By Kevin D.
Williamson
Tuesday, June
29, 2021
One of the great ironies of the abortion
debate is that the pro-life camp, purportedly made up of religious
fanatics, mostly wants
to talk about biology, while
the notionally secular pro-abortion faction has embraced a medieval
superstition about “ensoulment” and “quickening,” as exemplified most recently
by Garry Wills’s latest New York Times essay, flabbergasting
in its simplemindedness, on Joe Biden and the Catholic bishops.
Wills’s column is the sort of Dark Ages
hoo-haw that gives Dark Ages hoo-haw a bad name.
We shouldn’t live by prehistoric
superstition when we have better alternatives, but we shouldn’t sneer at our
forebears as primitive — they would recognize us, and we should recognize them
and recognize ourselves in them. As James George Frazer argued in The
Golden Bough, magic is the embarrassing ancestor of science, the fruit of
mankind’s earliest efforts to produce a systematic explanation of the physical
world and natural phenomena. Is the thunder really the Sky Father shaking
his shield? No, of course not, but put yourself in the place of those early
men: Everybody you know believes that the Sky Father causes thunder, everybody
you have ever known believes it, the people of the highest standing in your
community attest to it, your father and your grandfather believed it and, even
if you were to question it — and here’s the most important part — what’s
the next-best explanation?
The elaboration and refinement of
next-best explanations over centuries — and not very many centuries — took us
from Jupiter and Minerva and orgiastic cereal rituals to physics and genetics
and space tourism. And that happened really, really quickly: The time between
the first organized human agriculture and today constitutes
about 3 percent of the totality of human history. Or think of it this way: When
Joe Biden was born, Nikola Tesla and Piet Mondrian were still alive — two Joe
Bidens ago, Ulysses Grant was just taking charge of Union troops, and three Joe
Bidens ago, they were hashing out the Constitution in Philadelphia while Mozart
was swanning around Prague. We are anatomically the same animals as our caveman
ancestors, but our social evolution has moved with incredible speed in the last
three centuries. The number of years that passed between the first flight at
Kitty Hawk and the moon landing is fewer than the number of years Oprah Winfrey
has been walking the earth. We have had electric lights for about 0.04 precent
of the time Homo sapiens has been around, and yet that short
span has been enough time for us to go from Edison bulbs to iPhones. But for
the other 99.96 percent of human history, we worked by firelight — or shivered
in the darkness.
So we should not laugh too hard at the old
superstitions — and, more to the point, we should not be very surprised to see
many of those superstitions survive into our own time. The myth about Ronald
Reagan’s refusal to say the word “AIDS” as president is the modern answer to
the old belief that the touch of a king could cure scrofula, just as the
American folk belief that the nation’s economic performance is a judgment on
the character of the president is an echo of the ancient superstition that the
king’s piety ensured good crops and fecund livestock while his impiety brought
about drought or plague. (If I’ve been hitting that theme more often, it is
because I am writing a book about it.) We are superstitious creatures, and
magic is never far from our minds.
It is probably worth noting here that our
modern attitudes toward science are in many ways like our ancestors’ attitudes
toward magic or religion, which is to say, they are informed by a status game.
Not one American in 10,000 has the scientific training to engage meaningfully
with the science touching climate change, evolution, or vaccines, and our
attitudes toward those things mostly reflect tribal identities: Team Fauci vs.
Team Trump. This leads to all kinds of stupidity, from young-Earth creationism
(an astonishingly
common view among Americans) to
anti-vaccine kookery to, in the case at hand, the denialism — human denialism
— at the center of the abortion debate.
What’s rare about Wills’s essay is that he
forthrightly connects his thinking to Dark Ages superstitions and expects (not
without some reason) that the readers of the New York Times opinion
pages, who sway in the wind like a field of rotten corn, will be satisfied with
that.
Wills demands to know: If Christians of
old thought abortion a serious matter, then why is Judas at
the bottom of Dante’s inferno, rather than a gang of abortionists?
(Seriously, that’s where he starts. Judas, of course, is not
alone at the bottom of the pit — Brutus and Cassius are there with him, because
Dante did not share my view that Brutus is the hero of that
story and Julius Caesar the villain. But that’s for another week.)
Dante’s Divine Comedy is an idiosyncratic allegorical work
mainly concerned with the personalities and events of 14th-century Florence and
historical figures connected to them. It is not a map of medieval moral
orthodoxy and certainly not a statement of Christian religious orthodoxy, a
fact that was obvious enough to the agents of the Inquisition who censored it.
I admire Dante deeply, but his moral schematic is his own.
A better indication of the state of public
thinking about abortion in Dante’s time and place might be found, to take one
obvious example, in the laws of the nearby Tuscan cities of Siena and
Castiglion Aretino, which “prescribed the death penalty for anyone supplying
abortifacient herbs to [a] pregnant woman causing her to abort the fetus,”
according to Jurists and Jurisprudence in Medieval Italy: Texts and
Contexts. Abortion was covered as a category of homicide or as a
stand-alone crime in the laws of Milan, Genoa, Benevento, etc. Dante, a man of
politics, must have been familiar with these statutes or similar ones. He may
even have objected to them for the same reason Wills objects to similar
statutes in our time.
While custom and law varied from place to
place in the Christian world, and it is difficult to make an apples-to-apples
comparison between medieval law and our own (abortion was treated as something
closer to a tort than a crime in much of Europe in the Middle
Ages, but, then, so in many cases was murder, at least murder that was not
political in character, murder of a commoner that did not touch the state or
the royal household; many other acts that we would think of as serious crimes
in our time were treated similarly, and that treatment does not necessarily
indicate that these matters were thought of as inconsequential), it
is remarkable how similar ancient disputes about abortion are to our own: For
example, enforceability was a pressing issue in medieval
abortion law (it was difficult to prove that an abortion was induced rather
than a natural miscarriage, and sometimes difficult to prove even that there
had been a pregnancy) and the matter was understood to be graver later in the
pregnancy.
Dante seems to have shared the common view
that the unborn progress toward humanity and that, in some point during the pregnancy,
a soul is conferred by God — see Purgatorio Canto 25, where
Dante puts this explanation into the mouth of the Roman poet Statius:
Open thy
bosom to the truth that comes.
Know soon as in the embryo, to the brain,
Articulation is complete, then turns
The primal Mover with a smile of joy
On such great work of nature, and imbreathes
New spirit replete with virtue, that what here
Active it finds, to its own substance draws,
And forms an individual soul, that lives,
And feels, and bends reflective on itself.
And that thou less mayst marvel at the word,
Mark the sun’s heat, how that to wine doth change,
Mix’d with the moisture filter’d through the vine.
Here, Dante is writing under the influence
of the classical philosophers, but his fellow Italians did not swallow the
Greco-Roman view whole: The influential legal commentator Accursius, who died
just before Dante was born, had suggested that the Roman punishment for
abortion, banishment, was adequate only for abortions induced in the first 40
days of a pregnancy, whereafter, he thought, the penalty should be death. This
line of thinking was not uncommon.
Wills sees the gradualist view in Aquinas
and attributes it to the influence of Aristotle:
Aristotle
told him—that it came at or near childbirth, after an earlier stage of having a
nutritive soul (like plant life), which developed into an animal soul, at last
receiving a rational soul. Thomas kept Aristotle’s biology, just adding that
God himself infuses the soul into the body at some unspecified time during the
last stage of this process.
I have no doubt that Wills is correct that
Aquinas took this idea from “Aristotle’s biology.” And Aristotle’s biology was
excellent — for its time. As it turns out, we have learned a few
things since Aristotle was scrawling his thoughts in charcoal on animal skins
by the light of a fire he started by banging rocks together. Aristotle’s
biology was primitive, mistaken, and, from the point of view of our own time,
preposterous. It is difficult to believe that if Aristotle had access to
21st-century science and technology he would maintain his 4th-century B.C.
views, just as Dante probably would have modified his 14th-century A.D. views
if he knew what we know.
There isn’t some magical thing that
happens in the last three weeks of pregnancy that changes the unborn from a
“sea sponge” (Dante’s description) into a human being. The ancients, believing
that the soul animated matter, took detectable fetal movement as the sign of
“quickening” or “ensoulment.” (Islamic law has traditionally taken the same
view, prohibiting abortion only after 120 days.) We now know, for example, that
fetal movement starts only a few weeks in — before many women even know they
are pregnant. We now know that there is a detectable heartbeat at only five
weeks in. Etc. These aren’t pro-life points: They are the simple facts of the
case.
There simply isn’t some dramatic thing
that happens late in the pregnancy that radically changes the organism in
question — to maintain otherwise is pure superstition, but it is a popular
superstition, because it buttresses the legal fiction of “personhood,” under
which those who wish to permit abortions are able to define “human being” in a
way that excludes the (1) individual (2) living (3) human (4) organism they wish
to see put to death.
Wills must at some level understand that
this is preposterous, which is why he retreats into the further
preposterousness:
The
religious opponents of abortion think that the human person actually antedates
the Aristotelian scheme, dating it from “conception” (when the semen fertilizes
the ovum). But the Catholic theologian Bernard Häring points out that at least
half of the fertilized eggs fail to achieve “nidation”—adherence to the
uterus—making nature and nature’s God guilty of a greater “holocaust” of unborn
babies than abortion accounts for, if the fertilized ovum is a “baby.”
Presumably, if God wanted a world in which
there were no mass murders or genocides, then He, being omnipotent, could do
something about that. He doesn’t. It does not follow that we are directed to be
indifferent to mass murders and genocides and other great evils that are the
product of human volition. God also permits plagues and disasters, and we work
on vaccines and countermeasures. The fact that many pregnancies fail to take
does not tell us anything at all about the moral standing of intentional abortion,
any more than the fact that everybody dies tells us anything about the morality
of murder or war. This is shockingly immature stuff from Wills, who is too old
for this schoolboy theodicy. He should be embarrassed to write such things. But
it gets worse:
The
opponents of abortion who call themselves “pro-life” make any form of human
life, even pre-nidation ova, sacred. But my clipped fingernails or trimmed
hairs are human life.
This is either the dumbest thing published
in the New York Times since the last time Paul Krugman wrote
or it is willfully misleading, a bad-faith argument. Because, as you may have
noticed, you can give your children a haircut or trim their nails without
controversy — this does not mean that you can kill them if they get in the way
of your social life or cost too much money. Likewise, you can tattoo or pierce
yourself all you like, but tattooing or piercing a stranger without his
permission is a crime. The morally relevant level of organization here is organism,
not tissue. An unborn child is an (1) individual (2) living (3)
human (4) organism, not a part of another organism. It is an individual in
the sense of being biologically distinct from its parents, living in
the sense of being composed of tissue that is living rather than tissue that is
dead, human as opposed to rutabaga or salamander, and an organism as
opposed to a pile of toenail clippings, a tumor, or a pint of donated blood.
These are not interpretations or religious revelations. These are facts as
well-attested as any biology has to offer. “Ensoulment” and similar
superstitions are simply ways of changing the subject: moral cowardice and
intellectual cowardice.
Dante had the excuse of not knowing these
facts. Garry Wills does not.
The rest of this tedious nonsense you will
have heard before in other generally adolescent contexts. Neither Jesus nor the
Bible explicitly condemns abortion, Wills notes. Maybe “Thou shalt not kill”
isn’t clear enough for everybody, but, setting that aside, do we really want
this to be our guide? Jesus is mum on the questions of cannibalism and child
pornography, while the Bible takes a pretty tolerant view of slavery. In
Dante’s time, the deans of European law accepted that an eight-year-old girl
could consent to marriage, that heresy should be a capital crime, and that
witches were a thing. (In fact, some legal scholars believe that at least some
witchcraft prosecutions were de facto abortion prosecutions.)
They also didn’t know about germs, lots of them thought the earth was the
stationary center of the universe and did not — let’s remember — really know
where babies come from on anything but the more superficial physiological
level. The first mammalian ovum wasn’t even observed until 1827.
Maybe we should build on that knowledge,
no?
But the true believers in the religion of
man-as-meat require a metaphysics, inasmuch as the biology is against them.
Next, they’ll be telling us how many
angels can dance on the head of an infrastructure bill.
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