Abortion

[theculturewarrior]

I have read that the Church's teaching on abortion was once that the baby could be terminated before the 40th day. I think this teaching came from Aquinas. It sounds like a whopper, I know, but I verified this at [url="http://www.newadvent.org"]http://www.newadvent.org[/url] I believe the article was "conception" or "abortion."

My question is, how can I find the infalliblity of the Church in this?

Of course, I have faith in my Church. I have my own thoughts on this which I would be willing to share, but would like to hear your answer.

[Adeodatus]

Aquinas believed, like most people at that time and before him, that there was only a human foetus (male) at 40 days after conception. It was 80 days for a female foetus! Basically, he believed that as soon as you knew it was human flesh, there must be a human soul animating it. It was a human being. But medieval embryology bought into the idea that the "conceptus" was intially vegetal material, and then animal, and eventually there was human. Once it was human, it was a complete human being (i.e. body [b]and[/b] soul. Nevertheless, Aquinas still believed that aborting the "pre-human" body was a sin akin to murder, because it could develop into human flesh.

Notice that Aquinas's emphasis is not on 40 days or 80 days as such. What he's saying is that as soon as you can tell it's human flesh, then you know it's human. With the limited biology of his day, he could not see when the earliest stages of human life occurred. But he did leave us with the important insight that if it's a human body, there's a human soul.

So for us, who can see more clearly, we know that the embryo is a unique individual human genotype, and hence a unique human being. Aquinas, had he had access to our modern embryology, would therefore have said, "Well, it's human. You can't abort it." But note also, that even when he thought it wasn't human [b]yet[/b], he said that abortion would be like murder.

The Church hasn't changed on this matter. It has always taught that the killing of innocent human life is always wrong. Modern embryology has merely allowed us to be more precise about when human life actually starts.