“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you” (Jer 1:5):

THE life of every individual, from its very beginning, is part of God’s plan. Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves the creative action of God.

The Second Vatican Council, in a passage which retains all its relevance today, forcefully condemned a number of crimes and attacks against human life:

Whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia, or willful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where people are treated as mere instruments of gain rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others like them are infamies indeed.

They poison human society, and they do more harm to those who practice them than to those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are a supreme dishonor to the Creator.

Unfortunately, this disturbing state of affairs, far from decreasing, is expanding. With the new prospects opened up by scientific and technological progress there arise new forms of attacks on the dignity of the human being.

Among all the crimes which can be committed against life, procured abortion has characteristics making it particularly serious and deplorable. The Second Vatican Council defines abortion, together with infanticide, as an “unspeakable crime”.

Any form of abortion, however early it is performed and by whatever expert, is so crude and brutal as hardly to bear description. One method is for the little body to be “scraped out”, that is to say cut up within the womb and pulled out in pieces with a forceps.   Alternatively and more often the body is “sucked out” in parts by vacuum extraction. A third method — though this one tends to be avoided now as carrying risk to the mother — was to replace the fluid in which the baby lives by a salt or glucose solution; this burned up the fetus or killed it slowly by poisoning, and it was born dead some time afterwards by a false labour. At later stages of the pregnancy, the baby is removed from the mother by a surgical operation. When lifted out of its home in the mother’s womb, it is still alive.   After a while it dies of exposure.

God’s commandment is that no human being may deliberately take away innocent human life. What life could be more innocent than that of the unborn child? Deliberate abortion is therefore always gravely sinful. The embryo or fetus possesses its fundamental right to life from the moment of conception. From that moment the fetus is already provided with all the genetic elements which will shape its future development as an adult human person.

To use the language of genetics, the embryo, from the instant of the meeting of the mother and father cells, is already equipped with the entire “programme” of its future physical characteristics, right down to the minutest detail (including its unique and identifying finger-prints), as well as of its basic mental capacity and personality traits. Everything that education and environment will later have to work on is already present in the embryo.   Each single embryo, even though so small as to be invisible to the naked eye, is unique and un-repeatable. Strictly speaking, so far as in-built potential for future development is concerned, the newly-fertilised mother-cell has the same potential as the newly-born baby. A distinguished Professor of Midwifery has said:

This is more than a potential human being; it is already a human being with potential, complete with every genetic detail, unique, individual and unrepeatable. From the day of conception to the day of birth, life in the womb is a continuing process of inter-locking events. To interrupt the process is to take innocent human life.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law” (No 2271).

From earliest times, Christians sharply distinguished themselves from surrounding pagan cultures by rejecting abortion and infanticide. The earliest widely used documents of Christian teaching and practice after the New Testament in the 1st and 2nd centuries, the Didache (Teaching of the Twelve Apostles) and Letter of Samadas, condemned both practices, as did early regional and particular Church councils.

To be sure, knowledge of human embryology was very limited until recent times. Many Christian thinkers accepted the biological theories of their time, based on the writings of Aristotle (4th century BC) and other philosophers. Aristotle assumed a process was needed over time to turn the matter from a woman’s womb into a being that could receive a specifically human form or soul. The active formative power for this process was thought to come entirely from the man - the existence of the human ovum (egg), like so much of basic biology, was unknown.

Prof. Ogunu is of the Faculty of Education, University of Benin.

(To be continued)

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