#H. Paul Santmire

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Every Unfertilized Egg In The Body Of A Nun: Sanctity of Life, Abortion, Personhood, Murder, Blessings & Curses

“What is the moral question regarding abortion? Some people say that the fetus is alive and that, therefore, killing it is wrong. Since mosquitoes, bacteria, apes and whales are also alive, the argument is less than clear. Even plants are alive. I am not impressed by the rebuttal, “But plants, mosquitoes, bacteria and whales are not human, and the fetus is.” For the issue now becomes, in what sense is the fetus human? No one denies that its origin is human, as is its possible destiny, but the same is true of every unfertilized egg in the body of a nun.” – Charles Hartshorne

In the wake of multiple US states passing or considering hardline anti-abortion bills, many of which were pushed by high-profile conservative evangelical Christian activist, Janet Porter, I felt compelled to reflect on this issue a bit.

First I should preface by saying that I’ve never been super vocal about abortion as a political issue, mostly because as a man I’ve never felt it was my place to preach to women I don’t know about one of the most important medical decisions they may ever make in their life; it always seemed obvious to me that the decision to have an abortion or not should essentially come down to the woman involved, and perhaps her loved ones and doctor. This position of mine has always put me on the left side of things politically (supporting a women’s right to choose what to do with her body) when it comes to the political issue of abortion.

This being said, I’m still always reticent to offer my opinion on matters like these as if my hot take needs to be heard (it doesn’t, I realize that), BUT a) this is my blog and that’s what personal blogs are for (for writing thoughts down), and b) I’m particularly interested in the theological and philosophical aspects of this debate, particularly the white conservative Christian theological/philosophical justifications for being so vehemently anti-abortion.

Although I’m sure I won’t exhaustively cover all conservative Christian views on this topic, I do feel comfortable in saying that, in general, the conservative Christian’s (Protestants and Catholics alike) take on this topic is pretty straight forward: they believe in the “sanctity of life”; they believe babies are God-given miracles and insist that life begins at conception, therefore ending that life is an act of murder. Conservative Christians view humans as being very special and unique; God’s glorious creations, created a little lower than the angels. We’re precious persons, more precious than other life on Earth, in fact, mostly because humans are made in the very image of God.

So when conservative Christians are out there protesting against abortion, here are the main things they say compel them to take action:

The sanctity of life

Special status of humans

Murder and personhood

Babies as blessings

Let’s go through each one, shall we?

SANCTITY OF LIFE Conservative Christians love life! It is indeed holy! It begins at conception they say, and to kill a blastocyst (let alone an embryo or fetus) is the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another; murder! I personally think loving life and treating it as holy and sanctified is a good position to take; I really do. I’m all for embracing all living things in general (except maybe ticks and mosquitos…); I enjoy life forms of all types! ‘Let life flourish,’ I say! I’m pro-life in this sense. Seriously, I am. I’m not a super big fan of killing things; my personality is such that I tend to be pretty sensitive and do lean toward harmonization, and I’ve publicly expressed my anti-violent views on killing humans as a way to solve problems; it’s a solution I’ve personally taken off the table.

However…

It is undeniably clear (to me at least) that the evolution of complex life on our planet depends in large part on differential death, and that both death and harm play a role in the dynamic of the living. So at some point in our lives, if we are to be mature and honest with ourselves, it seems like we must admit that philosopher Dominique Lestel has a point when he suggests that we should “openly acknowledge that life, even if we cannot place a price on it, is certainly not without its costs.” Life can be defined many ways by many different people, and it can be said to consist of many, many different things, but one thing we can say about life with near certainty (along with Whitehead) is that it is indeed **robbery**. Sadly, the world in which we live seems to require something to die in order for something else to live.

I present this naturalistic perspective on life not out of a sadistic motive to justify or normalize deplorable acts of killing. I bring this perspective up because if life is sanctified and holy this ultimately must mean that death is sanctified as well since both birth and death are natural parts of life. I’ll talk more about this below when I reflect on murder and personhood.

THE SPECIAL STATUS OF HUMANS Now conservative Christians might yell “hold on there, bucko!” and attempt to clarify what they mean by “sanctity of life” at this point by perhaps quoting (predictably so) Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” (ESV)

As we can see, it’s not all of life on Earth that’s holy, it’s only human life that’s holy because humans are of course imago dei, image bearers of God. Focus on the Family is very clear on this:

“To be created in the likeness of God means that each human bears His image and with it, a value beyond our unique characteristics or individual attributes. Nothing else in God’s created order has the distinction of reflecting His image; it’s a privileged status reserved only for humankind.”

This is why it’s such a travesty to destroy a human life for conservative Christians because it’s kind of like destroying a little bit of God I suppose… And listen, personally speaking, I don’t disagree. I do think of humans as being imago dei, humans are very special and unique creatures. We are! But looking back at my spiritual trajectory, a big part of why I now call myself a religious naturalist and a Christian panentheist is because of this dangerous and idolatrous anthropocentric view of the natural world, the one that positions humans at the top with dominion over creation. Due in large part to pernicious interpretations of the Genesis verse cited above, it is unmistakably clear to me that the overemphasis on anthropocentrism in Western Christian theology has given humans permission to exploit nature as nature has no reason to exist other than to serve humans.

A helpful voice on this subject for me has been eco-theologian, H. Paul Santmire, and in particular his book The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology, which undertakes a pretty intense survey of the history of the concept of nature in Western Christian thought. Santmire’s book uncovers (to no surprise) very diverse attitudes within the Christian tradition with regard to nature. Some of the key Christian thinkers Santmire examines include Irenaeus, Origen, Augustine, Aquainas, Bonaventure, Dante, St. Francis of Assisi, Luther, Calvin, Barth, and Teilhard de Chardin. Santrimire is ultimately able to discern two motifs regarding humans and nature that are evident throughout Christian thought: the “spiritual motif” and the “ecological motif.” The spiritual motif describes the flavor of Christianity that is ambivalent at best to creation and hostile at worst. Santmire writes that the spiritual motif is “predicated on a vision of the human spirit rising above nature in order to ascend to a supramundane communion with God…” Santmire describes some characteristics of this spiritual motif as including a belief that God is a being separate from or transcendent to the world, who chooses to intervene in its affairs at will. Furthermore, this spiritual motif expresses a fundamental theological bias towards only those beings considered rational, spiritual, or moral. This bias thus excludes nonhuman life and the material world from its purview of concern. Santmire quotes a well-known phrase from Augustine’s Soliloquies as a basic expression of this motif: “I desire to have knowledge of God and the soul. Of nothing else? No, of nothing else whatsoever.” Ultimately, nature is affirmed as a “good” only in its ability to embody spirit, which is the final measure and end of all theological inquiry for the spiritual motif.

So back to my personal trajectory. It’s not that I’ve stopped considering humans as being special and unique and imago dei, it’s that I’ve just broadened my scope of concern. By emphasizing not God’s separateness but God’s inextricable entanglement with the world ALL things become holy and unique and special. I’m not downgrading human status here, I’m upgrading everything else! “Everyone gets a car!” as Oprah might say.

MURDER AND PERSONHOOD Let it be known, first and foremost, that I am not a fan of murder. I’ll mention again here that I’m on the record as being a Christian anti-violent resister of evil (a position I’m willing to bet many conservative Christians wouldn’t hold to). Now, to continue, we’ve established that death is a natural part of life but we haven’t bothered to distinguish between various types of death. Murder is a type of death that has very negative historical connotations; most human societies consider murder to be an extremely serious crime (rightly so) and, therefore, believe that the person charged with murder should receive harsh punishment in return.

It’s always nice to be on the same page so let’s talk about what murder is: murder is basically the unlawful, premeditated killing of a human by another human. State of mind is usually also a consideration when distinguishing murder from other types of killing (like manslaughter) and, typically, malice aforethought is associated with acts of murder. My understanding, according to how things are generally defined legally with regard to victims of murder, is that only humans can be murdered; i.e. one cannot murder a corpse, a corporation, a non-human animal or any other non-human organism such as a plant or bacterium. This legal clarification is an important one for our discussion because it really does seem to indicate that the issue of personhood plays a large role in debates about abortion.

So what makes a person a person?

This is a really tricky question for me because I do consider the concept of “nephesh,” or psyche, to be synonymous with “personhood.” And since I’m a special type of panpsychist that posits all things (including protons, neutrons and electrons etc.) have a certain degree of mentality or a psychic component I personally consider all things to be persons. Some philosophers, however, like to ascribe personhood only to those entities/agents who can perform various actions, like complex reasoning or plan formulation, etc… other philosophers, like Charles Taylor for instance, proposes a significance-based view of personhood:

“What is crucial about agents is that things matter to them. We thus cannot simply identify agents by a performance criterion, nor assimilate animals to machines… [likewise] there are matters of significance for human beings which are peculiarly human, and have no analogue with animals.”

For me, personally, distinguishing what makes humans unique from other creatures is a fun topic to think about but, again, because of my spiritual panpsychist commitments, the concept of personhood applies to all things (not just humans) and the discussion of what makes humans unique from other creatures becomes a separate, fun conversation in and of itself for another time.

But just for kicks let’s keep going and work our way to the question (that, as we’ve established, has some dubious assumptions) of when personhood begins.

We’ll start small. Multicellular organisms can loosely be divided into two categories: one type establishes order among cells through their internalized patterns of action and their individual relationships. This type of multi-cellular organism usually doesn’t move much (plants, trees etc…). The other type has the previous type of order, but also has a centralized source of order. A unifying experience emerges out of the experiences of the cells in some part of the organism; this requires a central nervous system and a brain. (Now keep in mind, these categories are loose approximations. There are, of course, always disputable instances to be found).

So when does personhood begin?

As I indicated above, I think it should be made clear that the understanding of “personhood” or “psyche” or “soul” (I’m using these terms interchangeably here, in case you didn’t notice) should not be considered unique to human beings because psyches/souls commonly appear in the animal kingdom. And, on top of that, every living cell has value in and of itself and for God, and therefore, should be respected and valued by humans.

Some conservative Christians (and some Christians who aren’t conservative), I anticipate, might have an issue with how I’m conflating soul and psyche. They may say that it’s actually the everlasting eternal soul that makes humans special and unique. I’ve written about my view of the soul before and don’t want to rehash it here, but just briefly: I simply DO NOT believe in the idea of the soul as some sort of supernatural, ontological reality which is distinct, but yet somehow related to the body in some way, and which is a “substantive substance endowed with reason,” as Augustine says. And I honestly don’t think that when most people talk about the soul in this abstract way that they actually believe this bullshit either. I think that most contemporary people do what I do when they talk about the soul: they conflate the highly developed self-conscious experience found in humans with “the soul.”

All that being said, then, since we’re talking about humans in particular here, from a process-emergent perspective it could be argued that the human psyche/soul doesn’t become uniquely human until it starts doing uniquely symbolic human things, which hardly starts before language develops. This is Charles Hartshorne’s point above, and although I don’t necessarily agree with Hartshorne’s weird rational contributionism with regard to value, personhood, and abortion, his point about the difference between potentiality and actuality is a good one to consider I think. Having potential is an indefinite state, while actuality is identifiable, ascertainable, and functional.

So, if we say that personhood involves the formation of the “psyche/soul,” then, to quote process philosopher, John Cobb, the term “can be applied when there is a succession of unifying occasions each of which derives extensively from its predecessors and contributes extensively to its successors. Of course, each also derives from cellular occasions and contributes to them. The relative importance is always a matter of degree. Hence there is no one point at which the “soul” or “person” comes into being.” It’s for this reason that human beings would better be described as human becomings.

Now, we can go in at least two directions here with regard to murder and personhood and look at the implications:

1) If we accept my spiritual, animistic, panpsychist definition of personhood, where non-human animals, insects, plants, germs, bacteria, etc. have personhood status, it turns out that we are maliciously murdering people all of the freaking time (and make no mistake, we have been consciously murdering our planet for quite a while and, from my perspective, this is no less of a travesty; I mean, we are indeed killing God and ourselves).

or

2) If we accept the more process-emergent understanding of personhood, the one where personhood is still universal but human personhood becomes unique at a certain point, then there is good reason to believe that human persons don’t become uniquely human until they start doing uniquely human things.

Either way, I think both options here helpfully subvert our wicked and myopic anthropocentrism, forcing us to see a larger picture, as well as humble us by directly implicating us and getting our hands dirty (so to speak) in life’s cycles of not only birth but death as well. The truth is that we are constantly killing each other, and although this must be accepted, it is never not sad.

Additionally, with regard to murder and abortion, I’m pretty sure when conservative Christians claim that ending the life of a blastocyst, embryo or fetus is murder (a moral wrong) they’re being hyperbolic. As we’ve established, no reasonable person would debate that some type of killing is going on when a blastocyst, embryo or fetus is terminated, but again, as our definition of murder states, malice aforethought is typically associated with **murder** and helps to distinguish it from other types of killing. Malice aforethought implies that the murderer has hateful, bitter, resentful feelings toward the one who is being murdered. I cannot be convinced that a woman who has an abortion, for whatever reason, can have malice aforethought associated with her state of mind. I simply can’t. In fact I’d be willing to bet that the state of mind most women have during abortions resembles some type of frantic, stressful anguish and/or heartache, not malice aforethought.

With regard to this moral dimension being discussed, I resonate quite a bit with Christian ethicist, Rebecca Todd Peters, when she builds on the reproductive justice ethic of black womanist activists by indicating that “The problem that we face in this country is our failure to trust women to act as rational, capable, responsible moral agents.” Peters rightly (imo) points out that when it comes to abortion in the U.S. we operate in a “justification framework” where women are continually asked to justify their abortions in response to a default assumption that abortion is morally wrong. As I’ve shown throughout this post, it’s hard to consider death as being a moral wrong since it is a natural part of life, and the only way to make abortion a moral wrong is by claiming it is murder. I do, however, think women can be trusted to act as rational, capable, responsible moral agents and make their own choices when it comes to reproduction and the moral status of the blastocyst, embryo or fetus.

Much more to be said here but I’ll move on.

BABIES AND BLESSINGS If someone asked me if my kids were blessings I would say yes without hesitation. Babies can indeed be wonderful gifts and they can bring much joy. Tiny infant baby humans rank pretty high for me as far as creatures on this planet that I would never, ever, ever want to harm (along with kittens); they’re so freaking cute! But here is the thing about blessings and curses: how we understand blessings and curses really does speak to and depend on our understanding of God, doesn’t it? I mean if all babies are blessings from God then what are we to think about couples who are unable to have children? Or what about couples who have children but lose them prematurely? Are they cursed in the same way the Deuteronomist insists Israel will be cursed if they “fail to observe faithfully all the terms of this Teaching” (Deut. 28:58)? Have childless couples offended God in some way? I refuse to believe that this is the case.

The underlying issue here is the problem of evil. The simplistic, parochial way that most conservative Christian’s talk about God’s blessings and curses paints a picture of an all-powerful, capricious God that is inconsistent at best with the blessings and curses God bestows; we all know good things (blessings) happen to bad people and bad things (curses) far too often happen to good people. Nevertheless, in the conservative Christian’s imagination whatever happens is simply God’s will.

I have zero doubt that this was a comforting thought to ancient people who were frightened by the notion of a random universe, with nobody in charge. But with God in control, even the most unspeakable tragedy could be re-branded: nothing that happens is actually bad. A family living in poverty who can barely support their 4 children who unexpectedly become pregnant with number 5 is not cursed, they are blessed, even if it doesn’t appear to be this way at the moment. Likewise, a woman who is raped and becomes pregnant is not cursed, she is blessed with a baby for crying out loud! Look on the bright side! This type of theology only leads to blaming victims for their own fate.

Perhaps not surprisingly, as a process-relational religious naturalist I view blessings and curses in the bible as a) mostly having to do with the human relationship to the natural world and, to a lesser extent b) perhaps something used by God as a lure that prompts someone or a group of someones to pursue a worthy end. Now with regard to the first type of blessings/curses, my understanding of the kind of blessings found in Deuteronomy 26:3, for instance, are as as close as the Torah comes to a vision of sacred social order. Likewise, when the Bible depicts wrongs piled up on top of one another, as in Deut. 28:17-18, this speaks more than anything to the consequences of humans being in discord with nature. To use climate change as good example again, we humans are indeed out of balance with the natural world and God is cursing us; there will be lots of death and punishment and we (along with our children and our children’s children) will suffer the consequences our sins.

Ultimately, as I have already said and will say again, I generally view my kids to be amazing gifts. I really do. They’re beautiful, absolutely beautiful. But beauty is not always good, however, in fact it is really never only good. Steve Odin, in his great book, says that “since all beauty perishes as soon as it becomes, all beauty is tragic beauty.” In our temporal existence as humans we experience both the joy of beauty arising through the creative process and the inevitable destructive loss of that beauty. Parenthood is an adventure that opens the door to such glorious, blissful moments that I seriously cannot describe them with any great justice. At its best, parenthood is as close to Heaven as it gets, in my opinion. In the same breath we must admit that that which makes greater enjoyment possible also makes greater suffering possible. This is true with parenting as well. The risk and subsequent anxiety involved in becoming a parent is (for lack of a better word) staggering. And perhaps this may be one of the issues lying at the root of the abortion debate: the potential symbolized in the new life embodied by the birth of a baby is glorious (it really is!), and when this glorious potential is viewed from the one-sided perspective that sees intense beauty as being not intrinsically bound up with tragedy it makes issues like this appear all too simple.

I guess just to sum up my positions here which I’ve tried to flesh out (although not very well) in this post:

Life is sacred, yes, but because birth and death are both parts of life, death is just as sacred and sanctified as birth

I take an animistic, panexperientialist stance that says all things are persons, so, therefore, while humans are unique, and special, and definitely different than other creatures they’re not necessarily better or more valuable than other life forms (I know as a particular species our tendency is to look out for our own kind but broadening our scope of concern isn’t a bad thing)

While death is indeed sacred and a natural part of life, murder is still murder and it is reprehensible. But murder is different than other forms of killing, it is a moral wrong

We can indeed trust women (more-so than men I would say!) to act as rational, capable, responsible moral agents when it comes to reproduction and the moral status of the blastocyst, embryo or fetus

Saying something is a “blessing” necessary implies that there are consequences which come along with it, i.e. blessings are more complicated and multifaceted than they may appear

Every Unfertilized Egg In The Body Of A Nun: Sanctity of Life, Abortion, Personhood, Murder, Blessings & Curses was originally published on TURRI