Seamlessly for life

In some circles the “seamless garment” approach to life issues is perceived to be inadequate, almost a “relativising” of Catholic pro-life teaching. This, I suggest, is a mistaken critique that effectively undermines the anti-abortion cause.

Vatican II made a number of very important points about the Christian understanding of the person. In its section on personhood, Gaudium et Spes proclaims the human person as “the centre and summit” of creation (12). Echoing the creation story in Genesis, it proclaims that the human being is imago Dei, the image and likeness of God.

Proclaiming that we are all social beings, the document states that we share “in the light of the divine mind”, having intelligence, skills, and the capacity for faith. Through this we are able to “come to contemplate and savour the mystery of God’s design” (15) in the universe.

Through these capabilities we are able to engage individually and collectively in moral decision-making and to construct our world. We are able to make moral judgment through the faculty of conscience, that inner voice of God that speaks to us (16). (In my next article I shall look at conscience in greater detail, so I will not take it further here).

That we are able to act as moral beings, making judgments and act upon them, is the result of our capacity for reason, a reason that moves beyond animal instinct for survival through the divine gift of human freedom. No other creature on Earth has this capacity to the degree that we have.

The Council reminds us that “it is, however, only in freedom that [we] can turn ourselves towards what is good” (Gaudium et Spes 17).

The Council (and subsequent teaching) also insisted that respect for human life was paramount. It tightened up teaching on war (particularly stressing the principle of non-combatant immunity) and declared that capital punishment was almost always morally wrong, while reaffirming its opposition to abortion.

By virtue of being human with capacity for freedom, intelligence, reason, conscience and skills, human life—created in the image and likeness of God—is sacred. The “seamless garment” approach takes all of this very seriously, from conception to the grave.

What we need to see here, however, is that though these are given to us all, humans have varying degrees of capacity to exercise them. Though we may say that we have them, we have them to varying degrees at various stages in our lives. They grow in us as we ourselves grow.

Both in principle and practice adults have and exercise all these capacities—reason, intelligence, skills, freedom and capacity for faith. Children have them too, though less developed. The question is: do babies or the unborn have them?

It seems they do not. Newborns, babies and young children are in fact wholly dependent on the care of others. The chilling implication of this, some secular scholars conclude, is that they therefore have no rights other than those the law gives them, based on the assumption that they will one day develop into fully autonomous, rational and free human beings.  A few even conclude that this gives us the right to abort foetuses at any time and even to practise infanticide.

The Church has, in contrast, consistently opposed such thinking. Abortion and infanticide have always been called grave moral evils.

Having said that, it’s worth noting that during the Middle Ages the legal and religious penalties for abortion varied in severity. It was a far greater crime to kill a foetus after the soul was deemed to enter the body (three months for boys, between three and six for girls) than before, as historian John Noonan has documented.

The “seamless garment” approach in essence rejects such a hierarchical approach to the right to life based on an individual’s capacity to be fully human. It is capacity, not the exercise of certain human functions, that makes us truly human and thus deserving of protection from being killed.

Since as Catholics we do not hold that sin ever totally destroys the image of God in the human person, it is reasonable then to reject capital punishment in almost all circumstances (a point clearly made by the “seamless garment” advocates). Executions in the case where there are no other means to prevent harm to the common good of society, which the Church considers a very rare possibility, are the only exception to the rule—and even more stringent conditions apply than the case of a “justifiable” war.

It is for good reason then that the “seamless garment” is called a consistent ethic of life. It is fundamentally a call to moral consistency.

Our commitment to protect the life of the unborn (precisely because they have the biological capacity to become fully human) must extend beyond birth and through the entire biological and biographical life of the person.

It is thoroughly inconsistent to compel someone to have a child in the name of pro-life and then allow the same child to die of malnutrition a few years later!