The NEW YORK TIMES' editorial about the chilling effect of the actions of Phoenix Bishop Thomas Olmsted makes a number of excellent points. But it stops short of debating the questionable ethical teachings of the Catholic bishops regarding abortion in the first trimester. But as the chilling example of Bishop Olmsted's actions shows, those teachings should be debated.

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Duluth, MN (OpEdNews) January 1, 2011: The NEW YORK TIMES' editorial "A Matter of Life or Death" (Dec. 23, 2010) argues that Bishop Thomas Olmsted's actions in Phoenix can have a chilling effect on Catholic hospitals in the United States providing emergency abortions.

Even though patient records are confidential, Bishop Olmsted somehow learned that an emergency abortion had been performed in the Catholic hospital in Phoenix, his Catholic diocese. It was an emergency situation; it would not have been possible to transfer the patient to another hospital, so that the abortion would have been performed there. According to published news stories, he excommunicated the Catholics in the Catholic hospital who had been involved in the emergency abortion to save the mother's life. More recently, he told the hospital that it could no longer advertise itself as a Catholic hospital.

As the TIMES' editorial points out, "No one has suggested that Catholic hospitals should be required to perform nonemergency abortions." Thus the main argument of the editorial is that Bishop Olmsted's actions can have a chilling effect on other Catholic hospitals in the United States regarding emergency abortions. As the editorial points out, "Catholic hospital account for about 15 percent of the nation's hospital beds and are the only hospital facilities in many communities."

As Bishop Olmsted's chilling example shows, the questionable ethical teachings advanced by the Catholic bishops regarding abortion should be debated by the NEW YORK TIMES and other civic-minded Americans. Why hasn't the NEW YORK TIMES published editorials debating the questionable ethical teachings advanced by the Catholic bishops regarding abortion?

As you may remember, during the 2008 presidential campaign, Senator Barack Obama was asked a question regarding abortion: "When does life begin?" He said, "That's above my pay grade." In short, he ducked the question, just as the editorial writers for the NEW YORK TIMES have ducked the question by not debating the questionable ethical teachings advanced by the Catholic bishops regarding abortion.

Obama is now president of the United States, but he still has not figured out an intelligent way to debate the questionable ethical teachings advanced by the Catholic bishops regarding abortion, just as the editorial writers for the NEW YORK TIMES have not.

Granted, we Americans have an excellent tradition known as the doctrine of the separation of church and state. As I've noted, the TIMES' editorial explicitly bows down before this doctrine when it points out that "[n]o one has suggested that Catholic hospitals should be required to perform nonemergency abortions."

But where exactly does the chilling effect of Bishop Olmsted's actions come from? The chilling effect comes from the questionable ethical teachings advanced by the Catholic bishops regarding abortion. Therefore, those of us who are concerned about the chilling effect of his example should debate the questionable ethical teachings advanced by the Catholic bishops regarding abortion.

Let's start with the slogan, "Life begins at the moment of conception." The claim made in this slogan should be debated. Granted, it can be debated in more than one way. But it has not been debated in any meaningful way in editorials in the NEW YORK TIMES, as it should be.

Let me explain how I think this claim should and should not be debated.

One way to debate the claim would be to negate it by adding the word "not" in the sentence: No, life does not begin at the moment of conception. However, I would not recommend this way of debating the claim, because a certain kind of life-form is indeed truly formed at the moment of conception. But this life-form is an infra-human life-form, not yet a fully human and distinctively human life-form.

Using his own terminology, Peter Singer of Princeton University has made these two points. However, he does not work with the idea of ensoulment that has been used in the Catholic tradition of thought, as I will momentarily. (Disclosure: I am not a practicing Catholic, but I grew up as a Catholic, was educated in Catholic institutions of education, and studied Catholic moral theology at the University of Toronto when I was a Jesuit seminarian.)

From the moment of conception onward, we have a certain kind of infra-human life-form developing. However, in the natural course of events, not all of the developing infra-human life-forms survive. In the course of natural events (i.e., no deliberate intervention through human agency), many of the emerging life-forms do not survive. But a certain number of the infra-human life-forms do survive and eventually develop into fetuses in the mothers' wombs.

Next, we need to discuss when the developing fetus should be considered to be a full-fledged, distinctively human being, as distinct from being an infra-human life-form. I will use the traditional Catholic term "ensoulment" to refer to when the infra-human life-form emerges and becomes a full-fledged, distinctively human being.

Up until the moment of ensoulment, the developing fetus is not a full-fledged human being. As a result, the destruction of the developing fetus through deliberate human agency before ensoulment should not be referred to as murder. By definition, murder involves the deliberate taking of innocent human life through deliberate human agency. But distinctively human life begins only at the moment of ensoulment. Therefore, the destruction of the infra-human life-form through deliberate human agency before ensoulment should not be referred to as murder.

For the sake of discussion, let us say that some Catholic bishops would argue that ensoulment occurs at the moment of conception. According to the Catholic tradition of thought, each egg fertilized by sperm would represent an immortal soul and would experience bodily resurrection at the resurrection. But many eggs fertilized by sperm are destroyed in the natural course of events. They do not survive and develop into fetuses. And not all fetuses emerge in live births. Consequently, if the Catholic bishops hold that the moment of conception is indeed the moment of ensoulment, then at the resurrection there will be more resurrected human bodies than there ever were live human being in the history of the world. This possibility will produce a lot of theological problems.

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?

Authors Website: http://www.d.umn.edu/~tfarrell

Authors Bio:

Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book WALTER ONG'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO CULTURAL STUDIES: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE WORD AND I-THOU COMMUNICATION (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000; 2nd ed. 2009, forthcoming). The first edition won the 2001 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology conferred by the Media Ecology Association. For further information about his education and his publications, see his UMD homepage: Click here to visit Dr. Farrell's homepage.

On September 10 and 22, 2009, he discussed Walter Ong's work on the blog radio talk show "Ethics Talk" that is hosted by Hope May in philosophy at Central Michigan University. Each hour-long show has been archived and is available for people who missed the live broadcast to listen to. Here are the website addresses for the two archived shows:

Click here to listen the Technologizing of the Word Interview

Click here to listen the Ramus, Method & The Decay of Dialogue Interview