What Should We Think About Abortion?

Worldwide

The reference figure is the WHO's: between 2015 and 2019, about 73 million abortions were performed each year worldwide.^[8] The same number is confirmed by the Guttmacher Institute (an American family-planning organization, openly in favour of abortion)^[9] and by the medical journal The Lancet, with a margin of error between 66.7 and 82 million.^[10] This order of magnitude is repeated by the WHO, the Guttmacher Institute and The Lancet: it commands consensus among these sources, including organizations favourable to abortion.

Concretely, this volume corresponds to about 200,000 abortions per day worldwide — more than 2 abortions every second. This statistical trivialization is one of the reasons why the Church speaks of abortion as an “unspeakable crime”, an expression of the Second Vatican Council taken up by John Paul II.^[11]

In France

The Directorate for Research, Studies, Evaluation and Statistics (DREES) publishes the official figures each year. In 2021, 223,300 abortions were recorded in France, including 208,200 among women residing in metropolitan France.^[12] The highest level ever recorded at the time dated from 2019: 232,200 abortions.^[13] Since the mid-2000s, the annual number has hovered around 225,000.

The abortion ratio — the number of abortions relative to the number of births — rose from 0.27 in 2010 to 0.30 in 2021.^[14] Concretely: about 23% of pregnancies (nearly one in four) end in abortion in France. The rise in this ratio is not due to an increase in abortions in absolute terms, but to the parallel fall in the birth rate.

A few other significant figures, drawn from DREES and Guttmacher data:

• The most common age range is between 20 and 29; in the United States, only 3.6% of patients who had abortions in 2014 were minors — American data, not directly transferable to France.^[15]

Why do women have abortions?

The Guttmacher Institute — the worldwide reference of the pro-choice camp — has published several detailed surveys on the reasons given by American patients. The most cited reasons (women being able to mention several) are:^[16]

• having an abortion would interfere with schooling, work or caring for existing children: 74%
• they cannot afford a child financially: 73%
• they do not want to be a single mother or have relationship problems with the father: 48%
• fewer than 1% were victims of rape or incest

The observation is essential: in this American survey — where each woman could state several reasons — suffered violence (rape or incest, fewer than 1% of responses) is almost never the reason given; the stated reasons are very largely a matter of social, economic or relational circumstances that society could relieve in ways other than eliminating the child. Some women also cite health reasons: 12% a health problem concerning themselves, 13% a possible health problem of the unborn child (the survey does not measure life-threatening risk as such).^[17] Women's vulnerability is real; but this vulnerability is, in almost all the cases reported here, what the Church means when it speaks of the distress that drives abortion — not a fatality, but a situation to be transformed.

History of abortion in France (1920–2024)

This trajectory — from a criminal offence in 1920 to a freedom inscribed in the Constitution in 2024, a world first — ranks among the most far-reaching legislative developments in the world on this subject. It changes nothing, from the Catholic point of view, about the moral nature of the act. A thing can become legal without becoming good: civil law describes what the State authorizes; moral law asks what truly respects the dignity of all, including the most invisible.^[19]

The pro-life position does not rest, contrary to a common caricature, on religious emotion. It can be condensed into a syllogism that is simple and binding on every rational being, believer or not:

Premise 1. It is immoral — and it should be illegal — directly and deliberately to kill an innocent human being.

Premise 2. Now, abortion directly and deliberately kills an innocent human being.

Conclusion. Therefore abortion is immoral, and should be illegal.

This reasoning is logically valid: if both premises are true, the conclusion necessarily follows. To support the pro-choice position, one must therefore reject one of the two premises. Let us take them in order.

The first premise is universally accepted

Premise 1 — “it is immoral directly and deliberately to kill an innocent human being” — is one of the rare moral judgments accepted by just about everyone: believers and unbelievers, supporters and opponents of the death penalty, supporters and opponents of pacifism. It rests on what the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights calls “the inherent dignity of all the members of the human family and their equal and inalienable rights”.^[20] Article 3 states: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”

The qualifiers are essential:

• “Directly” excludes cases where the death of an innocent is an unintended collateral consequence (medicine, legitimate defence, indirect consequences).
• “Deliberately” excludes accidental deaths.
• “Innocent” excludes extreme cases of legitimate defence or just war.

The whole debate thus shifts to the second premise, which is scientific and philosophical in nature: is the embryo, the fetus, indeed an “innocent human being”?

The scientific consensus

On this point, embryologists are absolutely unanimous: at fertilization a new individual human organism is formed, genetically distinct from its mother and father, endowed with its complete genetic code, engaged in continuous development through to adulthood.

The standard Anglo-Saxon reference textbook, The Developing Human — Clinically Oriented Embryology by Keith L. Moore and T.V.N. Persaud, writes:

“A zygote is the beginning of a new human being (i.e., an embryo). Human development begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete… unites with a female gamete… to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.” — Keith L. Moore, T.V.N. Persaud, The Developing Human — Clinically Oriented Embryology, 10th ed., Philadelphia, Elsevier, 2016^[21]

The same formulation is found in Ronan O'Rahilly and Fabiola Müller, in Human Embryology & Teratology, considered the world reference textbook of embryology:

“Although life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed when the chromosomes of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte.” — R. O'Rahilly, F. Müller, Human Embryology and Teratology, 3rd ed., New York, Wiley-Liss, 2001, p. 8^[22]

The United States Senate Judiciary Committee, after hearing doctors, biologists and scientists of all persuasions, concluded as early as 1981:

“Physicians, biologists, and other scientists agree that conception marks the beginning of the life of a human being — a being that is alive and is a member of the human species. There is overwhelming agreement on this point in countless medical, biological, and scientific writings.” — United States Senate, Report of the Subcommittee on Separation of Powers to Senate Judiciary Committee S-158, 97th Congress, 1st Session, 1981, p. 7^[23]

Admissions by pro-choice philosophers

Most striking is that the best philosophers favourable to abortion explicitly recognize that the fetus is a human being. They do not base their position on denying the humanity of the fetus, but on other arguments (denial of intrinsic value, the mother's right over her body, etc.). This concession is decisive.

Peter Singer, utilitarian philosopher at Princeton, one of the most radical defenders of abortion and infanticide:

“It is possible to give ‘human being’ a precise meaning. We can use it as equivalent to ‘member of the species Homo sapiens’. Whether a being is a member of a given species is something that can be determined scientifically, by an examination of the nature of the chromosomes in the cells of living organisms. In this sense there is no doubt that from the first moments of its existence an embryo conceived from human sperm and eggs is a human being.” — Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 73^[24]

David Boonin, author of A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge University Press, 2003), a major philosophical work of the pro-choice camp, goes further still:

“In the top drawer of my desk, I keep a picture of my son Eli. This picture was taken on September 7, 1993, twenty-four weeks before he was born. I have no doubt in my mind that this picture shows [my son] at a very early stage of his physical development. And I have no doubt that the position I defend in this book entails that it would have been morally permissible to end his life at this point.” — David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion, Cambridge University Press, 2003, preface, p. xiv^[25]

The most resounding testimony remains that of Dr Bernard Nathanson (1926–2011). Co-founder in 1969 of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), he was one of the principal architects of the American legalization of abortion and personally performed or supervised tens of thousands of abortions. Confronted with the evidence of ultrasound and embryology, he publicly broke with his positions in the late 1970s:

“There is simply no doubt that even the early embryo is a human being. All its genetic coding and all its characteristics are unquestionably human. There is no doubt that it is alive, that it is self-directed and that it is not the same being as the mother — and that it is therefore a unified whole.” — Bernard Nathanson, The Hand of God, Washington DC, Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 131^[26]

Even more telling, Ann Furedi, then chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service — the largest independent abortion provider in the United Kingdom — publicly stated in 2008:

“We can accept that the embryo is a living thing, that it has a beating heart from day 21, that it has its own genetic system. It is clearly human, in the sense that it is not a gerbil, and we can recognize that it is human life.” — Ann Furedi, Abortion: A Civilised Debate, Battle of Ideas conference, London, 1 November 2008^[27]

On the factual and scientific level, the biological humanity of the embryo is attested by the embryology textbooks cited above — even if the moral conclusion to be drawn from it remains, itself, disputed.

Three tests to be convinced

For a non-specialist interlocutor, Trent Horn proposes demonstrating three successive things: the embryo is alive, it is human, it is a distinct organism.^[28]

1) The embryo is alive. A living being, in biology, is an organism that grows through cell reproduction by converting nutrients into energy. The embryo meets these criteria from fertilization. The irrefutable argument: “What does abortion do to the embryo?” — it kills it. And one can only kill what is alive.

2) The embryo is human. Reproduction between two humans produces nothing other than humans: it is a universal biological law. The embryo possesses the complete human genetic code (46 chromosomes), distinct from its mother's.

3) The embryo is a distinct organism. This third property distinguishes the embryo from a mere skin cell. An organism is “a collection of biological parts that function together to maintain a complete living being”. Horn's proposed organism test is simple: “If I give the thing in question enough time, food and a suitable environment, and it is capable of growing into a mature member of its species, then it is an organism.” Skin cells, spermatozoa, ova fail this test. The embryo passes it immediately. As Christopher Kaczor writes:

“Skin cells are only parts of a human being, without a dynamic and intrinsic orientation to develop into an adult. By contrast, the human embryo is a whole and complete organism, an individual living human being whose cells work together in a coordinated effort of self-development toward maturity.” — Christopher Kaczor, The Ethics of Abortion — Women's Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice, 2nd ed., New York, Routledge, 2014, p. 113^[29]

Embryonic development: what is hidden from the public

Gynaecology textbooks and family-planning websites readily speak of a “clump of cells” or an “egg” to describe the contents of the uterus during the first weeks. This presentation is scientifically false. Here are the facts, as confirmed by Jérôme Lejeune — a world-renowned French geneticist, discoverer of the cause of Down syndrome, first president of the Pontifical Academy for Life (February–April 1994):

“At the real age of one month, the human being measures four and a half millimetres. Its tiny heart has already been beating for a week; its arms, legs, head and brain are already sketched out. At two months of age, the fetus measures three centimetres from head to rump. Open your hand: it is almost finished. Hands, feet, head, organs, brain — everything is in place and will only grow bigger. Look even closer, with an ordinary microscope, and you could decipher its fingerprints.” — Jérôme Lejeune, in Manuel sur l'embryon humain, Fondation Jérôme Lejeune, p. 15^[30]

Verifiable landmarks:

Since abortion on request is legal in France up to 14 weeks, all of this takes place during the period when abortion is authorized.

The most resounding study of recent years on fetal pain is that of Stuart W. G. Derbyshire (psychologist, University of Singapore, openly in favour of abortion, former consultant to American family planning) and John C. Bockmann, published in 2020 in the prestigious Journal of Medical Ethics. Their conclusion, running counter to the previous medical consensus:

“It is now clear that the consensus [that fetal pain would appear after 24 weeks] is no longer tenable. Current neuroscientific evidence shows that the thalamic projections into the subplate, which emerge around 12 weeks of gestation, are functional and equivalent to the thalamocortical projections that emerge around 24 weeks. The evidence indicates an immediate and unreflective experience of pain mediated by the developing function of the nervous system from 12 weeks.” — Stuart W. G. Derbyshire, John C. Bockmann, “Reconsidering fetal pain”, Journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 46, 2020, p. 3–6^[31]

This study — precisely because it comes from an author favourable to abortion — relaunched the scientific debate on the subject. It suggests the fetus might feel pain from 12–13 weeks, before the French legal limit — but this reading remains debated among specialists and is not consensual.

The false objections

Objection 1 — “If embryos are human, then skin cells are too.” False: skin cells are not organisms. They do not develop spontaneously, given a suitable environment, into a mature member of the human species. The embryo does. As Boonin honestly admits: “The anti-abortionists have raised powerful objections to these arguments [embryo/cell analogy], and I am inclined to believe that these objections are correct.”^[32]

Objection 2 — “The embryo can split into twins, so it is not yet an organism.” False: the potential for division does not imply the current absence of an organism. If one cuts an earthworm in two, two worms result, but there was indeed one before the cut. The philosopher Stephen Napier formulates the same reply more rigorously: individuality is not the same as indivisibility.

“It is perfectly consistent with our empirical knowledge to interpret twinning as a form of asexual reproduction in which the starting zygote gives birth to another without ever disappearing.” — Stephen Napier, “Twinning, substance, and identity through time: A reply to McMahan”, The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 2, 2008^[33]

On this hypothesis, one of the two twins simply continues the initial organism while the other is born through a process of asexual reproduction from it — but in both cases, an individual indeed existed before the division.

Objection 3 — “It's only a fetus, not a baby.” Semantic confusion: “fetus” is simply the medical term for a human being from the 8th week to birth, just as “newborn”, “child”, “adolescent” designate the later stages.

Objection 4 — “What I carry is a human being only if I desire it.” The status of an organism cannot depend on a feeling external to it. Even a journalist openly favourable to abortion publicly admitted it:

“Why can't we agree that what they felt about their pregnancy was very different, but that it is pretty silly to claim that what was growing inside them was not the same entity? Fetuses are not different. They are not considered human life only if they are wanted.” — Mary Elizabeth Williams, “So what if abortion ends life?”, Salon, 23 January 2013^[34]

A wanted fetus and an unwanted fetus are biologically the same thing. Only the gaze cast upon it changes — never its nature.

Objection 5 — “One embryo in two dies naturally, so it isn't really a person.” The frequency of natural deaths in a category of beings never determines the dignity of its members. In centuries when infant mortality exceeded 30%, no serious moralist concluded that newborns were not persons. A high rate of loss describes biological fragility; it changes nothing about the moral status of those who die.

The opacity maintained by family-planning organizations and official websites — which speak of “suctioning out the egg” or “emptying the contents of the uterus” — does not withstand the medical description of the procedures. The following passages rely on medical textbooks, practitioners' testimonies and a ruling of the United States Supreme Court, cited in the notes below.

First trimester: medical abortion (up to 7–8 weeks)

Medical abortion uses mifepristone (RU-486), an anti-progesterone that blocks the hormone needed to maintain the pregnancy, followed 24 to 48 hours later by misoprostol (Cytotec®), which causes the contractions that expel the dead embryo. The method accounts for about 70% of abortions in France in 2021.^[35]

Former obstetrician Anthony Levatino, who performed more than 1,200 abortions before becoming one of the most committed pro-life physicians in the United States, describes the procedure as follows:

“The mother swallows the pills. RU-486 blocks the action of progesterone, naturally produced to stabilize the uterine lining. The lining breaks down, cutting off the baby's blood and food, which dies inside its mother's womb. Misoprostol then causes painful contractions to expel the dead baby. At nine weeks, the baby is more than 2.5 cm long. If the mother looks closely, she can count the fingers and toes.” — Anthony Levatino, Abortion Procedures educational videos (LiveAction); see also his testimony before the United States House of Representatives, 17 May 2012^[36]

First trimester: suction aspiration abortion (8–13 weeks)

Suction abortion consists in dilating the cervix and inserting a cannula connected to a pump with a suction power 10 to 20 times greater than a household vacuum cleaner. The fetus is suctioned out piece by piece. It is the most widely used surgical method. Levatino describes:

“The baby has a heartbeat, fingers, toes, arms and legs, but its bones are still weak and fragile. The suction force tears it apart and it passes through the tube into the machine. […] To make sure nothing remains, the abortionist then uses a curette to scrape the lining of the uterus.” — Anthony Levatino, Abortion Procedures videos (LiveAction)^[37]

Second trimester: dilation and evacuation (14–24 weeks)

At this stage, the fetus is too large to pass through the cannula. The procedure consists in using grasping forceps to extract the fetus piece by piece. The United States Supreme Court, in its Gonzales v. Carhart ruling (2007), describes the method as follows:

“The doctor, often guided by ultrasound, inserts grasping forceps through the cervix and into the uterus to grip the fetus. The doctor grips a fetal part with the forceps and pulls it through the cervix and vagina, continuing to pull even when there is resistance from the fetus. The friction causes the fetus to tear apart. The piecemeal evacuation process continues until it has been completely removed.” — United States Supreme Court, Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U.S. 124, 2007, Section I-A^[38]

Warren Hern, an American gynaecologist who performs this type of abortion, writes in his textbook Abortion Practice that it is “sometimes necessary to use long curved scissors to decapitate and dismember the fetus”.^[39] Levatino, who carried out these procedures, describes the final step:

“Usually, the hardest part is extracting the baby's head, which is about the size of a large plum. At 20 weeks, the head is grasped and crushed. The abortionist knows he has crushed the skull when a white substance comes out of the cervix. That was the baby's brain.” — Anthony Levatino, Abortion Procedures videos (LiveAction)^[40]

Third trimester: induction

Induction abortion is performed from the 25th week onward. A needle injects digoxin (a heart drug) into the fetus's heart, chest or head, causing cardiac arrest. Laminaria are then inserted to dilate the cervix, and the mother carries her dead baby for two to three days before induced delivery.

At the stage of viability (from 22–24 weeks, even 21 in some record cases), medicine knows how to save very premature babies. The coexistence, in the same hospital, of a neonatal unit straining to keep a 24-week baby alive and a unit performing late termination on a fetus of the same age a few metres away, is one of the most flagrant contradictions of contemporary positive law.

The real philosophical debate has no longer, for twenty years, concerned the biological human character of the fetus (admitted by all), but its quality as a person. Singer, Tooley, Warren and McMahan develop the idea that a biological human being may not yet — or no longer — be a person, and that one may kill it without violating its right to life.

Stephen Schwarz's SLED criterion

The philosopher Stephen Schwarz (University of Rhode Island) demonstrated that there are in practice only four differences between a newborn and a late-term fetus. He summarizes them in the acronym SLED:^[41]

• Size — the fetus is smaller
• Level of development — the fetus is less advanced
• Environment — the fetus is in the womb
• Degree of dependency — the fetus is totally dependent on the maternal body

None of these four differences, taken alone or together, justifies discriminating against the right to life. Scott Klusendorf condenses the demonstration:

“If it is immoral to harm human beings because of their skin colour or sex, why would it be morally acceptable to harm them because of their size, level of development, location or dependency?” — Scott Klusendorf, The Case for Life — Equipping Christians to Engage the Culture, Wheaton, Crossway, 2009^[42]

Size grounds no intrinsic value: a newborn is small, a dwarf is too, without losing their dignity. Environment either: the mere fact of passing through the birth canal cannot turn a non-person into a person. Dependency is shared by infants, the gravely disabled, the elderly: no one maintains they may be killed for that. Level of development is a continuum: the right to life, on the other hand, is binary — one has it or one does not.

All proposed criteria are arbitrary

Abortion supporters have successively proposed as the criterion of the right to life: implantation, the first heartbeat, the capacity for movement, human appearance, sensitivity to pain, the presence of a brain, viability, self-awareness, the desire to go on living. None withstands analysis.

The pro-choice philosopher Jeff McMahan (University of Oxford) himself admits the untenable character of these criteria:

“I think it is very difficult to maintain the sharp distinction that almost everyone accepts between abortion and infanticide. And that is because the difference between the fetus and a newborn is location. […] Whether killing this human being is permitted surely cannot depend on whether it is inside or outside the woman's body. Its moral status depends on its properties, not its spatial location.” — Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing — Problems at the Margins of Life, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 378^[43]

McMahan draws the logical but terrifying conclusion that infanticide should be permitted. Peter Singer draws it explicitly: “The life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.”^[44] If the pro-life position were false, infanticide would be morally acceptable. Nobody, with the exception of Singer and a few radical utilitarians, is prepared to admit that. It is a sign that pro-life logic is, on this point, the only coherent one. Jeff McMahan goes so far as to endorse the reverse consequence — sacrificing the newborn for the benefit of others — in an admission he himself presents as uncomfortable:

“It therefore seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that it would be permissible (and perhaps even morally required, other things being equal) to kill the healthy orphan newborn in order to use its organs to save the three other children. […] Most people will find this implication intolerable, and I confess that I cannot accept it without significant apprehension and considerable unease.” — Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing — Problems at the Margins of Life, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 360–361^[45]

Gradualism: a threat to the equality of all fundamental rights

Many of the criteria dismissed in the table above — brain, sensitivity to pain, movement, self-awareness — share a deeper flaw than their isolated inconsistency: they come in degrees. Yet if the value of a human being depended on a property that admits of degrees, that value itself would become graded — which ruins the principle of equal dignity on which human rights rest. The Catholic philosopher Christopher Kaczor formulates the argument precisely:

“If what grants someone personhood is some quality X, and that quality X comes in degrees, then the value of persons would also come in degrees.” — Christopher Kaczor, The Ethics of Abortion — Women's Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice, 2nd ed., New York, Routledge, 2014, p. 103^[46]

Concretely: if intelligence, autonomy or self-awareness grounded the right to life, a more intelligent adult would have more value than a less intelligent adult, a fully autonomous person more value than a gravely disabled one. No decent society accepts this consequence. The only way to escape gradualism is to ground dignity in a binary property — belonging or not to the human species as an individual organism — rather than in a capacity that develops progressively.

Viability: a criterion depending on place and technology, not on the nature of the fetus

The viability criterion, already dismissed in the table above, deserves separate treatment, as it is the threshold most often invoked in French and American legal debate. Yet viability is not an intrinsic property of the fetus: it is a datum that varies with the hospital, the country and the year. A fetus non-viable at 23 weeks in an isolated maternity unit may be viable at the same age in a state-of-the-art neonatal unit. The gynaecologist Landrum Shettles drew from this as early as 1990 a consequence embarrassing for any legislation based on this threshold:

“An abortion law based on viability would require a great many redefinitions. What was not considered a human being to be protected last year could be this year. If we accepted the law, we would find ourselves declaring that last year's abortions were homicides in some cases.” — Landrum Shettles, quoted in Molly Yard, Voices of the Abortion Debate, New Dimensions, October 1990, p. 109^[47]

This observation is so solid that David Boonin himself, one of the most rigorous philosophical defenders of abortion, concedes it without evasion:

“Whether a fetus is viable or not seems to be a fact more related to its environment and the current state of technology than to its own nature, and it is therefore difficult to see how its viability could grant it a right to life.” — David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 254^[48]

A fundamental right cannot depend on a postcode or a hospital's budget.

The embryo-rescue dilemma: a dilemma that settles nothing

One scenario often recurs in public debates: in a fertility-clinic fire, if only one thing could be saved, would one choose a two-year-old child or a hundred cryopreserved embryos? Many people spontaneously answer that they would save the child — and conclude that embryos “don't really count”.

The reasoning is a sophism. Preferring to save one identifiable individual over a hundred embryos proves nothing about their ontological status: the choice involves other factors — the emotional bond already formed with the child present, its visible and immediate suffering in the face of danger, the far greater probability that it will actually reach adulthood. A firefighter who, in a burning building, first saves a conscious child rather than a hundred sleeping newborns in a nearby nursery proves no more that those newborns have no value: he responds to perceptible urgency, not to a metaphysical judgment about who is or is not a person. A triage dilemma never defines an ontology.^[49]

The Thomist objection: mediate animation

One objection, paradoxically from inside the Catholic tradition, deserves an honest answer rather than evasion. Saint Thomas Aquinas, following the Aristotelian embryology of his time — which knew nothing of cellular fertilization — taught that the rational soul was infused only after a delay for the formation of the body (“mediate” animation, as opposed to the “immediate” animation defended today by the Magisterium). Some wrongly conclude from this that the Catholic tradition itself would permit very early abortion.

This reading ignores that Thomas reasoned from the biological data available in the 13th century, not from an intangible theological principle about the precise moment of animation. The principle he lays down remains valid: the rational soul requires an organized body for the exercise of its operations. What has changed is biology itself. Theologians Benedict Ashley and Albert Moraczewski updated Thomist reasoning on the basis of modern embryology:

“What is the principal organ which causes the human body to develop in such a way as to be fit to receive a soul? Modern embryology clearly shows that it is the nucleus of the zygote produced by the fertilization of a human ovum by a human sperm.” — Benedict Ashley, Albert Moraczewski, “Cloning, Aquinas, and the Embryonic Person”, The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 2, 2001, p. 199–200^[50]

In other words: the “organization” Thomas deemed necessary for animation exists from the zygote onward, since the cell nucleus already contains, from fertilization, the complete genetic information that actively directs the whole development of the organism toward its mature human form. Applied with today's biology rather than that of the 13th century, the Thomist principle therefore leads to immediate animation, not to its denial.

Don Marquis and Alexander Pruss's argument: deprivation of a future

The philosopher Don Marquis (University of Kansas) proposed in 1989 in the Journal of Philosophy — one of the world's most prestigious philosophy journals — an anti-abortion argument that rests on no religious presupposition and is still today one of the most discussed in applied ethics:^[51]

Premise 1. What makes killing an adult gravely immoral is that it deprives the victim of the whole of its future — its experiences, projects, activities, future enjoyments.

Premise 2. Abortion deprives the fetus of the same thing: a future like ours.

Conclusion. Therefore abortion is gravely immoral.

The argument is powerful because it applies to atheists as well as believers: it suffices to admit that what makes my murder unjust is depriving me of my future life. Marquis himself formulates the heart of his intuition thus:

“In killing me, you deprive me of all my future activities, projects, experiences. […] When I am killed, I am deprived both of what I now value and which would have been part of my future personal life, but also of what I would eventually come to enjoy. Therefore, when I die, I am deprived of the whole value of my future.” — Don Marquis, “Why Abortion Is Immoral”, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 86, no. 4, April 1989, p. 183–202^[52]

One question remains: why would today's fetus and the adult I will be tomorrow be “the same” subject, such that the former can be deprived of the latter's future?

The continuity of the organism: the same subject at two ages

Alexander Pruss (Baylor University) answers starting from a simple thought exercise. Let us call “Bob” any adult living today, and follow his history backward:

“If we had a camera and watched what happens in the womb in which Bob lives, we would see an embryo developing, cells differentiating, a fetus forming, growing and finally a birth. If we keep watching, we will see Bob become a newborn, then a toddler, a child, an adolescent, and finally — an adult. In other words, Bob's development and growth is uninterrupted and continuous.” — Alexander Pruss, “I Was Once a Fetus: That Is Why Abortion Is Wrong”^[53]

At no point in this history does one subject die to make room for another: no birth of a “person” interrupts a hitherto impersonal organism. Cell renewal changes nothing about this continuity:

“It is true that most of Bob's original cells are no longer there, but that does not prevent the organism's survival. Bob cannot be a mere part of my body, because my whole body comes continuously from Bob's body. […] Thus, Bob and I are organisms having all our organs in common. But that is possible only if I am Bob.” — Alexander Pruss, “I Was Once a Fetus: That Is Why Abortion Is Wrong”^[54]

Yesterday's embryo and today's adult are therefore not two successive entities — one impersonal, the other personal — but the same living organism at two ages of its development, like a child and the old man he will become seventy years later.

The body is not a property external to the subject

This organic continuity has a direct consequence against theories that make personal identity depend not on the body but on a chain of memories or mental states (defended notably by Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan): if “I” were only a consciousness housed in a body, that body would be a mere instrument at my service, and harming it would injure me only indirectly. Christopher Kaczor shows the absurdity of this consequence:

“If Singer and McMahan's conception of identity were true, then practices like rape, torture or mutilation would not really directly harm the individual in himself […] but would harm what could be considered the person's property or the human organism he or she occupies. […] But if you cut off my arm, is it not fair to say that you harmed me, instead of saying that you took away something I make use of?” — Christopher Kaczor, The Ethics of Abortion — Women's Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice, 2nd ed., New York, Routledge, 2014, p. 116–117^[55]

My body is not a lodging that “I” inhabit: it is me. That is why destroying it, at whatever age of its development, is destroying me.

A sufficient reason, not the only possible reason

An easy objection is to ask: “What if the fetus has neither memories, nor consciousness, nor a desire to live?” It rests on an argumentative confusion. To condemn abortion, it suffices that deprivation of a future be a sufficient reason making killing gravely wrong. To rescue abortion, the opponent must show that another criterion — present consciousness, present desire, past memories — is necessary, such that its absence makes killing permissible. These are two very different requirements, and the second is far harder to establish than the first.^[56]

Objection — “Without memories, nothing important is lost”

Imagine a patient, victim of a serious accident, totally amnesiac, whom doctors know with certainty will recover a normal conscious life within weeks. His continuity of memories is, for now, broken. Killing him in that state would nonetheless remain a manifest injustice. The absence of past experiences therefore does not suffice to exclude a being from the protection owed to its life — the embryo, which simply does not yet have past experiences, is in a situation comparable to that amnesiac: its future life remains before it, intact.^[57]

Objection — “Without a desire to live, there is nothing to protect”

The pro-choice philosopher David Boonin proposes a different criterion: only a being capable of desiring its own continuation would have a right to life. But a present desire is no more a necessary condition of the right to life: according no importance, at the present moment, to one's own future does not imply that this future is without value. The sleeping adult, the patient in a coma, a person going through a suicidal crisis formulate, at the moment one considers them, no present desire to go on living — without that authorizing anyone to kill them. For the suicidal person in particular, the right answer to the momentary absence of a desire to live is rescue, never elimination.^[58]

The honest limit of the argument

Intellectual honesty requires recognizing a real limit to this argument: it does not cover, on its own, absolutely every case. A diagnosis establishing that a human being will never, owing to major and irreversible brain damage, know the least “future like ours” would escape the letter of Marquis's demonstration. In these rare situations, the future-deprivation argument must then give way to the more fundamental argument set out above: the person as an individual substance of rational nature, whose dignity lies in the nature of the species to which it belongs, not in the present or foreseeable exercise of this or that capacity.^[59]

The argument from skepticism

Even if one doubted the moral status of the fetus, that doubt itself should suffice to forbid abortion. Alexander Pruss proposes an analogy:

Imagine a hunter who hears a noise in a bush twenty metres away. He does not know whether it is an animal or his friend. Does he shoot? Of course not — even if the probability that it is his friend is 5%, he would not take the risk. That is the principle of moral precaution.

Four possible situations:

1. The fetus is a person and I know it → abortion is murder.
2. The fetus is a person and I do not know it → abortion is manslaughter through negligence — gravely culpable.
3. The fetus is not a person and I do not know it → I have been guilty of grave moral negligence: I took the risk of killing a person without knowing.
4. The fetus is not a person and I know it → abortion is not culpable.

Only case 4 is morally permitted. As long as the pro-choice advocate lacks absolute moral certainty that the fetus is not a person, abortion remains immoral.^[60] Yet no serious philosopher of the pro-choice camp claims to hold such certainty.

In 1971, in an article that became famous, the American philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson (MIT) reversed the debate. She granted the pro-life camp its main premise — yes, the fetus is a person — but nevertheless maintained that abortion is morally permissible, because the right to life does not imply the right to use another's body to stay alive.^[61]

The thought experiment

Imagine, Thomson writes, that you wake up one morning plugged by the kidneys into a famous unconscious violinist suffering from a fatal kidney disease. The “Society of Music Lovers”, having discovered that you alone have the right blood type, kidnapped you during the night. The hospital director explains to you that unplugging yourself would kill the violinist, but that in nine months, he will be cured. Do you have a moral obligation to stay plugged in?

Thomson maintains not. And that pregnancy, particularly pregnancy resulting from rape, is analogous to this situation. The analogy became the most discussed pro-choice argument in analytic philosophy.

Why the analogy fails

The violinist argument has been the subject of several hundred academic replies. The main objections, as gathered by Christopher Kaczor, Francis Beckwith and Alexander Pruss:

1) The responsibility objection. In the great majority of reported cases (the American survey cited above), the woman consented to an act (sexual intercourse) whose potential biological consequence is the creation of a dependent person. In the violinist scenario, you are innocent: you were kidnapped. If you had voluntarily engaged in an activity you knew could lead to someone being plugged into you, your moral obligation would be quite different. Michael Tooley, a pro-choice philosopher, agrees:

“The anti-abortion person can very well maintain that in general people do not have the moral obligation to let a fetus use their body, even when that is necessary for another individual's survival, whereas a pregnant woman generally has the moral obligation to let the fetus use her body because she is morally responsible for a fetus needing her womb.” — Michael Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide, Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 45^[62]

2) Direct killing versus letting die. Unplugging oneself from the violinist is ceasing to provide extraordinary aid — he then dies of his own disease. Abortion, on the other hand, is a direct attack on the bodily integrity of the fetus: dismemberment, poisoning, crushing of the skull. As the pro-choice philosopher Jeff McMahan writes: “The standard methods used to cause abortions clearly involve killing the fetus: it dies either by being dismembered or by being poisoned.”^[63]

3) Intended death versus foreseen death. If a way were found tomorrow to save the violinist after unplugging, it would be a joy. If an abortion “fails” and the baby is born alive, it is a catastrophe for those who wanted it dead. This difference proves the death of the fetus is intentional, which is not the case in Thomson's scenario.

4) Parental obligations. Parents have obligations toward their children that they do not have toward strangers. A mother must breastfeed her newborn if no formula is available — she has no right to let it starve on the pretext that it is “using” her body. The womb is a particular case of this obligation.

5) The teleology of the womb. All organs of the human body have a purpose serving the body that bears them — except one. The womb is the only organ (with, to some extent, the breast) whose natural purpose is to serve the survival of another person. Kidney donation must remain free because the kidney serves my body. The womb, on the other hand, is “designed for” sheltering another human being. Refusing a child the use of the organ precisely intended to keep it alive is not comparable to refusing an organ donation: it is refusing a natural function.

6) The case of rape: one objection falls, not the other four. In a pregnancy following rape, the responsibility objection (1) indeed loses its force: the woman chose nothing. But the other four disanalogies remain fully intact — abortion remains direct killing, not mere unplugging (2), the child's death remains intentional, not merely foreseen (3), the parent-child relationship continues to exist biologically between the mother and this particular child (4), and the womb keeps the same natural purpose (5). Alexander Pruss proposes a variant of the thought experiment designed precisely for this case: two musicians are kidnapped together and placed in a canoe which, in nine months, will bring them both back to shore; one body's warmth keeps the other alive during the crossing. Throwing the second overboard to get home faster would remain an act of killing — even though neither castaway caused the situation of dependency.^[64] Causal responsibility is therefore only one of the five objections to the analogy: its absence, in the case of rape, does not suffice to bring down the other four.

Conclusion: the violinist argument, despite its extraordinary ingenuity, justifies abortion in none of the cases it claims to cover — neither abortion of convenience, which constitutes the immense majority of the practice, nor even, on examination, the case of rape, where four of the five disanalogies subsist in full. This erases nothing of the distress proper to a pregnancy resulting from rape, treated further on in this article — but that distress calls for support, not for a conclusion drawn from an analogy that does not hold.

Rape and incest

Pregnancies resulting from rape or incest account, according to the Guttmacher Institute's American survey, for fewer than 1% of reported abortions.^[65] Yet they concentrate most of the public discussion — precisely because they are the most painful and because they are often used to embarrass pro-lifers.

Rape is one of the most abominable crimes, and the woman who is its victim needs total support: psychological care, protection, justice rendered against the attacker. But the child conceived is not the rapist. It is, literally, another innocent in a situation already saturated with injustice.

Killing that child does not erase the rape — the woman remains raped, the trauma endures. Killing that child adds, on the other hand, a second injustice to the first. In our country, one does not even have the right to execute the rapist (the death penalty is abolished) — but one would authorize putting his child to death?

On this precise point, serious pro-choice philosophers side with pro-lifers. Nathan Nobis and Kristina Grob, declared supporters of legal abortion up to birth:

“Those who think fetuses are persons and therefore maintain that abortion is immoral should think that abortion is immoral also in cases of rape, since a person is a person, regardless of its origins.” — Nathan Nobis, Kristina Grob, Thinking Critically About Abortion — Why Most Abortions Aren't Wrong and Why All Abortions Should Be Legal, Open Philosophy Press, 2019, p. 51^[66]

David Boonin himself: “A fetus conceived as a result of rape surely has the same right to life as any other fetus.”^[67]

Diagnosed disability

In the Paris register of congenital malformations, about 95% of prenatal diagnoses of Down syndrome led to late termination over the 2001–2005 period (95% confidence interval: 92.7–96.9).^[68] Abortion for disability is authorized with no time limit — up to the ninth month if necessary. This practice belongs to an intellectual history marked by eugenics: Margaret Sanger, founder of the American Birth Control League (1921, which became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942), wrote as early as 1922, in a chapter entitled “The Cruelty of Charity”, that philanthropy encourages the healthiest to assume “the burden of the reckless and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste” (“a dead weight of human waste”).^[69]

Yet clinical studies on people with Down syndrome show that nearly 99% of the 284 people surveyed say they are happy to be alive, and that the great majority of them say they receive love from their families.^[70] The philosopher Alexander Pruss puts his finger on what makes this practice singularly shocking:

“The problem is that in such an abortion, a child is killed because he does not measure up to a standard through no fault of his own. Such a couple does not seem to love their child unconditionally. For they have set up a standard such that, if their child had not measured up, they would have killed him.” — Alexander Pruss, “Abortion for Fetal Disability”, academic blog, 18 December 2007^[71]

Non-viable child

The “he is going to die anyway” argument does not hold. Knowing that a person will die shortly — even with certainty — gives no one the right to kill him. The doctor's role, faithful to the Hippocratic Oath, is to relieve suffering, not to cause death.

“I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy.” — Hippocratic Oath, founding text of medical ethics^[72]

Danger to the mother's life

This is the hardest case: must one choose between the mother's life and the child's? Catholic moral theology, like classical moral philosophy, distinguishes here between two types of situations using the principle of double effect (formalized by Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 64, a. 7):

• Direct abortion (the act aims at killing the fetus, or kills the fetus as a means of saving the mother) remains always immoral.
• Indirect abortion (the act aims at treating a maternal pathology, and the death of the fetus is a foreseen but unintended consequence) is morally licit.

The two textbook cases are:

• Ectopic pregnancy (95% of the time, the embryo implants in a Fallopian tube). A rupture would kill the mother by haemorrhage. The surgical operation — salpingectomy — aims at removing the pathological tube, which indirectly causes the embryo's death. The act is licit.
• Cancer of the uterus during pregnancy. Hysterectomy saves the mother but causes the indirect death of the child. Licit, under the same conditions.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in its instruction Donum vitae (1987) taken up by Evangelium vitae, specifies:

“If, for example, saving the life of the future mother, independently of her pregnant state, urgently required a surgical operation or other therapeutic action which would have as an accessory consequence, in no way desired or intended, but inevitable, the death of the embryo, such an act could no longer be characterized as a direct attempt on an innocent life.” — Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum vitae, 22 February 1987, I, 1^[73]

Thanks to medical progress, cases where the mother is in danger before fetal viability have become extremely rare. The Catholic position is not indifference to maternal life: it is the refusal to choose between mother and child as long as another way remains possible.

Several realities that defenders of abortion themselves cannot justify suggest that, inwardly, they grant the fetus a dignity they intellectually refuse.

Double homicide

In the United States, the murder of a pregnant woman can be prosecuted as a double homicide: the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act (1 April 2004) recognizes two victims for federal crimes, and 39 federated States have adopted analogous laws with varying thresholds.^[74] In France, by contrast, the Court of Cassation refuses to qualify a fatal attack on the fetus as homicide (criminal chamber, 30 June 1999, then 2001–2002), and the European Court of Human Rights (Vo v. France, 8 July 2004) leaves States their margin of appreciation on the status of the unborn child.^[75] If the fetus were but a “clump of cells”, the American qualification would be absurd. The atheist and anticlerical writer Christopher Hitchens — who called himself “pro-life” while refusing the repeal of Roe v. Wade — put it with his usual bluntness:

“Unborn child seems to me to be a real concept. It's not a growth or an appendix.” — Christopher Hitchens, interview with Lisa Miller, Newsweek, 2008^[76]

“Safe, legal and rare”

The formula popularized by Bill Clinton — “Safe, legal and rare” — is actually incoherent. Why want to make “rare” an act that would be but one medical procedure among others? Nobody says appendectomies or tooth extractions should be made “rare”. The implicit admission, behind the slogan, is that everyone senses there is something wrong with abortion — but forbids himself to say so.

Sex-selective abortions

The UN estimated in 2007 that about 100 million girls worldwide had been eliminated by selective abortion or infanticide, principally in China and India.^[77] Stephan Klasen and Claudia Wink confirmed this figure in a major Feminist Economics study.^[78] If the fetus has no intrinsic value, sex-selective abortion should pose no moral problem — yet almost all feminists condemn it. Nivedita Menon, an Indian pro-abortion feminist, admits:

“We cannot simultaneously maintain that abortion implies that women have the right to control their bodies, but that women do not have the right specifically to choose to abort female fetuses.” — Nivedita Menon, “Abortion As a Feminist Issue: Who Decides, and What?”, Outlook India, 12 May 2012^[79]

Prenatal attachment

Why does one weep over a miscarriage, if the fetus is but a clump of cells? Why does one say “the baby is moving”, and not “the clump of cells moved”? Why does a partner caress his pregnant wife's belly? All these spontaneous attitudes, even among pro-choicers, betray a deep intuition: what grows in the womb is already a person. The pro-choice feminist Naomi Wolf denounced this incoherence as early as 1995:

“The pro-choice movement often treats with contempt the pro-life practice of showing us their disturbing graphics. But the best feminism must be based on what is true. It is true that images of violent fetal death work beautifully for pro-lifers as political polemic, but these images are not polemical in themselves: they are biological facts. We know it.” — Naomi Wolf, “Our Bodies, Our Souls”, The New Republic, 16 October 1995^[80]

An unvarying condemnation from the origins

Catholic teaching on abortion has never varied in its principle. The oldest non-canonical Christian document to have come down to us, the Didache (composed between the end of the 1st century and the beginning of the 2nd), already carries an explicit condemnation:

“You shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten.” — Didache, II, 2 (between 70 and 110 AD)^[81]

A century later, Tertullian (c. 155–220) — the first great Christian author in Latin, a jurist of Carthage — formulates the doctrine with a precision never surpassed:

“For us, murder being once for all forbidden, we may not destroy even the fetus in the womb while the blood is still drawn to form a human being. To hinder a birth is merely a speedier man-killing; nor does it matter whether you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to the birth. That is a man which is going to be one; you have the fruit already in the seed.” — Tertullian, Apology, IX, 8 (c. 197 AD)^[82]

The same condemnation is found in Saint Basil — who decreed as early as the 4th century, in his first canonical letter to Amphilochius (Letter 188, canon 2), that “the woman who deliberately destroys a fetus is answerable for murder” and adds, against the embryological casuistry common in his time: “with us there is no nice enquiry as to its being formed or unformed”^[83] —, in Saint Augustine, who denounces in De nuptiis et concupiscentia spouses who resort to “sterilizing poisons” or practise “the parricide they commit on the child already conceived”^[84], and in Saint Thomas Aquinas, who treats, concerning chance homicide (Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 64, a. 8, reply to objection 2), the case of one who strikes a pregnant woman: if the death of the woman or of the animated fetus results, he is not excused from homicide^[85]. Several regional councils condemn it, such as Elvira (c. 305, canon 63) and Ancyra (314, canon 21). The Second Vatican Council takes up the tradition in 1965 in the pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes: “For God, the Lord of life, has conferred on men the surpassing ministry of safeguarding life… abortion and infanticide are unspeakable crimes.”^[86]

The Catechism

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, promulgated by Saint John Paul II in 1992, devotes four paragraphs to abortion (§§ 2270–2275). The two central ones:

“Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person — among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2270^[87]

“Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2271^[88]

Evangelium vitae — the 1995 declaration

The reference document is the encyclical Evangelium vitae, signed by Saint John Paul II on 25 March 1995. In it the Pope explicitly exercises his charism of definitive teaching, in union with all the bishops of the Church:

“Therefore, by the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors, in communion with the Bishops of the Catholic Church, I confirm that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral. This doctrine is based upon the natural law and upon the written Word of God, is transmitted by the Church's Tradition and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium. No circumstance, no purpose, no law whatsoever can ever make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the Law of God which is written in every human heart, knowable by reason itself, and proclaimed by the Church.” — Saint John Paul II, Evangelium vitae, 25 March 1995, § 62^[89]

Many theologians consider that this formulation meets the criteria of the infallible ordinary and universal Magisterium (cf. Lumen Gentium, § 25). This status, widely taken for granted in Catholic theology, remains discussed among specialists.

The encyclical also stresses shared responsibility: the woman is not the only one involved.

“Responsibility belongs also to those who have encouraged the spread of an attitude of sexual permissiveness and a lack of esteem for motherhood, and to those who should have ensured — and who have a special duty to ensure — effective family and social policies in support of families, especially larger families and those with particular financial and educational needs. Finally, but no less a cause of concern, are the physicians and nurses who place at the service of death skills which were acquired for promoting life. […] A specific kind of moral responsibility belongs to the father of the child, not only when he expressly pressures the woman to have an abortion, but also when he indirectly encourages such a decision by leaving her alone to face the problems of pregnancy.” — Saint John Paul II, Evangelium vitae, § 59^[90]

Forgiveness is possible

The Church's teaching, severe on the act, is of infinite gentleness toward persons. The same encyclical addresses to women who have had abortions a message no public institution has been able to formulate:

“I would now like to say a special word to women who have had an abortion. The Church is aware of the many factors which may have influenced your decision, and she does not doubt that in many cases it was a painful and even shattering decision. The wound in your heart may not yet have healed. Certainly what happened was and remains terribly wrong. But do not give in to discouragement and do not lose hope. Rather, try to understand what happened and face it truthfully. If you have not already done so, give yourselves over with humility and trust to repentance. The Father of mercies is ready to give you his forgiveness and his peace in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. You will come to understand that nothing is definitively lost and you will also be able to ask forgiveness from your child, who is now living in the Lord.” — Saint John Paul II, Evangelium vitae, § 99^[91]

Pope Francis first conceded to all priests, for the sole duration of the Jubilee Year of Mercy, the faculty to absolve the sin of abortion — previously reserved to bishops or specially delegated confessors — (Misericordiae Vultus, 2015), then made it permanent through the apostolic letter Misericordia et Misera (20 November 2016).^[92] The gesture matters: it means no one must ever despair.

The Bible is not silent

Whatever one sometimes reads, the Bible is not mute on prenatal life. Without explicitly naming “abortion” — attested in the ancient Graeco-Roman world, where medical treatises (cf. Soranus of Ephesus, Gynaecology, I) describe abortive procedures, and condemned by ancient Jewish authors (cf. Flavius Josephus, Against Apion, II, 202) — it forcefully affirms that the unborn child is known and loved by God:

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.” — Book of Jeremiah, 1:5^[93]

“For thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise thee, for thou art fearful and wonderful. Wonderful are thy works! Thou knowest me right well; my frame was not hidden from thee, when I was being made in secret, intricately wrought in the depths of the earth.” — Psalm 139:13–15^[94]

“And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb.” — Gospel according to Saint Luke, 1:41^[95]

The Greek word used for John the Baptist in utero, βρέφος (brephos), is exactly the same as the one that will designate Jesus in the manger after his birth (Lk 2:12). For the New Testament, the baby before birth and the baby after birth are designated by the same word, because they are the same being.

What scientific studies say

The French State affirms, through Dr Philippe Faucher on its official website ivg.gouv.fr: “The majority of serious scientific studies published on the subject show that there are no long-term psychological after-effects of abortion.”^[96]

This claim is disputed. Priscilla Coleman's meta-analysis published in 2011 in the British Journal of Psychiatry reviewed 22 studies, 36 outcomes and 877,181 women (including 163,831 who had undergone abortion). Conclusion:

“Women who had undergone an abortion had an 81% increased risk of mental health problems compared to women who had not had an abortion. Nearly 10% of mental health problems in women who had aborted could be attributed to this act.” — Priscilla K. Coleman, “Abortion and mental health: quantitative synthesis and analysis of research published 1995–2009”, British Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 199, 2011, p. 180–186^[97]

But this meta-analysis is contested on methodological grounds: sixteen researchers called for its retraction in 2022 for serious flaws, and the expert committee mandated by the journal recommended its withdrawal, which the journal refused (cf. BMJ, July 2023).^[98] Conversely, other systematic reviews — notably the one commissioned in 2011 by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges — conclude that it is the unwanted pregnancy itself, whether it ends in abortion or birth, that is associated with the risk to mental health.^[99] The question therefore remains debated in the scientific literature: a statistical association, in one direction as in the other, does not suffice to establish causation — a caution researchers on both sides acknowledge.

The symptoms reported by these clinicians — a reported association, with no established causation, as with the studies cited above — include, according to Dr Vincent Rue in the United States and Prof. René Ecochard at Lyon University Hospital: depression, suicidal thoughts, relationship breakdowns, drug use, alcohol abuse, sexual disorders, phobias, psychogenic sterility, eating disorders.^{[100] [101]} The Finnish register study conducted by Mika Gissler and published in 1996 in the British Medical Journal — covering all deaths of Finnish women between 1987 and 1994 — observed a statistical association (which does not suffice to establish causation): a suicide rate about three times higher among women who had undergone abortion than the general rate, and about six times higher than the rate observed after live birth.^[102]

Testimonies: those voices one never listens to

And then there are the voices themselves: women who, after having been on the side of abortion, publicly switched camps — and whom one almost never hears. Two nominative journeys, published under their names and verifiable: that of Norma McCorvey (1947–2017), the “Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade (1973), who became a pro-life activist and author of published memoirs^[103]; that of Abby Johnson, director of a Planned Parenthood centre for eight years, who resigned in 2009 and recounts her journey in her published memoirs^[104]. These individual stories do not have the value of statistical proof: they show only that turnarounds exist, even among former figures of the opposing camp.

The role of family planning

The best-documented case is nominative, published and verifiable: Abby Johnson, director of the Planned Parenthood centre in Bryan (Texas) for eight years, states she came under strong institutional pressure to increase her centre's number of abortions in order to raise its revenues. She resigned in October 2009 after witnessing an ultrasound-guided abortion, and recounted her journey in her published memoirs.^[105]

Abortion survivors

There are abortion survivors: children who survived the procedure. The best-attested nominative case is that of Melissa Ohden: born in 1977 after the failure of a saline-injection abortion in a Sioux City hospital, taken in charge by two nurses, she founded the Abortion Survivors Network and testified under oath before the United States Congress (House Judiciary Committee, September 2015).^[106]

Beyond this documented case, the best-documented file is that of the American nurse Jill Stanek, who testified before the United States Congress as early as 2000: she recounts finding living newborns in the waste room of a Chicago hospital — left to die after a failed abortion.^[107] Her testimony contributed to the promulgation of the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act (2002) under George W. Bush. The logic of abortion, pushed to its conclusion, leads to situations that even pro-choice legislators struggle to defend.

Catholic teaching does not boil down to a refusal. It opens a culture of life that demands as much of men, of society and of welcoming structures as of women themselves. The doctrine refuses to choose between the child and the mother: it asks that one be protected without abandoning the other.

The father's responsibility

Saint John Paul II writes it with a clarity few civil institutions have taken up: “A specific kind of moral responsibility belongs to the father of the child, not only when he expressly pressures the woman to have an abortion, but also when he indirectly encourages such a decision by leaving her alone to face the problems of pregnancy.”^[108] Many abortions are not the “choice” of a free woman, but the consequence of a man who slipped away.

Social responsibility

A society that contents itself with proclaiming “choice” without offering housing, financial support, childcare help, or suitable accompaniment for isolated mothers, organizes the conditions for abortion more than it relieves them. Defending life presupposes concrete networks of welcome: associations such as Mère de Miséricorde, La Vie est un Don, Tom Pousse, foundations specializing in aid to pregnant women in distress, rapid-adoption structures for those who cannot raise their child.

Listening after the wound

For women who have had abortions, the Church offers structured paths of healing: Rachel's Vineyard retreats, Mère de Miséricorde accompaniment, sacramental confession. Mother Teresa, receiving in Calcutta women broken by this wound, told them:

“If you hear of a woman who does not want to keep her child, who wants to have an abortion, try to convince her to bring him to me. I will love him, seeing in him the sign of God's love.” — Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Oslo, 11 December 1979^[109]

Abortion is one of the places where Catholic doctrine most frontally contradicts contemporary culture. But this contradiction rests on a single conviction, defensible even apart from any faith: the weakest does not lose dignity for being small, dependent, unwanted or invisible.

Refusing abortion is not despising women. It is, on the contrary, refusing that society impose on them, as the sole answer to their distress, the death of their own child. It is demanding that men take responsibility, that families accompany, that States protect. Defending life is not reactionary rhetoric: it is the coherent application, down to the smallest, of the principle on which our civilization was built — “everyone has the right to life”.

A truly human world does not ask a mother to eliminate her child in order to survive. It helps her not to be alone.

• What should we think of euthanasia? — the other great fight for the protection of vulnerable life.
• Evil and suffering — why distress does not remove dignity.
• The soul immediately created by God — theological foundation: it is at conception that the spiritual soul is infused.
• Why Catholicism is the true religion — general moral framework.

For further reading, recommended: Matthieu Lavagna, La Raison est pro-vie — Arguments non-religieux pour un débat dépassionné, published in 2024 (the work from which this article takes its non-religious argumentative structure, referring to its primary sources).