There seems to be a growing popularity among pro abortion folks that life begins ‘at the first breath.’ I’m not an expert on this view of the beginning of life, but I know that one strain of Hebrew thought proposes that this is when life begins. They take this poetic view from the Genesis story where God ‘breathes into man the breath of life.’ A colleague tells me that this understanding of the beginning of human life was also held by Rudolph Steiner. Steiner taught that a spirit or ‘soul’ hovers over a child about to be born and enters into it at the first breath.
What interests me is how people who would otherwise criticize Christianity (and Catholicism in particular) for being pre-rational, unscientific, medieval, etc. etc. subscribe to this patently unscientific view of human beginnings. Let’s face it, the idea that human life begins at the first breath might be a beautiful and poetic opinion. However, it is no more than that. It is pre-rational, unscientific, and merely poetic. Science teaches us that human life begins at conception. All the research points increasingly to not only the earlier develpment of the human body in the womb, but also the early development of personality within the womb. It is not difficult to read up on this stuff, and it is not hard to understand, why even a Harvard law professor could understand it if he wanted to. It needn’t be above anyone’s pay grade.
The Catholic Church, so often portrayed as obscurantist, anti scientific, backward and unthinking, is right up to speed with the science on this one.
It is the pro abortionists, trying to justify the murder of innocent children in the womb, who take refuge in half-baked, out moded, unscientific, romantic and esoteric notions.
Fr. I believe that when people are putting this argument to pro-life people it is in a lame attempt to undermine Christian theology and teaching as regards to abortion. If Scripture says we only have a soul at birth, then abortion would be OK. However, I find this to be both ignorant and insulting from those who can pick one verse out of context as a “proof text,” to borrow the phrase, without recourse to any philosophical or theological understanding.
Fr L.,Last week I wrote about watching our baby (I’m 17 weeks pregnant) crying in the womb after being startled by its very loud 2 year old brother. http://shovedtothem.blogspot.com/2009/03/oh-humanity.html After seeing the obvious emotions of our youngest, it is beyond me how anyone could describe that as anything but a live human being. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Thank you Father for this post and for the wonderful picture. It is amazing how the more science shows the truth of life, the more the pro-abortion folks argue with it! Gotta love the irrational!
Fr L, excellent post. Many years ago, before I was a practicing Christian or certainly a Catholic, I worked in the operating room as a nurse. The hospital I worked for occasionally performed late elective abortions, into the 3rd trimester. These were probably illegal even then, but they were done. More than once, I know personally of those babies breathing as they were removed from their mothers’ wombs, placed in a basin and left to die with no medical assistance at all. So, ok, if life begins at the first breath, that, too can come at any time, just like crying. I have prayed for those little babies and cried for them, and, of course, repented. There is no excuse for such willful ignorance. It is also willing cooperation with evil. AnneG in NC
You’re right – it misses the point by choosing just another arbitrary point. Good news is that people who quote poetry may not be too far from softening completely. Nothing is quite as poetic as a little baby.As for breathing – children breathe in the womb – they just breathe amniotic fluid. It’s a medical fact.
My husband brought up a great point when I emailed this to him… “First breath? Perhaps it’s the mother’s first breath. Perhaps it should be defined at first consumption of oxygen, since breathing merely moves oxygen into the lungs. Oh, first consumption of oxygen begins at conception. Ah, the logic breaks down.”
I was recently giving a lecture to my ObGyn residents on the topic of “Fetal Death”, otherwise known as stillbirth. It struck me as I read in a standard Obstetric textbook about fetal death, that by inference, there must be such a thing as fetal life. I posed this riddle to the residents and medical students, if a fetus can die a natural death, it must first be alive: When does this life begin and what physiological process defines the onset of that life? The only answer they could come up with was conception.The new 3D/4D ultrasounds are loved by patients because they make the images instantly recognizable, compared to the old 2D images. But after staring at these 2D images for 20 years, I can affirm that they show the essence of life. And all textbooks list the placenta as a respiratory organ, so they are already “breathing” even before they draw that first breath.
Hi i wanted to share with you that when i was fasting and praying for God to show me why i was always fearful & anxious the Holy Spirit showed me in a vision the root cause. I was in the womb and felt so fearful. So i approached my mom and asked her. She said she was so afraid of losing me because she previously had a miscarriage. Makes sense. This closes the life in womb issue for me. Blessings marvin.
As to “Hebrew thought,” Judaism excuses abortion through the “rodef” pilpul, that the baby is a rodef, a pursuer, an aggressor, whose life the mother may take. (among many, see “Jewish Law Favors Stem Cell Research,” Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, July 30, 2004) Judaism teaches that the baby is not “nefesh,” a person, until it is born.”Rashi, the venerated twelfth century Judaic interpreter of the Bible and Talmud, says of the fetus” ‘lav nefesh hu – it is not a person.” Rabbi Meir Abulafia decreed, ‘So long as the fetus is inside the womb, it is not a nefesh and the Torah has no pity on it.” The noted Judaic legal scholar Rabbi Isaac Schorr stated: ‘The sense of the Talmud is that a fetus is not a person’ (Responsa Koah Schorr, no. 20 [“responsa” are authoritative in Judaism and supersede the plain text of the “Hebrew Bible.”]). The Talmud contains the expression ‘ubar yerech imo’ -the fetus is the thigh of its mother, i.e., the fetus is deemed to be part of the pregnant woman’s body. The Greek philosopher Aristotle regarded the unborn child in its first seven days as a ‘secretion’ (ekrysis). In rabbinic law the status of ‘secretion’ lasts for the first forty days of gestation. In Judaism the woman is not regarded as pregnant until the baby in her womb is more than forty days old.”Contrary to these traditions of Judaism, God did not say in the bible that He recognized the unborn baby only after forty days. He said He recognized it as a being before the child had even formed in the womb (Jeremiah 1:5) As usual, the rabbis go God one better and establish a term of forty days before recognition can be conferred, and that rabbinic recognition is only of the pregnancy itself, not of the humanity of the child.”The matter does not rest at the forty day limit, however. In the familiar pattern of rabbinic modification, supplementation, and emendation, enough of these are generated to allow abortion at any time during the pregnancy for almost any reason, however fanciful or arbitrary. For example, if it is decided that an aborted baby does not look like a baby after it has been aborted, then it is not considered to have been an aborted child. [Tosefta Niddah 4:5-6] “Since the 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, the standard American abortion procedure is considerably Talmudic in nature, since the Talmud specifically states that if the unborn baby is adduced to be a rodef the rabbis authorize that it can be chopped up at any time: ‘They chop up the child in her womb.’ [Mishnah Ohalot 7:6]” – Michael Hoffman, Judaism Discovered, ISBN 9780970378453, pp. 878-879.
Further, and to ever greater dismay, in Judaism Gentiles are NEVER considered human."You are adam ["man"], but goyim [gentiles] are not called adam ["man"]." Kerithoth 6b“The seed of the goyim is like an animal.” Sanhedrin 74b“All Gentile children are animals.” Yebamoth 98a"The best of the gentiles should all be killed." Sopherim 15, rule 10Rabbi Eliyahu exhorts the killing of women and children:http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1180527966693&pagename;=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull "…'living soul' designates Israel because they are children of the Almighty, and their souls, which are holy, come from Him. From whence come the souls of other peoples? R[abbi] Eleazar said: 'They obtain souls from those sides of the left which convey impurity, and therefore they are all impure and defile those who have contact with them.'…'living soul' refers to Israel, who have holy living souls from above, and 'cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth,' to the other peoples who are not 'living soul," but who are as we have said." Bereshith 47a"One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994 [N.Y. Times, Feb. 28, 1994, p. 1] at the eulogy for Dr. Baruch Goldstein, Kach Party terrorist who used a machine gun to murder at least 39 Palestinians worshipping at Cave of the Patriarchs mosque in Hebron. Rabbis praised his mass murder and then Prime Minister Yitshak Rabin gave permission for a memorial to honor Goldstein. Here's a picture of the shrine to the mass murderer:http://pro.corbis.com/search/Enlargement.aspx?CID=isg&mediauid;=%7BC55FC619-14B1-486B-9B52-28E7B6545F0E%7D"The Jew by his source and in his very essence is entirely good. The goy, by his source and his very essence, is completely evil. This is not simply a matter of religious distinction, but rather of two completely different species." Rabbi Saadya Grama, Romemut Yisrael Ufarashat Hagalut ("Jewish Superiority and the Question of Exile") 2003.“Souls of non-Jews come entirely from the female part of the Satanic sphere. For this reason souls of non-Jews are called evil.” [Yesaiah Tishbi, Torat ha-Rave-ha-Kelippahnbe-Kabbalat ha-Ari (The Theory of Evil and the Satanic Sphere in Kabbalah) 1942, reprinted 1982] The Messianic age of restoration and redemption (tikkun olam) forecast by the religion of Judaism and spoon-fed to their partisans among the goyim, posits a world restored to universal harmony and justice. That’s the cover story, anyway. But the truth it is somewhat more macabre, as Tishby relates: “… the presence of Israel among the nations mends the world, but not the nations of the world…. It does not bring the nations closer to holiness, but rather it extracts the holiness from them and thereby destroys their ability to exist… [T]he purpose of the full redemption is to destroy the vitality of all the peoples.”], Michael Hoffman, Judaism Discovered: A Study of the Anti-Biblical Religion of Racism, Self-Worship, Superstition, and Deceit, ISBN 13: 9780970378453, pp.774-775Because Gentiles are not human, Gentiles are owed no debt of morality or decency – not honesty [Baba Kamma 113a], not property [Baba Mezia 24a], not even life! — “The best of the Gentiles should all be killed” Soferim 15, 10 "Some of the Turks and the nomads in the North, and the Blacks and the nomads in the South, and those who resemble them in our climates. And their nature is like the nature of mute animals, and according to my opinion they are not on the level of human beings, and their level among existing things is below that of a man and above that of a monkey, because they have the image and the resemblance of a man more than a monkey does." Maimonides explaining who is not fit “to participate in the world to come,” Guide for the Perplexed, Book III, chapter 51 cited in Israel Shahak, Hebrew University Professor, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years. London: Pluto Press, 1997. p. 25. "… the explanation of the matter, [is to be found] in light of what Rabbi Chayim Vital wrote in Shaar HaKedushah (and in Etz Chayim, Portal 5, ch. 2) — that every Jew, whether righteous or wicked, possesses two souls, as it is written, “And neshamot (souls) which I have made. … The second, uniquely Jewish, soul is truly “a part of G-d above, The souls of the nations of the world (the Gentiles), however, emanate from the other, unclean kelipot which contain no good whatever, as is written in Etz Chayim, Portal 40, ch. 3, that all the good that (Gentiles) do, is done out of selfish motives. So the Gemara comments on the verse, “The kindness of (Gentiles) is sin” — that all the charity and kindness done by (Gentiles) of the world is only for their self-glorification…" (Chapters 1 and 2) The lower category consists of three completely unclean and evil kelipot, containing no good whatever… From them flow and are derived the souls of all the nations of the world (Gentiles), and the sustaining force of their bodies. Also derived from these kelipot are the souls of all living creatures that are unclean and forbidden to be eaten, and the sustaining force of their bodies." Tanya, Chapter 6http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/7880/jewish/Chapter-1.htm"Rabbi Kook the Elder, the revered father of the messianic tendency in Jewish fundamentalism, said, 'The difference between a Jewish soul and the souls of non-Jews—all of them in all different levels—is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.' Rabbi Kook's entire teaching… is followed devoutly by, among others, those who have led the settler movement in the occupied West Bank… According to the ideologies which underlie Gush Emunum, the militant West Bank settlers group, and Hasidism, non-Jews have 'satanic souls'… Members of Gush Emunum argue that 'what appears to be confiscation of Arab-owned land for subsequent settlement by Jews is in reality not an act of stealing but one of sanctification.' From their perspective the land is redeemed by being transferred from the satanic to the divine sphere… Common to both the Talmud and the Halacha, Orthodox religious law, is a differentiation between Jews and non-Jews. The highly revered Rabbi Menachem Mandel Schneerson, who headed the Chabad movement and wielded great influence in Israel as well [and proclaimed himself messiah], explained that 'The difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish person stems from the common expression: 'Let us differentiate.' Thus, we do not have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior level. Rather we have a case of 'let us differentiate' between totally different species. This is what needs to be said about the body: the body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of all nations of the world.'" Allan C. Brownfield, "It Is Time to Confront the Exclusionary Ethnocentrism," Issues of the American Council for Judaism, Winter 2000, cited in Michael Hoffman, Judaism Discovered, pp.365-366."And for Christians let there be no hope…" Birkat HaMinim, "Benediction" #12 of the Shmone Esreh"It is our duty to praise the Master of All, to ascribe greatness to the molder of primeval creation, for He has not made us like the nations of the lands, for He has not assigned our portion like theirs nor our lot like theirs, for they bow to vanity and emptiness and pray to a god who cannot save–man, ash, blood, bile, stinking flesh, maggot, defiled men and women, adulterers and adulteresses, dying in their iniquity and rotting in their wickedness, worn out dust, rot of maggot [and worm]–and pray to a god who cannot save." Aleinu from Judaic prayer book, Two Nations in Your Womb, Israel Jacob Yuval, University of California Press, 2006, p.119“I want to attack their souls.” Rabbi Abraham Heschel, interviewed by Geula Cohen for Ma'ariv, January 4, 1965 as translated by AJC/Parishttp://mauricepinay.blogspot.com/2007/12/vatican-ii-kabbalist-sage-rabbi-abraham.html"Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate – healthy, virile hate – for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German." (Elie Wiesel: Legends of Our Time, "Appointment with Hate, NY, Avon, 1968, pp. 177-178).
This ‘life at the first breath’ idea is the most nauseating extreme of a murderous lobby. That we can have the power over life and death until the moment a fully formed child moves from one place of nurture to another is as horrific as suggesting that if a child develops problems in primary school, he or she may as well be put down before causing more inconvenience in secondary school.
It is not the people’s fault. We are brought up with the notion that life begins with the first breath. One of the first big events in a child’s life is his “birthday.” Unfortunately we, as a culture, makes a big important deal of it. That big important deal has a lasting effect. We just don’t have a celebration for conception. Most Americans, like it or not, believe that life begins with the first breath and ends with the last. Want laws protecting all life…. don’t just condemn the notion, change it!
Radio45 – the Chinese have a tradition of a huge one year celebration when the baby is three months out of the womb. Unfortunately, there are far too few babies (especially female) to celebrate this wonderful tradition in China these days.