I wrote the following essay in the late fall of 2003 after watching a "Pro-Life" questioner addressing "Pro-Choice" candidates for high public office squaring-off in a debate. The "Pro-Lifer" was doing his best to not sound like the fool most of them appear to be when addressing what is for them a difficult moral issue.
I don't respect "theology," a classical term meaning literally, the "study of God." As though somehow the "theologian" could measure, weigh, and determine the color and smell and other physical and even less measurable attributes of a totally unknown and unknowable entity, even if such a being might exist. What the "god philosopher" George Carlin calls, the Invisible Man in the Sky who is going to send you into a lake of fire where you will burn for all eternity...if you don't believe in Him. And He really LOVES you.
Certainly the existence of a being such as the major monotheistic religions describe is more and more unlikely to be proven in any of our lifetimes. But this seems not to deter millions of seemingly sane and intelligent human beings from the study of theology.
One of the ideas that seems to infuse the study of much of theology, no matter what they call their religion, is the idea of the SOUL. The soul, much like God, is also an ambiguous sort of entity: invisible, undetectable and unidentifiable by means of any technology currently available. But, nevertheless, most of us seem as sure of the existence of the soul as we are about the existence of the invisible man in the sky.
And what that invisible man in the sky really loves about each and everyone of us is not our material and mortal body, but our immortal soul.
Human Soul and Abortion Morality
by William F. Harrison, M.D.
Copyright (c) 2003 William F. Harrison, M.D., FACOG
While watching a presidential candidate trying to give short answers to big questions on a C-SPAN political programming coming from Iowa, I had an epiphany. One questioner, noting that the candidate had characterized himself as Pro-Choice, asked two important philosophical questions pertaining to abortion prefaced by rather routine "Pro-Life" rhetoric that I will paraphrase: "Technological advances have allowed us to visualize the remarkable changes that occur during embryonic and fetal maturation within the mother's womb, to observe tiny emerging limbs, fingers and toes, the beating heart, and altering in facial features. If the developing conceptus, even at the earliest stages of life is not a living human being, then what is it? And if it is a living human being, why does killing it not constitute murder?"
There are two elements almost universally thought to separate human beings from all other forms of life. One of these is a chiefly religious concept, the other a conceit of a different order. The first is the widely believed religious notion that there resides within each of us a unique, and uniquely human, Soul that distinguishes homo sapiens from all other life forms. The second generally accepted hypothesis is that the self conscious human Mind makes us unique among all earth's creatures.
Certainly there seems little else in our anatomical or chemical makeup that might confer special consideration for our species on the part of nature or the Divine. As an example, all primates have limbs that end in structures much like our hands and feet, all have hearts, brains, and expressive faces. It is said that the opposable thumb is one of the unique features of human beings. But does any one believe that our human souls reside in our opposable thumbs? Or how about in the structure and the chemical composition of our "new, unique" DNA, might the soul reside there? The structure and chemistry of the DNA in all living species is simply a longer or shorter repetition of the same four chemical bases. In fact, the qualitative and quantitative differences between the DNA of a "normal" chimpanzee and a "normal" human being is a little more than one percent, while considerably more DNA variation than that is exhibited between "normal" human beings and some others of us born with certain chromosomal abnormalities.
If there truly is within every person a Soul, it must reside somewhere in the exceptional consciousness, of self and of abstractions, that emanates from the living human brain. The soul, therefore -- if indeed there is one -- must be found in what we call the Mind.
If this is correct, then because of what we know of the finite time necessary for the structural and functional differentiation, growth, maturation and "hard wiring" of the cellular and organic features that make up the sensate human brain, it can be stated with almost 100% certainty that human consciousness does not begin to waken until sometime after the 24th week of intrauterine life.
It is a given that there is a unique new life in every mature ovum, perhaps in every sperm (the male and female zygotes), and when these join, they form another unique new life from the moment of conception. The question all of us should ask is this: at what point in this continuum of life does a zygote, a fertilized egg, an embryo, fetus, or newborn attain moral equivalence with the girl or woman who carries this unique new being within her womb?
Because of the things I've expressed above, I believe that the maturing fetus's status doesn't rise to a level of moral equivalence with what all too many consider its "maternal incubator" -- the pregnant girl or woman -- until such time as the fetal mind has attained a state of waking consciousness coincidental with ensoulment, which, should such occur, would be sometime after 24 weeks of intrauterine life.
However (and here comes the hard part), pregnancies of those women for whom abortion initially is not an option, must be treated by the pregnant mother-to-be and by society as morally equivalent to the infants they will become unless the woman aborts. It is in validating and valuing the lives of both these, the woman and her potential child, where we who embrace reproductive freedom, and others, who call themselves "Pro-Life," should be searching for common ground.
William F. Harrison, M.D., FACOG
Fayetteville Women's Clinic
1011 N. College Ave.
Fayetteville, AR 72701
Tele (479) 442-8166
E-Mail: Wharri3365@cox-internet.com
Searching for common ground. Is this a pipe dream? I don't think it is for most of us. Certainly those who stand in front of clinics and doctor's offices screaming at the girls and women entering these facilities, and blockading PP clinics are not interested in common ground. And a tiny handful of us on my side can find no advantage in such a search. But for me, such an effort is the exact reason that I have worked so hard to speak out and defend my position for the last 23 years.
Common ground. What would this entail? First, I think we can agree that if at all possible, the need for abortion care should be reduced by making sure every girl or woman who is sexually active and their sexual partners, have factual information about sex, birth control, and the probability of pregnancy occurring with every method. And every young person should receive intelligent and responsible sex education, delivered by persons whose major goal is to reduce the probability of an unwanted pregnancy rather than to deliver a particular religious message. Telling a young person to "just say no" is Not adequate sex education. Messages of abstinence only, while important for young people, is not sufficient in our current culture, or indeed, in any culture that I know.
Second, I think we can mostly agree that if a woman is to have an abortion it is better to do it as early as possible. This means eliminating waiting periods and increasing rather than working to decrease the number of knowledgeable professional abortion care givers.
It means that adolescent girls who have determined that it would be better for them to abort than to have a baby are certainly mature enough to make such a decision. The ones I worry about are those very young girls who decide it is better to deliver a baby long before she is able to make a realistic accessment of her impending problems that having a child long before one can take care of a baby and love and support her child as every baby deserves to be loved and supported.
Third, it is important to acknowledge that for babies without a brain due to massive hydrocephalus or anencephaly, that this means there is no "mind" present, and thus no "soul."
And finally, I think for most of us, for the girl or woman whose mind is not in doubt, the presence of her soul is a given. And when we must chose between the life and health of an adolescent or adult female and an intrauterine life at any stage of pregnancy, the only person that can legitimately and morally make that decision is the woman or girl herself.
The following was contained in a recent story about the increasing difficulties of accessing abortion care in the UK. This appeared in The Observer.
A few months ago [Gloria] Feldt received a call from a Catholic priest. He was anxious to talk to her about better sex education. Two parents in his parish had recently come to visit him. Unbeknown to them, their 14-year-old daughter had got pregnant and had been told by the legal authorities that she must tell her parents if she wanted to go ahead with an abortion. Instead she had found someone who could do the procedure illegally. She died.
"There could be more just like her," says Feldt. "But we don't hear from them. It's the most vulnerable who are being affected by this kind of legislation, and it's the most vulnerable who never get their stories heard."
Certainly she should receive knowledgeable and informed advise from her physician and those who love her, and perhaps her "spiritual adviser," but if she choses not to seek this counsel, in the end, only she can make this determination. And if this means a late term abortion as opposed to a premature delivery, or that a young girl should be able to obtain safe legal and professional abortion care without her parent's knowledge or consent, so be it.
Supreme Court Justices and politicians have no business making decisions about what a girl or woman does with her body, or her pregnancy.