Other people take the view that life begins at the stage when the foetus could survive outside the womb. As we've seen, there are difficulties with choosing a precise point when the unborn gets the right to live.
Although it's uncomfortable to be so imprecise, the right answer may lie in accepting that there are degrees of right to life, and the foetus gets a stronger right to life as it develops. This answer has the value of reflecting the way many people feel about things when they consider abortion: the more developed the foetus, the more unhappy they are about aborting it, and the more weight they give the rights of the foetus in comparison with the rights of the mother.
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This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. Ethics guide. When is the foetus 'alive'? On this page When does a foetus get the right to life?
The Hebrew term yeled , which means "child, son, boy, offspring, youth," is used to refer to the unborn child, regardless of the stage of development. The same is true of the term ben , which means "son, child, youth" cf. From the biblical perspective, all children are children, whether born or not.
The Jews neither had nor needed a specialized term for the unborn, whose humanity they saw clearly. Thus the Hebrew Scripture regularly refers to individuals existing in the womb "I knew you in the womb," Jer. Job , Ps. The Didache , one of the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament c. The Letter of Barnabas c. Numerous other references in the early Christian writers condemn abortion as murder. The possession of the soul at all stages of development is also indicated by natural reason, once one understands what a soul is.
From an ultimate perspective, a human is comprised of a human soul serving as the substantial form of a human body cf. Summa Theologiae , as indicated in Genesis The fact that a soul is needed to turn a human body into a human has sufficiently penetrated the popular consciousness that people recognize the presence of a soul is tied to the right to life.
This leads to the argument in which pro-abortion individuals try to turn the concept of the soul against pro-lifers by arguing that there is no empirical way of determining the presence of the soul, making it a matter of faith or personal opinion. One response to this argument is to discuss the concept of the soul. According to biblical theology, the soul the spirit is the life-principle of the body. As such, so long as a human body is alive, it has a human soul, for, as James tells us, "the body apart from the spirit is dead" Jas.
This point of biblical theology was infallibly proclaimed, using philosophical terminology, by the Council of Vienna When the soul departs, the body ceases to be living, loses its integrity, and begins to decay. Given this, a pro-life advocate may say that there is an empirical test for the presence of the human soul. If you want definitive proof that the Hebrew Bible has no idea of souls, re-read Job. When Job is suffering for no good reason, some friends visit him.
Each offers an explanation of why Job, an innocent man, was suffering. Not one single visitor offers Job the explanation he needs. No one tells him that his soul will be rewarded for his righteousness in Heaven. That explanation did not happen and could not happen until the year BCE, when Aristotle taught a bunch of early rabbis about his ideas concerning matter and form. Matter is the principle of potentiality and form is the principle of actuality.
In the case of a sculpture of a horse, matter is like the clay and form is like the idea of a horse that a sculptor imposes on the clay. Matter is obviously material, but form is immaterial. Form is of the same essence as God, who is pure thought. The rabbis of post-biblical Judaism in the Talmud immediately codified this Aristotelian dualism into the Jewish idea of guf Hebrew for body and neshama Hebrew for soul.
With the new doctrine that our souls survive the grave, new explanations for theodicy could be formulated. The next verse is even more to this point. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there were none of them.
And according to this verse, God seems to treat this unformed substance as though it has a soul. I also think it is reasonable to conclude from general and special revelation that would be from what we know from observation and from the Bible that from the time of conception the new clump of cells is a new individual.
Your doctor is defining personhood as something that has the full genetic make-up of a person. In fact, there is no other genetic match to those cells, so it is a new genetic entity, and in that sense is a unique, new being.
I think it is tempting in our culture to think of the soul as a physical object that gets infused or sewn into our bodies. According to scripture, it seems to be much more complex than that; kind of in the sense that Jesus was both fully God and fully man.
We are both physical beings and spiritual beings and because of the fall we have a very difficult time understanding or even interacting with the spiritual aspect. Thankfully, Christ provided a way that we could interact with God who is spirit again. I usually try to stick to the question at hand, but I do want to address that if your babies had souls, then where are they now?
According to Psalm , God is sovereign, which is comforting because you can rest in his sovereign and loving grace knowing that he has taken care of your babies. Heather Zeiger served as a research associate at Probe Ministries from to She is a regular contributor to Salvo Magazine, MercatorNet, and bioethics.
When Heather is not writing, she enjoys working with teens, running, reading, going to museums, and being a homegrown Texan. Heather is married to fellow science nerd, David, and they are owned by their cat. She can be reached at heatherzeiger.
Probe Ministries is a non-profit ministry whose mission is to assist the church in renewing the minds of believers with a Christian worldview and to equip the church to engage the world for Christ.
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