Nancy Pelosi disagrees with Roe v. Wade
Posted on August 25, 2008
As reported by Rush, and over at Hot Air, Speaker Pelosi, when asked to elaborate on the issue of when (human) life begins, spoke specifically as a Catholic and gave a very un-Catholic answer (note: the author of this post is not himself Catholic, but feels reasonably certain that he understands Roman Catholic doctrine on this point):
REP. PELOSI: I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is, over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition. And Senator–St. Augustine said at three months. We don’t know.[snip] And so I don’t think anybody can tell you when life begins, human life begins [Pope, with hand in the air: "Really?" Pick me! Pick me!]. As I say, the Catholic Church for centuries has been discussing this, and there are those who’ve decided…[snip] So again, over the history of the church, this is an issue of controversy.
Again, I’m no expert on Catholicism, but Pelosi seems to actually have been correct when relating that “over the history of the church” exactly when a child is quickened or endowed with a soul has encountered some controversy. The thing is, the question put to her was, specifically, what she would tell Senator Obama (not Catholic) about when life begins, and Pelosi answers the question, in her own words, as “an ardent practicing Catholic”. And when I read her answer (you can see the video at that HotAir link as well), it reminded me of something from one of my past readings of Roe v. Wade. I recalled that the majority opinion, for some reason that I can’t quite grasp, discussed the history of Catholic thinking on the matter, and then, with all the weight and authority of the Supreme Court of the United States, declared flatly that life beginning at conception is the official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. Here’s the quote from Justice Blackmun:
The Aristotelian theory of “mediate animation,” that held sway throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Europe, continued to be official Roman Catholic dogma until the 19th century, despite opposition to this “ensoulment” theory from those in the Church who would recognize the existence of life from [Page 410 U. S. 161] the moment of conception. [Footnote 61] The latter is now, of course, the official belief of the Catholic Church.
Does Madame Speaker not only oppose the doctrine of her Church, but also disagree with the primary canonical text of the American Left, the opinion in Roe v. Wade? (Or has she just never read it?)
Final notes: It strikes me that life at conception is far more scientifically valid than pinning down the time of “ensoulment”, if that is what Pelosi is trying to do, but that is not really the point of this post. If anyone knows anything about my postings (there hasn’t been one in about a year), I’m among the last to take the position that a SCOTUS opinion is dispositive on matters of faith and morality. My point here is that Speaker Pelosi doesn’t share my view and might feel just a tiny bit of embarrassment that she disagrees with Roe v. Wade as to the clarity (in the present day) of the Catholic Church’s position on when life begins.
» Filed Under Abortion, Activist Judges, News, Politics As Usual, Revisionism, Secular Humanism, religion
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16 Responses to “Nancy Pelosi disagrees with Roe v. Wade”
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Thank you for pointing out that Pelosi’s general claim – that Catholic doctrine on ensoulment has not been consistent – was correct. But I’m not sure exactly what you’re claiming regarding Roe v. Wade.
Are you saying that Blackmun’s opinion in Roe declared as a fact that ensoulment takes place at conception – or that it is the position of the Catholic church that it does? The former is certainly not correct – in fact, the opinion cites the various positions on that matter, including the changes in Catholic position, precisely to support its conclusion that the answer to that question is not generally agreed upon and cannot be dictated by the government. The latter – that the Catholic church does have a position on the matter – certainly is correct. They’ve always had a position. They just haven’t always had the same position.
But Pelosi’s claim that “I don’t think anybody can tell you [definitively] when life begins” is not inconsistent with Blackumn’s observation that the Catholic church thinks it can tell you. As he notes, they’re just one of many voices on that issue. Pelosi is not claiming they don’t have an opinion – only that their opinion cannot be taken as controlling on everyone else.
Mr. Keith: I’m not sure how to be more clear than concluding with “my point is…”, and perhaps not knowing how to be more clear is my failing as a blogger. To answer your question, I suggest not that SCOTUS made an finding on ensoulment, but did make a dicta comment about what the Catholic Church believes, an important comment about which the Speaker seems to be unaware.
As to your concluding sentence, I suggest that it begs a question. If you suggest that the Catholic Church cannot be taken as controlling on “everyone else”, then why can nine justices be controlling on everyone else, including millions of unborn Americans?
Actually, let me revise my comment above. SCOTUS did, in fact, make a finding on ensoulment, didn’t it? By finding a difference on levels of permissible restrictions on abortion depending on trimester, Roe v. Wade has what I believe to be the undeniable effect of deciding that the unborn is at least “more” of a person in the third trimester than in the first, and so some protections may attach to the unborn prior to live birth.
In that way SCOTUS did decide the question, although vaguely, and without any demonstrable ability to do so other than the robes they wore.
why can nine justices be controlling on everyone else, including millions of unborn Americans?
Um, they’re the Supreme Court of the United States, and they interpret the laws and Constitution of the United States, whereas the Catholic church only has nominal authority over the 21% of our citizens who voluntarily choose to be members of that church? That’s the difference between law and some religious blowhard’s idiosyncratic opinion – a difference that, as Blackmun quite rightly pointed out, should be carefully and stringently maintained.
Let me note in passing that there’s no such thing as an “unborn American”. As to what Pelosi is aware of, she did not cite Roe as the source of her knowledge of Catholic doctrine, so I don’t know if she remembers that it happened to be mentioned in that opinion, or why that matters anyway. As to what she knows of Catholic doctrine itself, as we both agree, her summary was substantially correct, and as I pointed out before, it was not in conflict with the observation (by Blackmun or in general) that there is not an official dogma on that issue within the church. Again, she didn’t say the Catholic church doesn’t have a position on “when life begings” (or ensoulment takes place); she said that position had changed, and was not definitive. All very true.
My apologies. My penultimate sentence should read: “[Pelosi's remark] was not in conflict with the observation (by Blackmun or in general) that there is now an official dogma . . .”
My apologies. My previous correction should not have reference my “penultimate” sentence, but the one before that.
Those responsible for sacking those responsible for the credits have been sacked.
My apologies. My previous correction should have contained the word “referenced” (past tense), not “reference”.
Those responsible . . . ([edited]). [and subject to being "sacked!"]
[The worst is, I'm not trying to be funny. I'm really this lame.]
Let me get this out of the way first: Sections 2270-2275 of the Catechism are a good guide to Catholic teaching on Abortion.
But even with granting her a little leeway with her dubious logic: How could she be a supporter of partial birth abortion knowing St. Augustine’s best guess was that ensoulment happened no later than 3 months after conception?
Nancy Pelosi cannot speak for the Catholic Church as stated above the Catechism of the Catholic made it very clear where the church stands on this issue. She further contradicted Catholic doctrine when she went on to extol the acceptibility of contraception. Paul VI made it clear in Humanae Vitae that contraception was not to be practiced.
For starters, the Catholic Church has long taught that the 2nd person of the Trinity, the Word, “became flesh” at the moment of the annunciation of the angel Gabriel to Mary, which is celebrated on March 25th….9 months before Christmas.
Secondly, in the Gospel of Luke, Mary immediately went “in haste” to the hill country to visit her cousin Elizabeth – who she had just learned was pregnant with John the Baptist (so about 6 months on). In the discourse of Luke, the women meet and the “infant leaps” in Elizabeth’s womb at the sound of Mary’s greeting. Mary is called “Mother of my Lord” by Elizabeth…the point being…if Mary was already a Mother, then what was in her womb was not ‘merely’ a body without a soul!
Thirdly, even IF we posit that early embryology wasn’t advanced enough to allow the early theologians absolute certainty of when “ensoulment” took place, ethics urges caution when the question is life or death and the picture is unclear about someone being present or not.
So in the case of a hunter in the woods – it’s not ethical to shoot at the sound of something rustling in the leaves… all the more clear is the need to err on the side of life in the case of the embryo in the womb.
Besides, from 70 AD, in the Didache, the earliest Christian catechism, abortion was forbidden BY NAME as evil. So was contraception (yes, the Romans had contraceptive medicines).
So Madam speaker is either abysmally ignorant or willfully obtuse for the sake of political expediency. It’s impossible to be a well-read and informed Catholic and not know that life begins at conception or at most “thereabouts” long before “implantation” (else, how would IVF work?), and that to abortion is INTRINSICALLY evil – worse than war, worse than capital punishment, worse than not giving someone Union rights.
Here is my comment that I posted on Amy Proctor’s website:
The ignorance displayed by Pelosi is the main reason that I have stated, “All Catholics who vote Democrat are hypocrites.” Ted Kennedy is from the same mold.
As for Augustine, he believed that life began at conception.
[... Human life begins in the womb at the time of animation (E 85). Miscarriages before this time simply "perish" (E 86). Man's soul is higher and better than his body (CG XII, 1), which is man's adversary (CX, 21, 43; TR 111, 103). ...]
Further…Pelosi sins by her very own definition “Free Will”
Here’s Augustine on sin: [Augustine believed sin originated with free will, which is a created good (TR XIV, 11). Free will implies the ability to do evil (CG XII, 6). It is a voluntary (TR XIV, 27), noncompulsory (TS X, 12), self-determined act (FW III, 17, 49). Augustine appears to have later contradicted this view when he concluded that Donatists could be forced to believe against their will (Correction of the Donatists III, 13). With the fall man lost the ability to do good without God's grace (E 106), yet he retains the ability of free choice to accept God's grace (L 215, 4; GFW 7). True freedom, however, is not the ability to sin but the ability to do good (CG XIV, 11), which only the redeemed have (E 30).]
Also…
“If it is growing, it is living. If it is living, it is “life”! Once the sperm enters the egg you have a human being and you cannot reverse the process. It’s the same when you mix all the ingredients for a cake and then bake it in the oven. You cannot reverse the process; it is now a cake!
The combining of egg and sperm create all the cells found in human life and from that moment on we begin the process of dying just as a seedling grows into a tree and dies sometime after maturity (unless George chops it down to early).
Wonderful, Joe and Norm. I never could understand why there was any argument to begin with: An embryo, later developing into a fetus and eventually a human being capable of sustaining itself outside the womb, was created by the merging of a LIVE sperm and a LIVE ovum. The biological aspect of human reproduction, in cold scientific terms, dictates the beginning of life that so many wish to argue–at no point was either of these cells dead or inanimate, or they would have been unable to ultimately form the live human being.
Live sperm + live egg = live human
It has to be living in order to reproduce.
I don’t know… I never was very good at math, so maybe my addition’s off.
Pelosi lied through her teeth about the history of the Catholic churches stance on abortion. As a few here have already stated the Catholic church has strongly condemned abortion and infanticide for over 2000 years as stated in the Catechism.
God said to Jeremiah:
“Before you were formed in the body of your mother I had knowledge of you, and before your birth I made you holy; I have given you the work of being a prophet to the nations.”
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of critical thinking going on here, or even attention to the words in question.
To begin:
SCOTUS did, in fact, make a finding on ensoulment, didn’t it? By finding a difference on levels of permissible restrictions on abortion depending on trimester, Roe v. Wade has what I believe to be the undeniable effect of deciding that the unborn is at least “more” of a person in the third trimester than in the first, and so some protections may attach to the unborn prior to live birth.
No.
That’s not what the decision in Roe says. The decision declares that the state has an “interest” in protecting unborn fetuses, but that the woman also has an interest in her personal liberty, including regarding whether to continue a pregnancy or not. The Roe decision is crafted as a balancing of those interests, with the deciding factor being whether the fetus can survive on its own. The trimester breakdown is explicitly described in terms of the viability of the fetus, with a reference in the text to the time limit at which the fetus is more likely to survive a miscarriage (then, about 24 weeks’ gestation; today, even with modern technology, that has changed by only a few weeks). That limit – essentially the beginning of the third trimester – marks the point at which the state’s right to intervene in favor of the fetus could outweigh the woman’s right to decide whether to continue the pregnancy (though the Court left it up to the states to decide how to legislate this). They then broke the first two-thirds of the pregnancy down into periods in which there can be no restriction of abortion other than for medical safety, and in which there can be increasing restrictions but not complete prohibition – again on grounds of the increasing “viability” of the fetus. That word is used explicitly, always as a mark of the ability of the fetus to survive outside the uterus. The existence of a soul is no part of the foundation of the trimester framework (and note that that framework can be defended conceptually without reference to the soul, or even if there is no soul at all). The trimester system quite simply and clearly has nothing whatsoever to do with ensoulment; the text of the decision is perfectly explicit.
But then:
How could she be a supporter of partial birth abortion knowing St. Augustine’s best guess was that ensoulment happened no later than 3 months after conception?
Pelosi didn’t say that any regulations on abortion depend on what the Catholic church says or said. She pointed out that what the church has said has changed over time, which undermines its claim to being definitive.
the Catechism of the Catholic made it very clear where the church stands on this issue. She further contradicted Catholic doctrine when she went on to extol the acceptibility of contraception.
Pelosi did not say it wasn’t clear where the Catholic church stands on abortion now; she said that that isn’t where it stood previously, which undermines its claim that its current position is definitive. And she is free to contradict the Catholic church’s policy on contraception or anything else if she wants to. Whether she accepts that doctrine as a Catholic is up to her; whether the church’s opinion should be made law for everyone else, however, is another issue – one she is obligated to oppose in her position as leader of the people’s Congress.
As for Augustine, he believed that life began at conception.
[... Human life begins in the womb at the time of animation (E 85). Miscarriages before this time simply "perish" (E 86).
Note that the quotes you give make it explicitly clear that Augustine believed "life" begins well after conception. "Animation" means "quickening" - the point at which you can feel the fetus moving in the uterus. That comes months after conception. And he could not make a distinction between "perishing" before the point of quickening and death after quickening if there was not a period starting from the beginning of pregnancy during which the fetus was not considered the same as a real person.
Man's soul is higher and better than his body (CG XII, 1), which is man's adversary (CX, 21, 43; TR 111, 103). ...]
This part is just creepy, but it is the source of a lot of religious squeamishiness about sex.
when you mix all the ingredients for a cake and then bake it in the oven. You cannot reverse the process; it is now a cake!
But it is surely not a cake at the moment you put it in there. So . . . it becomes a cake at some later point, partway through the “developmental process” – right? Exactly which point may be open to debate, but it can’t be at the very beginning. Which may make this a valuable analogy after all.
God said to Jeremiah:
“Before you were formed in the body of your mother I had knowledge of you . . .”
This logically means that you existed before you were conceived, which is (a) false, and (b) contradictory to what everyone else has been saying about conception. Which pretty much renders this useless as any kind of guidance on what we ought to think about the matter.
The biological aspect of human reproduction, in cold scientific terms, dictates the beginning of life –at no point was either of these cells dead or inanimate,
Bizarrely enough, this is a true statement. And it’s a good reason for not using the euphemism “when life begins” to mean “when moral status attaches”. As you point out, both the sperm and egg are alive to begin with, and were generated from bodies that themselves were alive, and so forth, so there is no point in conception or development at which life “begins” it merely continues, generation to generation. But we can’t conclude that because everything in the process is alive, everything has equal moral status. There has to be some point at which moral personhood arrives, and it can’t depend on anything about “when life begins” – if only because that is a moot question in itself. So when does moral, not mere biological, status develop? At conception? At first cell division? When the likelihood of twinning is past? At implantation? At quickening? At viability? At birth? At the development of self-awareness? At the development of relational capacity? All of these have been proposed; none is obviously right. None is uniquely significant in the developmental process, and none marks a clear developmental dividing line – though one may mark a moral dividing line. You have to give an argument for which one you think matters, with reasons why. Suddenly it’s not so simple that any idiot can figure it out by reading their catechism, is it?
Almost all of the comments in this thread suffer from a basic failure to think about what the things one is saying actually mean. Some of them are flatly self-contradictory. Others are wildly irrelevant to the topic. And among the ones that refer to Pelosi, virtually none correctly understood what she was actually saying, even when it was correctly summarized in the original post and reiterated in my first comment. (As for the extensive quotes from Agustine and the rest, you’re still missing the point: the issue is not that many Catholics have condemned abortion for a long time, but that some Catholics have not, and the church’s official position on the question has not always been formally anti-choice. Pelosi was right about this, and your quotes are not counter-evidence.)
You know your a liberal when you have a bumper sticker saying KEEP ABORTION LEGAL right next to your SAVE THE REDWOODS SAVE THE RAINFORESTS bumper stickers
In R v W, the Court did not specifically determine the question of whether or not a fetus is a person, noting that the matter remains undecided.
In my opinion, the use of the word ‘person’ is a red herring. A better term would be ‘human being’. The questions here are, “Do all human beings have a right to life or not?” and “Shall one human being have the right to cause the death of another human being when that other human being has committed no crime nor poses any threat?”
The Court said, “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.” The Court only believed itself positioned to resolve the question of when a right to abortion begins.
The decision established a system of trimesters that attempted to balance the state’s legitimate interests against the abortion right. The Court ruled that the state cannot restrict a woman’s right to an abortion during the first trimester, the state can regulate the abortion procedure during the second trimester “in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health”, and the state can choose to restrict or proscribe abortion as it sees fit during the third trimester when the fetus is viable (”except where it is necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother”).
In science, something is said to be alive if it is made out of one or more living cells, can take in oxygen and nutrients, excrete waste, grow by either increasing cell size and/or number of cells, reproduce and respond to the environment.
A fertilized human egg contains a diploid strand of human DNA, that is, one strand from the mother and one from the father. It is, at that moment, a human being in a particular stage of development.
Another red herring in this situation is the phrase “for the health of the mother”. If health is defined as “feeling good” or “feeling happy” or “not depressed” then a human being can be killed in order to maintain those conditions.
Despicable.
Still another falacious argument is “viability outside the womb”. A newborn child cannot provide for itself, nor can a bedridden senior citizen. I know a few people who are in their 20’s, still living at home who seem to be unable to provide for themselves.
I’ll be blunt. There is no logical reason why one human being should have the power to kill another human being except in self-defense or during a Just War. All attempts to rationalize or justify the horrific slaughter of innocent children are subterfuges and deceits of the worst kind.
It is obvious that something is killed during an abortion, and that something is a human being. Why it has been allowed to continue in this country, to the point where 50 million people have been killed, is a horror. It is as if the populations of Texas and California were both obliterated.
Does anyone here honestly think that killing every single person in Texas and California should be someone’s “right to choose”?