Life Begins

In comments on my Bishops v. Biden post below, Thomas Peters of the Americanpapist blog and others take me to task for failing to understand that the bishops are simply acknowledging what today’s embryology textbooks teach; namely, that human life begins at conception. And since we all (should) believe that human life ought not be […]

embryo.jpegIn comments on my Bishops v. Biden post below, Thomas Peters of the Americanpapist blog and others take me to task for failing to understand that the bishops are simply acknowledging what today’s embryology textbooks teach; namely, that human life begins at conception. And since we all (should) believe that human life ought not be killed, therefore the bishops’ position should not be considered confessional. Q.E.D.
But the beginning of something is not ontologically equivalent to being the thing. To take a humble example, if 18 boys gather to choose up teams for a baseball game, the first team “begins” when the first boy is chosen. That is to say, a process gets under way that, if not stopped, will result in a team. But there is no actual team until the ninth boy is chosen. Agreeing that “life begins” at conception does not clinch the anti-abortion argument, as the bishops claim.
Ontology aside, it is simply the case that many morally serious people and morally serious religious traditions (to say nothing of the American Constitution, as currently interpreted) do value life developing in the womb differently from life after birth. For example, Orthodox Judaism values the life of the mother more highly than the life of the fetus.The point is this: It’s a matter of moral judgment, not “objective fact,” to say, as the bishops do, that the fertilized egg which constitutes “the beginning of life” should have all the legal rights belonging to a newborn infant. That’s a position based not on embryology but on an assessment of the worth of embryonic life. It is a moral judgment that many Catholics and non-Catholics share, and that many Catholics and non-Catholics do not. It bears the force of the bishops’ authority only for Catholics. That is why it is, as Biden contends, confessional.

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