Next, let us say that some Catholic bishops would argue that DNA is implanted in each egg fertilized by sperm. But DNA refers only to the body, not to the distinctively human soul. According to traditional Catholic teaching, each individual distinctively human soul is created by God and infused in the body of the fetus at the moment of ensoulment.
For an excellent and accessible book about the distinctively human rational soul, the interested reader should see Mortimer J. Adler's INTELLECT: MIND OVER MATTER (Macmillan, 1990).
Next, let us discuss the moment of ensoulment. In HEAD AND HEART: AMERICAN CHRISTIANITIES (Penguin, 2007), Garry Wills, a practicing Catholic, points out that the famous thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas considered ensoulment with the distinctively human soul to occur only at the completion of human formation, not at the moment of conception when an egg is fertilized with semen:
"[Aquinas] said that a material cause (semen) cannot cause a spiritual product. The intellectual soul (personhood) is directly created by God at the end of human generation (in fine generationis humanae) [THEOLOGICAL SUMMARY, Part One, Question 118, Second Article, Second Response]. This intellectual soul supplants what had preceded it (nutritive and sensory animation). So he denied that personhood arose at fertilization by the semen. God directly infuses the soul at the completion of human formation" (page 526).
I am not convinced that the intellectual soul "supplants" what had preceded it. As a result, I do believe that we need to work with a two-soul/two-nature paradigm of the human person: (1) an infra-human soul (i.e., life-form) and (2) the distinctively human rational soul.
It would be speculation to suppose that Aquinas had perhaps been thinking about the story of God creating Adam and Eve in Genesis. But in that story, God is portrayed as first creating the body of Adam and then breathing life into it. The forming of Adam's body comes first, followed by God infusing life into it. Something like this two-step sequence of events may be the best way to understand how we can understand evolutionary theory and God's creation of the distinctively human soul.
One option would be to define ensoulment as occurring when the developing fetus can survive outside the mother's womb--at viability. But the developing fetus has not achieved viability in the first trimester. For this reason, I would say that abortion in the first trimester should be permitted, as it is in the United States.
I also recommend the idea of hominization, which I mentioned above. In an effort to reconcile evolutionary theory with the creationist views found in both accounts of creation in Genesis, the American cultural historian and philosopher Walter J. Ong, S.J., suggests how hominization can be understood:
"It took much longer for matter to be capable of the incredibly tight organization found in the human body. Nevertheless, over a period beginning with the emergence of life some one billion or more years ago, living beings did develop progressively more and more elaborate organization, more and more "complexification' or intensity of life. At a point where living organisms approximating the present human body finally were appearing, the first human soul is created by God, infused within a body in the material universe. This is, of course, a special act of God, for the creation of the human soul is always a special act of [God], since the soul in its spirituality transcends the material" (Ong, IN THE HUMAN GRAIN: FURTHER EXPLORATIONS OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURE [Macmillan, 1967, page 78]).
In other words, because the specifically human soul is immaterial (aka spiritual), it transcends the material. Ong is working with the philosophic distinction of the body (material) and soul (immaterial). Insofar as the distinctively human soul, the source of human rationality, is immaterial, God is understood as the creator of each individual distinctively human soul. As a result, God's creation is ongoing. (As to the story in Genesis about God resting on the seventh day of creation, some priest probably made that up as a way to argue that we should take a day of rest from our daily labors periodically, which is not a bad idea.)
I therefore suggest that we think of the human person as having two distinct natures: (1) an infra-human animal nature, which begins at the moment of conception; and (2) a distinctively human nature, which begins when the live fetus is born and is able to live outside the mother's womb. Until the fetus is viable outside the mother's womb, it is best understood as an infra-human life-form, not as a distinctively human person. For centuries, Catholic theology about the divinity of Jesus has claimed that he had two natures: (1) a human nature and (2) a divine nature -" so that he was totally human and totally divine. So the idea that a person might have two natures has a theological precedent.
However, even if my suggestion about two natures of the human person were to be widely adopted by Catholics and non-Catholics, we could still debate under what circumstances abortion beyond the first trimester should be allowed. As we debate the morality of abortion in the second trimester and perhaps in the third trimester, we should give additional thought to the definition of murder (the taking of innocent human life through deliberate human agency) and to the implications of that definition for the deliberate taking of innocent human life through deliberate human agency.
American actions in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, after all, involve the loss of life of non-combatants as "collateral damage." Non-combatants represent innocent human life. But if the American military is permitted to take the lives of innocent non-combatants, are there extenuating circumstances that might possibly justify such action? In a similar way, might there likewise be extenuating circumstances that could justify a woman in having an abortion in the second trimester or even in the third?
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