them die in piece. They don’t actually value the soul, they value the flesh. Well, no wonder we’re in such a mess.

Except for centuries of church teaching and canons.

Equality is entirely mythical and imaginary (and some people think it has theological foundation because of the florid language of the Declaration), but no one seems to object to acting as if this were true when it comes to every other sort of person. We constantly enact laws that enshrine this myth and these laws often impose burdens on others in order to protect the myth, when there is even less reason to believe in it than in the humanity of an unborn child. The pro-life position merely requires that we acknowledge that the child is genetically a human being, which the child obviously is. Questions of ensoulment don’t enter into it. There does seem to be a strong correlation between believing that unborn children have souls and are persons and objecting to their killing, but one should be able to object to killing unborn children even more easily if you have no assumptions about whether or not these children possess souls.

The secular humanist should be even more outraged at the killing of unborn human beings than the theologian, because unlike the theologian he does not assume that there is any salvation or hope of resurrection for those children. That this is frequently not the case is a problem for the secular humanist, not the theologian who might appear to attach almost too much importance to material life in the body. Of course, it isn’t just a question of life, but of our just treatment of others. We don’t quibble about whether people have souls when we say we shouldn’t bomb civilians or when we say we shouldn’t torture people. We assume that as human beings they should not be treated in a way that denies them humanity and dignity.

Most pro-choice people do not believe that the soul is created at birth, that early abortion is murder, pr that theology should be allowed to become the basis for laws governing how women decide upon their most intimate issues of reproduction. They believe instead that there is a very gradual process by which a zygote grows into a human being, and that this process is not complete until quite late in pregnancy. They resent having theological notions of law and morality imposed upon their views and actions. In a secular democracy, that is not supposed to happen.

Now, of course one can vote to impose theology upon others. One can even vote to repeal the constitution and enact a theological form of government upon our states. One can pass Amendments to the Constitution outlawing abortion. That doesn’t make it right, but it can be done. But until that is done, we live in a nation with a secular government that is not supposed to enact laws based on theological beliefs, especially when they impose on others some extreme burdens, such as bearing unwanted children.

One possibility (and the one I believe) is that he’s not very pro-life at all…

I mean, he seems to have abandoned the Iraq War ground effortlessly without a loss of interest in the candidate…

That indicates to me he isn’t/wasn’t terribly attached to the argument in the first place…

The same with abortion…

There is something in me that appreciates the die-hard idealist, whether he votes for Barr or Nader or writes in Ron Paul… but at the end of the day, at this moment, I’m left with this… Should idealistic conservatives vote for third-party instead of Obama, who might be their best-of-the-lessers choice, and McCain wins and continues this ridiculous war and continues down his League of Democracies path of madness… how will I answer my children, when in sixth-grade history they learn of the first real black contender, one who at least intimated he would get us out of the war—when they ask me who I voted for, and who I tried my hardest, in my own modest way, to get elected? I shudder to think of that day, and think it worth taking the chance on Obama despite my myriad objections to his worldview, in hopes that he brings a shift significant enough from this current administration to make some kind of difference for our country and for my sons.

We are in agreement that neither candidate will have much effect if elected. My purpose here is to drive home just how far-fetched it is to expect Obama to be accepting the proposals of pro-lifers. There is certainly an argument to be made (I have made it a few times) that the GOP does not deserve reflexive support from pro-lifers considering the party’s record, but if I am going to protest the GOP I still plan to do it by voting for another pro-life candidate.

I’ve really appreciated your blog for months now, and generally have little to differ with you on. However, I think there is a little more to the “back-alley butcher” argument than you allow.

The center-liberal boilerplate on abortion has been “Safe, Legal and Rare”… and yet it seems the “rare” part gets short shrift. However, the conservative retort to this has been “sanctity of life,” which when evaluated seems to boil down to “Illegal, and by the way we ignore the fact that some will seek abortions anyway and they will most certainly NOT be Safe, and we have no way to prove they will be any Rarer.”

There is no good answer, I suppose… although I appreciated a post on Takimag a few days ago talking about how utterly empty GOP promises of cleansing “activist judges” has really been, considering the results of the judges appointed by GOP leaders. In my view, morals (as opposed to universal “ethics”) must be the result of a convinced mind, convinced of God’s truth and Christ’s call… sadly this is not the country we live in, and may never be. Pragmatism must therefore take the day, and the pragmatist in me sees that abortions, while legal, decrease significantly when root problems of poverty and social construct are changed, and records suggest Democratic administrations lead to fewer abortions than Bush administrations. Make of it what you will, but I don’t see McCain or Obama having any considerable effect… at least not considerable enough to factor in to my decision come November.

Absolutely nothing, which is a cause to celebrate. I have absolutely no desire to live in, say, San Francisco for a whole host or reasons, but part of me is quite pleased that somewhere in America there is a shining citadel to decadent hedonism, freely chosen by the inhabitants thereof. I suppose the residents of S.F. feel the same way about my little burg in Ohio, and there is nothing wrong with that.

“interstate legal war”

I have no idea of what you mean by that. States already have different legal regimes on a whole host of issues (death penalty, gay rights, taxes, etc.) that hasn’t led to a ‘war’ or anything remotely like it.

To respond to the comments, the overwhelming majority of abortions are performed in the first trimester, and as it is a lot of counties in the United States don’t have an abortion provider (some NARAL statistic) yet that doesn’t prevent a million some abortions a year. The places most likely to endorse strict restrictions are the places least likely to actually perform the abortion. I sense in your resolution of this issue the uneasy compromise brought by the conflict of your minimalist conservative instincts when confronted with a (based on your viewpoint) horrible rights infringements that seems only able to be comprehensively reduced at the federal level.