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Date revised: December 16, 1997
NOBODY'S BODY BUT MINE
People who call themselves pro-life insist that a fertilized ovum is a baby with an unequivocal right to life. What they claim is that the ovum has a "right" to use a woman's body as a life support system, with or without the consent of that woman. Does any creature, born or unborn, have an inherent right to use someone else's body? Of course not! Whose body is it anyway? Any woman has a right to say "yes" or to say "no" to a pregnancy, a right to say "I will decide. My body's nobody's body but mine.".
Most people assume that the Catholic Church has always opposed abortion -- under all circumstances and without exception. Is this true? Well, yes, sort of. But the notion that the embryo is a human person from the moment of conception on is relatively new. As is the conclusion -- that "abortion is murder" -- which follows from the moment-of-conception theory.
A reading of the history of the church's thinking on abortion reveals much variation in the opinions of Catholic theologians over time about the status of the fetus and the permissibility of abortion. Although abortion was condemned as sinful in earlier times, other offenses were regarded as more serious -- sex outside of marriage for example.
For the first 600 years, the two big abortion issues were (1) was it used to conceal the sins of fornication or adultery? Theologians agreed that abortion was wrong if used to conceal sexual sins. According to Rosemary Stasek of California Catholics for Free Choicein a speech given in 1991, when penance was given, it was sexuality that was being punished more than the sin of abortion.
(2) Did the fetus have a soul from the moment of conception or did the soul enter its body at some later time? Before about 600 A.D., Christian scholars couldn't decide that one. Between 600 and 1500 A.D., the debate about whether abortion was homicide continued. There was no prevailing view that it was. In fact, penances given for abortion were often lighter than for bribery or theft. Therapeutic abortions were allowed to save the life of the mother as most theologians held that "ensoulment" was delayed and took place forty days after conception for males and eighty days for females.
In the Middle Ages, little was known about the biology of reproduction. Scholars thought that women's ovaries were without any real function. They believed the male sperm contained fully formed babies which simply required the mother's womb as a place for them to grow.
The modern era (about 1700 A.D. on) saw the expanding influence of the Pope on the church's moral teaching and power increasingly centralized in the Vatican. By now, the church had come to the conclusion that all abortion was homicide. The adoption of the doctrine of infallibility in the late 19th century reinforced the belief in the minds of Catholics that the church's stand on abortion was infallible.
Pope Pius XI's 1930 document "Casti connubii" taught that abortion was condemned even when the life of the mother was at stake. Its underlying postulate is that doing evil (performing an abortion) in order to bring about good (saving the mother's life) is not permitted. The death of a woman was not important; the death of the unborn could not be allowed. Did it ever occur to the Pope or the theologians that if a woman's life is in danger and a surgical procedure exists that would save her life, forbidding that procedure could be construed by thoughtful people as evil since not performing it would insure her death? Apparently not.
Unfortunately, ideology has often been more important to the church than the lives of women. The prohibition in the early part of this century of therapeutic surgery in the case of ectopic pregnancy illustrates the point. In this situation, growth of the embryo in a Fallopian tube instead of the womb creates serious danger to the life of the woman. Unless a surgeon intervenes quickly and removes the embryo, the tube will probably rupture. If it does, her chances of survival are less than one in three.
The official Catholic teaching from 1902 to 1945 was that no operation was permissible until after the tube had burst. Removal of the fetus prior to rupture was called "direct killing"of the unborn. This doctrine was handed down on March 5, 1902 by the Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome. It was not changed until October 1, 1945 after thoughtful American and British Catholic doctors, and many Catholic priests, began to question whether sacrificing the life of a woman for an embryo with no chance for continued existence, could be morally justified. After a great deal of work by concerned physicians and priests, the doctrine forbidding the life-saving surgery was abandoned. The Papal teaching was simply "re-interpreted" -- that is, it was stated that the surgery was "indirect killing" of the embryo and therefore allowable. We can only speculate about the number of Catholic women who died between 1902 and 1945 before Church authorities yielded to pressure to "reinterpret" the church's prohibition of life-saving surgery for ectopic pregnancies.
The Catholic Church is a powerful institution. Its influence reaches far beyond its own membership to exert a significant impact on politics. Often its influence is good. Catholic organizations have a wonderful record of working for peace and social justice. But, like other religions, Catholicism includes both a liberal and a conservative wing. John Paul II heads that part of the church determined to maintain the status quo, especially in the area of reproductive rights and women's rights generally.
The majority of American Catholics disagree with their church's prohibition of birth control and abortion. For detailed information from polls conducted on Catholic attitudes on these issues, readers can get them from Statistics relating to Catholics and the Abortion Issue.
Catholics for Free Choice has done a wonderful job of informing the public about the ways we are all - Catholics and non-Catholics alike - threatened by the Church's influence, not only in politics, but also in health care. Nationwide, many Catholic hospitals have merged with other health care providers. Such mergers have a significant impact on the availability of reproductive services which had formerly been offered at the institutions with which the Catholic health system merged. After the merger, members of the affected communities are shocked to find that they no longer have access to contraceptive services, tubal ligations, vasectomies or abortion surgery all of which had been obtainable locally before the affiliation.
If we value our freedom to choose there will never be a better time to defend it from religious interference.
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