An open letter to U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on when life begins
Dear Madam Speaker: You have served in the United States House of Representatives for 21 years now and became in 2007 the first woman ever elected to be Speaker of the House. Your service in national politics has been long; your dedication, recognized. You are by birth and continued choice an American Catholic.
But I feel I should respond to the injudicious remark which you made to Tom Brokaw on NBC-TV on Aug. 24. Brokaw, in an interview with you concerning various issues arising in the present presidential race, asked you what was your view on when human life begins. You answered: “As an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. What I know is over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition. St. Augustine said [it was] at three months. We don’t know…No one can tell when human life begins…. The point is that it shouldn’t have an impact on the woman’s right to choose.”
You said that “This is an issue that I have studied for a long time.” But if you really had studied the issue in depth, you would have known your answer insinuated an error. The exact time when a human being first becomes “human” has never been officially declared by the Catholic Church, that is true. Three centuries before Christ, the pagan Greek philosopher Aristotle opined that the human soul entered the body some 40-80 days after conception (when the body developed enough to accommodate the soul).
Some early Christian thinkers accepted the theory of Aristotle (as a theory). Others did not, claiming that God gave the human soul to the human body at the first moment of existence. But — and this is the important point to note, since your remark was made in the context of the abortion issue — no church doctor, St. Augustine or any other one, ever agreed that abortion was permitted — even if the human soul had not yet been given. Thus there may have been differing opinions in the church concerning the precise moment when the soul was given, but there were no differences concerning the immorality of abortion at any time during a human’s prenatal existence. This teaching of the Catholic Church remains the same today as in every past century of its history.
With the advent of modern biology, we know a lot more about the precise moment of humanness, even more since 1973 and Roe v. Wade. It is when the human egg is fertilized by the human sperm. When the two elements have fused you have a new human entity. Any biologist will tell you that. The embryo does not become “human” later on; it is human from the beginning. Does the embryo at that moment have a human soul? We do not know with absolute certainty. It is a consensus of Catholic theologians that it does. But whether or not, the new human must be respected as human and protected as such. Its proper, unique destiny — determined by God — is to grow and develop as a human. To deliberately stop that process is wrong, terribly wrong. There is no moral right to choose to do it.
And also, Ms. Pelosi, I wish you had not made the claim that you are “an ardent Catholic,” because your position on abortion seems to belie that claim. You stated to Brokaw that the argument about the beginning of human life “shouldn’t have an impact on the woman’s right to choose.” You are wrong; it should! The right of a mother to choose to kill her child denies the right of a child to life. You cannot support that position and be an “ardent” Catholic!
I know that several cardinals of the church in America and several archbishops have already addressed these concerns to you. I add one more voice — a less official one — with the hope that the various appeals will move you to reconsider your position.
Father John A. Leies, SM, STD, is president emeritus of St. Mary’s University and former head of the Theology Department there.