This is a useful and impressive book – a clear, careful, scholarly analysis of the various views that authoritative Christians, and the traditions that influenced them, have taken on this topic. The author cites opinions of all kinds. His central aim, however, is to counter recent suggestions that Christian thinkers have not always treated embryos as sacrosanct – in fact, that the churches have sometimes licensed abortion.
The history here is complex and interesting. Greek and Jewish traditions conflicted sharply on the topic – as, of course, they also did over homosexuality. The Greeks and Romans mostly allowed both abortion and infanticide, partly from a fear of over‐population in their small city‐states. Thus, Aristotle in the Politics directs that any excess pregnancies should be aborted, though this should be done ‘before life and sense have begun’. The Jews, by contrast, saw population expansion as a blessing and as a fulfilment of the divine command, ‘be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it’. Accordingly they saw the whole development of the embryo as an inviolable divinely‐ordered process which must not be interrupted. Christian thought followed them here, firmly forbidding infanticide – which was one of its most striking innovations – and in general forbidding abortion as well.
Some Christian theorists, however, followed Aristotle in making a distinction between early and late abortion. Notably, for instance, St Thomas held that the matter composing the early embryo did not receive the intellectual soul that made it fully human until the 40th day from conception if it was male and not till the 90th if it was female. Not surprisingly, recent theorists have seen these ideas as providing a rationale for early abortion. Dr Jones, however, cites many texts to show that this was intended as scarcely more than a legal distinction marking the borders of what counted strictly as homicide. Abortion and contraception were still viewed as mortal sins, even though slightly less grave ones than murder. Preventing a human life was considered almost, and sometimes quite, as bad as destroying one. The only conceivable exception was where a continued pregnancy presented an immediate threat of death to the mother, and even that was hedged about with restrictions.
Dr Jones himself accepts this position and ends his book with a heartfelt plea on behalf of the compassion which, as he says, the doctrine embodies on behalf of ‘the least of these little ones’. It is not enough (he says) to protect embryos only after the moment of implantation. They exist as individuals from the moment of fertilization. So the morning‐after pill too is excluded. It too is murder.
For him and his authorities, then, no questions arise. Abortion is not a problem. Can those of us who, by contrast, find it a complex and painful problem fully understand this position? It seems to me that we might have more chance of doing so if contraception – which is the most obvious means of avoiding abortion – were not forbidden as well. On this topic, some of the reasoning cited is extraordinary. St Jerome, for instance, writes, of a woman preventing pregnancy, ‘As often as she could have conceived or given birth, of that many homicides she will have been guilty’. Here the rationale cannot really be the compassion that Dr Jones appeals to, since these new humans do not exist at all. It must presumably be the sheer need to increase the number of human souls available for salvation.
Why was this consideration considered so overwhelming? One reason, which emerges in many of the texts, was clearly the suspicion that births were being prevented in order to conceal adultery. But these texts also show a quite startling lack of interest in other possible pressures that might lead to abortion – in the various calamities, ranging from rape, incest and insanity through all kinds of ill‐health and social hardship, that can strike pregnant women and make a further birth disastrous, both to themselves and to their families.
Compassion is indeed involved here, but something has surely been working to make that compassion strangely one‐sided and also to extend it back by fiat from the later embryo to the very early one. Where there is no nervous system there is surely no feeling and – whatever other reasons may come in here – the point cannot actually be compassion. The trouble is that, during that time, we are dealing with an entity that really does change its nature, but the theorists insist on maintaining a single fixed response to this changing entity throughout the change – on always treating an acorn as an oak, an apple‐pip as an apple‐tree. Definitions of words like ‘person’ are often manipulated in the hope of making this attitude plausible. Thus Dr Jones cites Boethius as supporting the view that the human embryo – any embryo apparently –‘like the new‐born baby, is not a “potential person” but a person with potential’.
However, altering language in this way cannot simplify the facts. The vast developmental process which, in less than a year, turns a couple of cells into a fully‐formed human is so mysterious to us that we naturally stumble and are often uncertain how to react to it. Much of the time we rightly treat it with a strong, general, undifferentiated respect. But sometimes there are emergencies – genuine clashes of interest where its claims do really have to be weighed against those of the people surrounding it. This is a real choice of evils, requiring decisions that must try to do justice to all parties. I have seen no arguments in this book to persuade me that such questions can always be given the same simple answer. But I do have a clearer idea of the background that has led people to want one.
