Recently I have noticed a tendency to debate wether a fetus has a soul.
What are your opinions?
What are your opinions?
Does a fetus have a soul
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I myself have had a miscarriage, and I believe this babies soul is in heaven. I also believe that a fetus has a soul, and this is why I think abortion is wrong on a spiritual level. Modern psychology has also done some studies on what goes on in the womb with a fetus.Sp0ck said:
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If a fetus doesn't have a soul, then when would the fetus recieve it?
Upon leaving the womb or right before it leaves?
I find it saddening that this is actually an issue. A fetus is the beginning of a human being. It's LIFE! Don't you think God knows whats, what? Of course he does. There is a reason for what happens, though we may not know or understand, God does know and had it planned!
That's all I got to say about that...
Go in peace with Christ as your guide.
Tarnaak
Upon leaving the womb or right before it leaves?
I find it saddening that this is actually an issue. A fetus is the beginning of a human being. It's LIFE! Don't you think God knows whats, what? Of course he does. There is a reason for what happens, though we may not know or understand, God does know and had it planned!
That's all I got to say about that...
Go in peace with Christ as your guide.
Tarnaak
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"I find it saddening that this is actually an issue. A fetus is the beginning of a human being. It's LIFE!"
I agree that it is what God made it and since we have no real interaction with it, it was in God's plan and that's all that matters. This is what I meant by my former statement. It really doesn't matter at which point it was formed, how many cells it has, or....
I agree that it is what God made it and since we have no real interaction with it, it was in God's plan and that's all that matters. This is what I meant by my former statement. It really doesn't matter at which point it was formed, how many cells it has, or....
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I also find this saddening, but in another forum some indivduals began to debate this after a woman had a miscarriage, and asked for advice. The topic was rightly directed to a debate area. I mean not to offend, but was shocked to witness the disregard for the woman's feelings. So, I have decided to present the "science" side of the issue to those who believe a miscarried fetus has no soul, and encouragement to those who have lost children in this manner.Tarnaak said:
www.psychologytoday.com select "key words" type fetus and click on article entitled fetal psychology.
FETAL PSYCHOLOGY
By Hopson, Janet L. -- Publication Date: Sep/Oct 98
The scene never fails to give goose bumps: the baby, just seconds old and still dewy from the womb, is lifted into the arms of its exhausted but blissful parents. They gaze adoringly as their new child stretches and squirms, scrunches its mouth and opens its eyes. To anyone watching this tender vignette, the message is unmistakable. Birth is the beginning of it all, ground zero, the moment from which the clock starts ticking.
Not so, declares Janet DiPietro. Birth may be a grand occasion, says the Johns Hopkins University psychologist, but "it is a trivial event in development. Nothing neurologically interesting happens."
Armed with highly sensitive and sophisticated monitoring gear, DiPietro and other researchers today are discovering that the real action starts weeks earlier. At 32 weeks of gestation--two months before a baby is considered fully prepared for the world, or "at term" --a fetus is behaving almost exactly as a newborn. And it continues to do so for the next 12 weeks.
As if overturning the common conception of infancy weren't enough, scientists are creating a startling new picture of intelligent life in the womb. Among the revelations:
o By nine weeks, a developing fetus can hiccup and react to loud noises. By the end of the second trimester it can hear.
o Just as adults do, the fetus experiences the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep of dreams.
o The fetus savors its mother's meals, first picking up the food tastes of a culture in the womb.
o Among other mental feats, the fetus can distinguish between the voice of Mom and that of a stranger, and respond to a familiar story read to it.
o Even a premature baby is aware, feels, responds, and adapts to its environment.
o Just because the fetus is responsive to certain stimuli doesn't mean that it should be the target of efforts to enhance development. Sensory stimulation of the fetus can in fact lead to bizarre patterns of adaptation later on.
The roots of human behavior, researchers now know, begin to develop early--just weeks after conception, in fact. Well before a woman typically knows she is pregnant, her embryo's brain has already begun to bulge. By five weeks, the organ that looks like a lumpy inchworm has already embarked on the most spectacular feat of human development: the creation of the deeply creased and convoluted cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that will eventually allow the growing person to move, think, speak, plan, and create in a human way.
At nine weeks, the embryo's ballooning brain allows it to bend its body, hiccup, and react to loud sounds. At week ten, it moves its arms, "breathes" amniotic fluid in and out, opens its jaw, and stretches. Before the first trimester is over, it yawns, sucks, :and swallows as well as feels and smells. By the end of the second trimester, it can hear; toward the end of pregnancy, it can see.
FETAL ALERTNESS
Scientists who follow the fetus' daily life find that it spends most of its time not exercising these new abilities but sleeping. At 32 weeks, it drowses 90 to 95% of the day. Some of these hours are spent in deep sleep, some in REM sleep, and some in an indeterminate state, a product of the fetus' immature brain that is different from sleep in a baby, child, or adult. During REM sleep, the fetus' eyes move back and forth just as an adult's eyes do, and many researchers believe that it is dreaming. DiPietro speculates that fetuses dream about what they know--the sensations they feel in the womb.
Closer to birth, the fetus sleeps 85 or 90% of the time the same as a newborn. Between its frequent naps, the fetus seems to have "something like an awake alert period,' according to developmental psychologist William Filer, Ph.D., who with his Columbia University colleagues is monitoring these sleep and wakefulness cycles in order to identify patterns of normal and abnormal brain development, including potential predictors of sudden infant death syndrome. Says Filer, "We are, in effect, asking the fetus: 'Are you paying attention? Is your nervous system behaving in the appropriate way?"
FETAL MOVEMENT
Awake or asleep, the human fetus moves 50 times or more each hour, flexing and extending its body, moving its head, face, and limbs and exploring its warm wet compartment by touch. Heidelise Als, Ph.D., a developmental psychologist at Harvard Medical School, is fascinated by the amount of tactile stimulation a fetus gives itself. "It touches a hand to the face, one hand to the other hand, clasps its feet, touches its foot to its leg, its hand to its umbilical cord," she reports.
Als believes there is a mismatch between the environment given to preemies in hospitals and the environment they would have had in the womb. She has been working for years to change the care given to preemies so that they can curl up, bring their knees together, and touch things with their hands as they would have for weeks in the womb.
Along with such common movements, DiPietro has also noted some odder fetal activities, including "licking the uterine wall and literally walking around the womb by pushing off with its feet." Laterborns may have more room in the womb for such maneuvers than first babies. After the initial pregnancy, a woman's uterus is bigger and the umbilical cord longer, allowing more freedom of movement. "Second and subsequent children may develop more motor experience in utero and so may become more active infants," DiPietro speculates.
Fetuses react sharply to their mother's actions. "When we're watching the fetus on ultrasound and the mother starts to laugh, we can see the fetus, floating upside down in the womb, bounce up and down on its head, bum-bum-bum, like it's bouncing on a trampoline," says DiPietro. "When mothers watch this on the screen, they laugh harder, and the fetus goes up and down even faster. We've wondered whether this is why people grow up liking roller coasters."
FETAL HEARING
Whether or not a fetus can taste, there's little question that it can hear. A very premature baby entering the world at 24 or 25 weeks responds to the sounds around it, observes Als, so its auditory apparatus must already have been functioning in the womb. Many pregnant women report a fetal jerk or sudden kick just after a door slams or a car backfires.
Even without such intrusions, the womb is not a silent place. Researchers who have inserted a hydrophone into the uterus of a pregnant woman have picked up a noise level "akin to the background noise in an apartment," according to DiPietro. Sounds include the whooshing of blood in the mother's vessels, the gurgling and rumbling of her stomach and intestines, as well as the tones of her voice filtered through tissues, bones, and fluid, and the voices of other people coming through the amniotic wall. Fifer has found that fetal heart rate slows when the mother is speaking, suggesting that the fetus not only hears and recognizes the sound, but is calmed by it.
FETAL VISION
Vision is the last sense to develop. A very premature infant can see light and shape; researchers presume that a fetus has the same ability Just as the womb isn't completely quiet, it isn't utterly dark, either. Says Filer: "There may be just enough visual stimulation filtered through the mother's tissues that a fetus can respond when the mother is in bright light," such as when she is sunbathing.
Japanese scientists have even reported a distinct fetal reaction to flashes of light shined on the mother's belly However, other researchers warn that exposing fetuses (or premature infants) to bright light before they are ready can be dangerous. In fact, Harvard's Als believes that retinal damage in premature infants, which has long been ascribed to high concentrations of oxygen, may actually be due to overexposure to light at the wrong time in development.
A six-month fetus, born about 14 weeks too early, has a brain that is neither prepared for nor expecting signals from the eyes to be transmitted into the brain's visual cortex, and from there into the executive-branch frontal lobes, where information is integrated. When the fetus is forced to see too much too soon, says Als, the accelerated stimulation may lead to aberrations of brain development.
FETAL LEARNING
Along with the ability to feel, see, and hear comes the capacity to learn and remember. These activities can be rudimentary, automatic, even biochemical. For example, a fetus, after an initial reaction of alarm, eventually stops responding to a repeated loud noise. The fetus displays the same kind of primitive learning, known as habituation, in response to its mother's voice, Fifer has found.
But the fetus has shown itself capable of far more. In the 1980s, psychology professor Anthony James DeCasper, Ph.D., and colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, devised a feeding contraption that allows a baby to suck faster to hear one set of sounds through headphones and to suck slower to hear a different set. With this technique, DeCasper discovered that within hours of birth, a baby already prefers its mother's voice to a stranger's, suggesting it must have learned and remembered the voice, albeit not necessarily consciously, ft6.m its last months in the womb. More recently, he's found that a newborn prefers a story read to it repeatedly in the womb--in this case, The Cat in the Hat-over a new story introduced soon after birth.
DeCasper and others have uncovered more mental feats. Newborns can not only distinguish their mother from a stranger speaking, but would rather hear Mom's voice, especially the way it sounds filtered through amniotic fluid rather than through air. They're xenophobes, too: they prefer to hear Mom speaking in her native language than to hear her or someone else speaking in a foreign tongue.
By monitoring changes in fetal heart rate, psychologist JeanPierre Lecanuet, Ph.D., and his colleagues in Paris have found that fetuses can even tell strangers' voices apart. They also seem to like certain stories more than others. The fetal heartbeat will slow down when a familiar French fairy tale such as "La Poulette" ("The Chick") or "Le Petit Crapaud" ("The Little Toad"), is read near the mother's belly When the same reader delivers another unfamiliar story, the fetal heartbeat stays steady
The fetus is likely responding to the cadence of voices and stories, not their actual words, observes Fifer, but the conclusion is the same: the fetus can listen, learn, and remember at some level, and, as with most babies and children, it likes the comfort and reassurance of the familiar.
FETAL PERSONALITY
It's no secret that babies are born with distinct differences and patterns of activity that suggest individual temperament. Just when and how the behavioral traits originate in the womb is now the subject of intense scrutiny.
In the first formal study of fetal temperament in 1996, DiPietro and her colleagues recorded the heart rate and movements of 31 fetuses six times before birth and compared them to readings taken twice after birth. (They've since extended their study to include 100 more fetuses.) Their findings: fetuses that are very active in the womb tend to be more irritable infants. Those with irregular sleep/wake patterns in the womb sleep more poorly as young infants. And fetuses with high heart rates become unpredictable, inactive babies.
"Behavior doesn't begin at birth," declares DiPietro. "It begins before and develops in predictable ways." One of the most important influences on development is the fetal environment. As Harvard's Als observes, "The fetus gets an enormous amount of 'hormonal bathing' through the mother, so its chronobiological rhythms are influenced by the mother's sleep/wake cycles, her eating patterns, her movements."
The hormones a mother puts out in response to stress also appear critical. DiPietro finds that highly pressured mothers-to-be tend to have more active fetuses--and more irritable infants. "The most stressed are working pregnant women," says DiPietro. "These days, women tend to work up to the day they deliver, even though the implications for pregnancy aren't entirely clear yet. That's our cultural norm, but I think it's insane."
Als agrees that working can be an enormous stress, but emphasizes that pregnancy hormones help to buffer both mother and fetus. Individual reactions to stress also matter. "The pregnant woman who chooses to work is a different woman already from the one who chooses not to work," she explains.
She's also different from the woman who has no choice but to work. DiPietro's studies show that the fetuses of poor women are distinct neurobehaviorally-less active, with a less variable heart rate--from the fetuses of middle-class women. Yet "poor women rate themselves as less stressed than do working middle-class women," she notes. DiPietro suspects that inadequate nutrition and exposure to pollutants may significantly affect the fetuses of poor women.
Stress, diet, and toxins may combine to have a harmful effect on intelligence. A recent study by biostatistician Bernie Devlin, Ph.D., of the University of Pittsburgh, suggests that genes may have less impact on IQ than previously thought and that the environment of the womb may account for much more. "Our old notion of nature influencing the fetus before birth and nurture after birth needs an update," DiPietro insists. "There is an antenatal environment, too, that is provided by the mother."
This article also includes the position of the scientists on abortion, but I had to delete this for the length. Also the part on fetal taste, and some commentary from fetal personality for the same reason.
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I believe it does, just because it is dependant on its mother does not make it any less human.
"Life begets life, the body is made for the soul."
"Life begets life, the body is made for the soul."
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The same as we are dependent on our Father in Heaven for life.
The funny thing is that if you dug up the ground and showed someone a pine nut that was sprouting and asked them what it is, they would say a pine tree. Well, it isnt out of the ground yet so how can that be? Obviously this is the right answer as a pine tree is what it is regardless of size but then they argue wether this same logic applies to a human being. I guess the desire to be right in murdering their own child will bring people to some very stupid conclusions.
The funny thing is that if you dug up the ground and showed someone a pine nut that was sprouting and asked them what it is, they would say a pine tree. Well, it isnt out of the ground yet so how can that be? Obviously this is the right answer as a pine tree is what it is regardless of size but then they argue wether this same logic applies to a human being. I guess the desire to be right in murdering their own child will bring people to some very stupid conclusions.
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The foetus, is a becoming humain, so I think he have a soul, since the begining.
He is also calling to become a child of god.
He is also calling to become a child of god.
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"Awake or asleep, the human fetus moves 50 times or more each hour"
That's more than my stinky cat moves all day!
That's more than my stinky cat moves all day!
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I would go so far as to call the zygote at the moment of conception totally human with a soul.
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If all living persons/humans are sinners deserving spiritual death/separation from God, and a fetus is a living person/human, does that make the fetus a sinner? (it sounds stupid, I know) If you classify a fetus as a living human being--doesn't the bible say living human beings are sinners deserving of death? With there being no 'age of accountability' in the bible (as that is just an assumed doctrine of the church), do we just account for "younger sinners" going to heaven (if they die at a young age) because we can't possibly conceive of them going to hell? This post may be better in another area...but I thought it may go with the topic.
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No I do not think a fetus is a sinner. They are innocent. They do not conceptualize consequences for their actions. They are also innocent in the aspect that they cannot make choices. The parent makes the choices. God does not punish a child for the sins of a parent. Accepting Christ in one's life is a personal choice. Therefore a fetus is not guilty. Neither is a fetus aware of the word of God.StandingRoomOnly said:
Yes humans are sinners deserving of death. IMHO I believe those that are innocent of the word of God (disculding those who refuse the word) go to heaven. I also believe those who cannot make conscience choices go to heaven.StandingRoomOnly said:
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Water_ripple,water_ripple said:
Excellent question! I wish everyone could read what you've written in a later post as it is an important reality. The following is my opinion to be sure, but realize it is also truth from partially a scientific and ontological perspective. The term fetus is Latin which means act of bearing young, a bringing forth, bearing, progeny. It's used as a medical term to refer to a human being in the womb from the end of the third month until birth. Philosophically, if a human being has no soul they are dead! A corpse... since the soul is the body's animating principle. This philosophical point is relevant to your question since it was the pagan Greeks who first came to the idea of soul. The soul in other words is the principle of life and all living beings have one. Plants and animals have what's called a material soul while human beings have an immaterial soul. The difference is an immaterial soul will never cease to exist because that is the nature of a spiritual substance. Coupled with this idea, Christian revelation tells us each human life is sacred and this is an aspect of why, because it is the immortal soul that most fully makes human beings an "image" of God (who is a pure spirit). Therefore from the moment of conception a human person exists. A man and woman cooperate with God in the process of procreation. When they come together in the act of love the woman's egg is fertilized by the man's sperm which provides the bodily material for this new person. At that moment God directly infuses a new and unique soul into this body and a person of infinite value is conceived whose life is inviolable. Without a soul this body material provided by the fused sperm and egg would not continue on through the stages of life. The soul is located in every part of the body and there is no point where it cannot be thereby even though we are starting to manipulate the human genetic code we cannot cause a new human being to exist without God's direct action. Thus we can see why the Church teaches the sanctity and inviolable dignity of every person from conception to natural death. In our science books we are told that DNA is the key to life but this genetic material cannot cause itself to do what it does... to organize. The soul is thereby the principle of life or organization since one characteristic of life is to organize. The soul gives DNA it's ability to form inanimate matter into different cells and organs which are the cause of all biological processes in a body. So this is important to understand as we work our way through the current bioethical issues that face us today. Cloning, in vitro fertilization, embryonic stem cell research, etc... are all issues the media has us face to face with yet generally has no understanding of the metaphysical aspects of human life. They only convey the scientific, sometimes in context of a convoluted theoligical understanding, but never from the philosophical. The trouble is what they present has the metaphysical since we all come from a world view and cannot get away from one. Sadly theirs (the popular media) is of materialistic/naturalistic perspective which is why we rarely see them present someone who speaks for the prolife side. Everyone who reads this thread can change these sad state of affairs by boldly repeating what has been said here. Thanks and keep up the good work!
Lumen Christi...
Sincerely, Tim (alias Ratjaws)
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Even a zygote is human. (A post I placed in an abortion debate)
God is above science. Always has been always will. God never has had to readjust His laws to fit data. I think it is important to remember this. Science has its beauties. Science can teach us things about the world around us, but it cannot give answers that are equatable to the answers of God. Thanx so very much for words of wisdom
Ratjaws said:
God is above science. Always has been always will. God never has had to readjust His laws to fit data. I think it is important to remember this. Science has its beauties. Science can teach us things about the world around us, but it cannot give answers that are equatable to the answers of God. Thanx so very much for words of wisdom
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Hello again Water,water_ripple said:
I'm not sure what you mean by saying "God is above science" but it is certain that unless God gives us the ability to do science, in other words to think, and the insight to desire learning about His universe, we'd have no science at all. If you could please explain what you mean by saying science "cannot give answers that are equatable to the answers of God?" This is very puzzling and seems to pit the knowledge we receive from good science with divine revelation. If that's what you meant I'd have to disagree.
Pax Christi...
Sincerely, Tim (alias Ratjaws)
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