A Different View on Abortion

I’ve always thought that just from a purely intellectual standpoint – taking emotion completely out of the equation – the abortion debate can be won for the pro-life side. While reviewing my Thomas Aquinas book early this morning, I came across an idea that I never heard or read before, which reinforced this somewhat intuitive belief.

Without going into too much depth (where the danger of floundering and drowning still lies for a newbie like me), much of Thomas’ philosophy, built up from the edifice of Aristotle, deals with potency and act. Each and every material being is some combination of potential and action. Famously, the acorn has the potential to become the towering oak. Or the egg which has the potential chicken inside it. On a personal note, I am a simple, financially-struggling blogger right now, but inside me is the potential for a successful novelist. Whether such potency is actualized is the gist of this anti-abortion argument.

A lot of words have been spilled over when the fetus becomes ensouled – either at the moment of conception or at some arbitrary, ultimately unknowable point during gestation. The pro-choice movement makes a big deal about this, thinking that it somehow pokes holes in pro-life arguments. But it really doesn’t. Here’s why.

Thomas himself did not believe that life began at the moment of conception. Surprising? It’s in the Summa Theologica. However, the moment life begins is not important for him. What is important is the concept of potency and act. One has to realize and admit that from the moment of conception, the clump of cells that emerges is destined to become a human being. That is the natural order of things. That zygote (or whatever the proper biological term) has the potential to become a living, breathing, loving, thinking, feeling human being, made in the image of its Creator, God. What right do we have to prematurely terminate this potentiality, to violate the natural law (in this case, natural because it is the ordered way in which normal pregnancies move)?

Hmmm?