"Keep their damn legs crossed"? "dumbass broad"?
Another genius heard from.
The attempt to find an ethically sound and unambiguous judgment on when, if ever, abortion is permissible has deep historical roots. Often, especially in Christian tradition, such attempts were connected with the question of when the soul enters the body--a matter not readily amenable to scientific investigation and an issue of controversy even among learned theologians. Ensoulment has been asserted to occur in the sperm before conception, at conception, at the time of "quickening" (when the mother is first able to feel the fetus stirring within her), and at birth. Or even later...
Neither St. Augustine nor St. Thomas Aquinas considered early-term abortion to be homicide (the latter on the grounds that the embryo doesn't look human). This view was embraced by the Church in the Council of Vienne in 1312, and has never been repudiated. The Catholic Church's first and long-standing collection of canon law (according to the leading historian of the Church's teaching on abortion, John Connery, S.J.) held that abortion was homicide only after the fetus was already "formed"--roughly, the end of the first trimester.
2think.org
Not being religious, my definition would have to do with sentiency, or consciousness, rather than "ensoulment." And I'm an American, too.
And the kinds of things that break my heart have more to do with human suffering than with concepts like "ensoulment."
But you and St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine can talk among yourselves about that issue. Maybe you can convince them you know more about God and the Bible than they do. |
