A Revolution in Biology, A Distortion in Theology...

In his recent essay “A Revolution in Understanding the Embryo,” Dr. John Wallingford, the Regents Chair in Molecular Biology at UT Austin and a past president of the Society for Developmental Biology points to an amazing fact:

Fifty-four years ago, I did something extraordinary. I built myself. I was a single, round cell with not the slightest hint of my final form. Yet the shape of my body now—the same body—is dazzlingly complex. I am composed of trillions of cells. And hundreds of different kinds of cells; I have brain cells, muscle cells, kidney cells. I have hair follicles, though tragically few still decorate my head. But there was a time when I was just one cell. And so were you.

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Wallingford continues, “All organisms, including humans, build themselves. Our construction proceeds with no architects, no contractors, no builders; it is our own cells that build our bodies. Watching an embryo, then, is rather like watching a pile of bricks somehow make themselves into a house, to paraphrase the biologist Jamie Davies in Life Unfolding (2014).” The human embryo is actively self-developing his or her body toward becoming a newborn, a toddler, and eventually an adult.

Unfortunately, Wallingford does not stay in his lane of his biological expertise:

In the modern debate over abortion, the doctrine that ‘life begins at conception’ is now so constantly repeated that it’s often assumed to have an ancient, perhaps even scriptural origin. It does not. In fact, in Catholic canon law, the doctrine dates precisely to 12 October 1869, when Pope Pius IX declared excommunication as the penalty for anyone involved in obtaining any abortion. For the nearly 2,000 years that had gone before, however, many Christian thinkers held the embryo to acquire its humanity only gradually. This concept, linked to the ‘animation’ or ‘ensoulment’ of the embryo, arose in laws first set down more than 3,000 years ago that imposed increasingly harsher penalties for causing the loss of a pregnancy as it progressed.

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Wallingford’s claims are misleading. The Catholic Church has always condemned abortion, not starting in 1869, but from the first century in the Didache, the Letter of Barnabas, and the Apology of Tertullian. Medieval authors like Thomas Aquinas and contemporaries like Pope Francis echo this unchanging teaching.

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