What’s Wrong with Abortion?
Issues of faith and morals, 1996, Chapter 13
Archbishop George Pell

Abortion was legalised in the English-speaking world in the late 1960s and early 1970s. However, Catholics and many other Christians have never believed that abortions are morally right. Therefore, opinions are strongly divided. It is important to understand the Christian side of the argument.

Abortion is the termination of a pregnancy before the foetus is viable. Early spontaneous or natural abortions are usually described as miscarriages, while the term “abortion” implies a deliberate human act.

Induced abortions have been regarded as an offence in most civilisations, and the Church has always taught that abortion is gravely wrong. The Greek physician Hippocrates of Cos (who died around 377 BC) is often described as the author of the Hippocratic oath, which explains the obligations of doctors. However, the earliest versions of this oath come from before the sixth century BC. Certainly the oath shows that the prohibition of abortion is pre-Christian in origin: “I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give a woman an abortive remedy”. The early second century instruction called the Didache (or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles) taught, “You shall not kill the embryo by abortion nor cause the newborn to perish” (2.2).

The Church’s teaching on this matter has not changed through the centuries and, indeed, cannot be changed because it is a fundamental part of God’s law which the Church must defend. The Scriptures themselves never speak of intentional abortion, but the many beautiful passages on childbirth and unborn children reveal Scripture as radically pro-life and profoundly sympathetic to expectant mothers.

In the Old and New Testaments, both the conception and formation of children in the womb are portrayed as the work of God (Psalm 139:13—15; Luke 1:35). For example, the Christmas story has many layers of symbolism.

The Christian teaching against abortion links the Scriptural teaching on the sanctity of the unborn with the explicit Old Testament and New Testament teachings against killing the innocent. In the Sermon on the Mount, our Lord recalls the commandment “You shall not kill” and adds to it the proscription of anger, hatred and vengeance (Matt. 5:21; Exod. 20:13).

Beginnings

The word “embryo” refers to human offspring in the first eight weeks from conception. “Foetus” refers to an unborn child more than eight weeks old. The human characteristics of an embryo and foetus are crucial to explaining the pro-life case against abortion. The Catholic Church teaches that from the moment of conception, the egg fertilised by the sperm must be treated as a human being and accorded the respect due to a person. Advances in genetic knowledge over the last 50 to 100 years have strengthened this conviction.

Originally, many Church teachers distinguished between a formed and unformed foetus, claiming that the soul was not infused at conception. The greatest theologian of the early Church, Saint Augustine of North Africa who died in AD 430, believed that the embryo was ensouled at 46 days.

Nevertheless, he also believed that it was gravely wrong to kill a formed or unformed foetus. Another great Catholic thinker, the Italian Saint Thomas Aquinas who died in 1274, believed ensoulment took place 40 days after conception for the male and at 90 days after conception for the female.

Through the advances of modern microbiology, we now know better. One hour after the sperm has penetrated the ovum, the nuclei of the two cells have already fused. From that moment, there is a set of genetic instructions to establish the code or inheritance for the new person. After seven or eight days, this ball of cells travels down the Fallopian tube to reach the womb where it implants. The child then releases hormones into the mother so that her body begins to supply it with nutrients.

By 25 days, the embryo’s developing heart starts beating. By 33 days, the embryo is about 70 mm long and has also developed a brain, eyes, ears, mouth, kidneys, liver, umbilical cord and a heart pumping blood which it is producing. By 45 days, about the time of the mother’s second missed period, the embryo’s skeleton is complete (in cartilage, not bone) and the first movements of limb and body occur. By 10 weeks, the foetus can grasp an object placed in its palm and clench its fist and it can respond to pain, touch, cold, sound and light. It wakes and sleeps; gets the hiccups and can suck its thumb. It can be seen that the foetus has a life independent of its mother and, although dependent on her for survival, its life is not identical with hers.

Reasons for Abortion

The United States, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand often follow similar patterns in moral, legal and political matters. Until the Second World War, the public consensus was strongly against abortion, although most British-based legal systems allowed abortion to preserve the mother’s physical and mental health after the 1938 case R v. Bourne in the UK.

Long-term, well-planned campaigns to enlarge the right to abortion started to have impact when the Abortion Act of 1967 was passed in England. The new legislation made it possible to have an abortion if it could be argued that the birth would lead to mental and physical health risks to any of the existing family, or if physical or mental abnormalities were likely to exist in the child. In 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States in the Roe v. Wade case ruled that a constitutional right to privacy included the right to have an abortion at any time until the twenty-sixth week of pregnancy. (However, determined legal and political efforts are now being made in the US to change or restrict the practical effects of this ruling, and Jane Roe is now pro-life because she has come to realise what was being destroyed.)

In January 1970, South Australia became the first Australian State to follow the new pattern established by Britain’s 1967 Abortion Act, although New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria preferred to leave existing legislation intact and interpret the laws differently to allow abortion.

In the late 1960s in places such as South Australia and the United Kingdom, psychiatric illness was alleged as the reason for abortion in 80 percent of cases. Today, not as many people feel it is necessary to claim mental illness in order to be allowed to have an abortion. Unfortunately, some abortions take place because of the cost and distress another child will bring (even in prosperous Australia), because of the diagnosis of foetal abnormalities, and even for reasons of convenience. The desire for perfect children can be like issuing a death warrant for babies with abnormalities, real or possible.

The right to abortion has become an important symbol for radical feminists, who often see it as an essential dimension of a woman’s right to control her own body and a necessary expression of personal autonomy and individual freedom. They call their approach “pro-choice”. But there is a terrible cost to unborn babies. This stance also ignores the fact that women themselves can be harmed by abortion, many living with grief or guilt for the rest of their lives. The pro-choice slogan refers only to the mother - there is no choice for the unborn child.

The Church forbids the destruction of all innocent life, therefore, it also condemns the direct killing of a foetus, even to safeguard the life of the mother. However, the Church does not forbid the unavoidable death of a foetus directly occasioned by a surgical operation necessarily performed for another purpose, for example, the removal of a cancerous uterus or of a Fallopian tube containing an ectopic pregnancy.

Here the Church is using a line of moral argument called the principle of double effect. The principle states that a good effect can be achieved properly even when other incidental but unavoidable harm is caused, as when manufacturers produce motor cars so that people can travel quickly even though it is foreseen that cars will be involved in traffic accidents causing deaths.

Abortion Methods

During the first 12 to 14 weeks of pregnancy, abortion is usually performed by forceps removal or suction curettage. In this procedure, the baby is actually dismembered, torn limb from limb. At the next stage of 14 to 20 weeks, injections of hypertonic glucose or saline into the foetus’s amniotic sac are the lethal agents. The foetus is literally pickled to death, and this process takes about an hour or longer. At 20 to 28 weeks, dismembering or even hysterotomy is used, similar to a Caesarean operation. This is particularly barbaric and dangerous for the mother and has recently been outlawed in Japan because of the side effects.

The IUD (intra-uterine device), which is inserted into the uterus as a means of birth control, usually causes abortions because it is thought to interfere with implantation of the embryo. The IUD can cause serious health complications, especially for women who want to bear children in the future.

Indeed, 200,000 women have filed lawsuits against the producers of Dalkon Shield, an early IUD, alleging severe adverse effects.

Pro-life forces now warn that some contraceptive pills can also cause early abortions. Various “morning after” pills are prescribed precisely for that purpose. The deadly experimental drug RU-486 is promoted for non-surgical abortion of older foetuses. Its effectiveness as a destructive agent on the foetus and the health of the mother is still being debated.

Sanctity of Human Life

A few philosophers, such as Peter Singer and Helga Kuhse, have started to teach that human life is not sacred and imply that humans are only a higher form of animal. In an article published in the Spectator in 1995, Singer wrote:

Yes, we can say, the foetus is a living human being, but that alone is not sufficient to show that it is wrong to end its life. After all, why… should mere membership of the species Homo sapiens be crucial to whether the life of a being may or may not be taken? Surely what is important is the capacities or characteristics that a being has. It is doubtful if a foetus becomes conscious until quite late in pregnancy, well after the time at which abortions are usually performed; and even the presence of consciousness would put a foetus at a level comparable to a rather simple non-human animal - not that of a dog, let alone a chimpanzee.

Modern Western civilisation, religious and irreligious, gives the lie to this nonsense. Medical research demonstrates that the foetus reacts to pain at ten weeks. Ask the mother of any new-born child, even if the child be sick or dying, physically or psychologically handicapped, and she will tell you that her child is worth more than one million animals and that it differs from any animal more than cheese differs from chalk, and therefore has the right to live. Every human being, even if unable to speak, smile, pray or curse, is made in God’s image and destined for eternal life. This religious truth is based on the huge differences between self-conscious humans, who are capable of thinking, and brute animals.

The almost universal sentiment about the importance of every human life is the bedrock of the Western world’s politics, law and daily living. This is why many governments require that each child be educated, why all adults have a right to vote, why the United Nations has a charter of universal human rights, why we are horrified by child abuse, why we donate money to help the victims of violence and famine, and why many oppose capital punishment, even for murderers. But unfortunately, in practice this principle is not always respected as it should be. Even then, those driven by sin and self-interest usually prefer to jostle the principle, to circumvent or reinterpret it, rather than to deny or remove it completely.

The supporters of abortion often deny that the unborn child is new human life, renominating it as part of the mother’s body. They also often oppose any proposals to show films or photos of their destructive work; of the baby’s skull being pierced or crushed; of the tiny body disintegrating under powerful suction.

Society must not lapse back to barbaric times, like during the pre-Christian Roman Empire when slavery and infanticide were practised. In mainland China today, the government’s “one family one child” policy means that millions of babies, especially girls, are aborted, killed as infants or placed in orphanages. There is already a severe imbalance in the number of men and women as a result of this policy.

The conviction that human life is sacred means that nowhere should abortion or infanticide be condoned, even when it is practised in secret or on deformed and retarded children.

Health Risks

In the 1960s in Australia when there was much more public discussion on the immorality (or otherwise) of abortion, one of the frequently stated ambitions of the abortion lobby was to diminish the number of maternal deaths and injuries brought about by ‘back-yard” abortionists. Often, this morbidity rate was exaggerated.

A different veil of silence now covers the medical risks to the mother from legalised abortions under good medical conditions. Induced abortions are neither safe nor simple. There is hard evidence of unfortunate medical sequels to abortion, especially in subsequent childbirth—for example, an increase in premature births, ectopic pregnancies and a whole range of diseases. As well, there is the immense harm to the psyche or spiritual well-being of many of the women involved. In 1994, newspapers highlighted more than twenty research projects which had investigated the increased risk of breast cancer for women who had undergone abortions. Such research is no doubt of interest to many people because about 75 000 Australians and 1 500 000 Americans each year have induced abortions.

Bibliography

• Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part 3, Section 2, Chapter 2, Article 5, Paragraphs 2270—75.

The following sources were used to research the views of Peter Singer and Helga Kuhse:

• Singer, Peter, “Killing babies isn’t always wrong”, Spectator, 16 Sept. 1995, pp.20—22.
• Singer, Peter, Rethinking Life and Death, 1994.
• Singer, Peter & Kuhse, Helga, Should the Baby Live?, 1985.

For Review

1. Why does the Catholic Church reject abortion?
2. Why is human life sacred?
3. How are abortions performed?

Consider These

1. A. Write a paragraph describing how you would support a close friend who has indicated that she is thinking of having an abortion.
   B. How would you help a friend who has had an abortion and wishes that she had not?
2. Some people say that the Church has no right to impose its view on others. In a democracy, do we have a right to publicly oppose abortion?
3. Some countries have legalized abortion but only when there is a threat to the life of the mother. What is the stance of the Church in such situations?
4. Do you think that an embryo or a foetus is a human being? What are your reasons?

Extension Exercises

1. The following poem, titled “The Sticking-point…..it out Herods Herod (Hamlet)”, was written by well-known Australian poet Bruce Dawe.
   
   I am a man, I know
   -but I still say
   that life is life
   and death is surely death
   - to kill the growing child
   in any way
   is to rob the future
   of its breath.
   
   The means are many,
   the result’s the same:
   life that already is.
   must cease to be.
   
   - I am not reassured
   that when they came
   such deaths were in the name
   of liberty…
   
   I only know
   that every year the world
   solves the insoluble
   at infinite cost,
   that every morning petals
   part-unfurled
   are brought to nothing by
   a killing frost…
   
   A. Explain the attitude to abortion presented in this poem. Give quotations to support your statements.
   B. What do you think is meant by “the world solves the insoluble at infinite cost”? Discuss how this line may be applied to a range of issues.
   C. What do you think of the title of the poem?
2. Do you know a family with a disabled child? Describe the special love which is apparent in such a family. Why is this so?

Printed here with the permission of Archbishop George Pell 2003