The Case for Calling Mary "Mother of God"

Modern Protestants often balk at Catholics referring to the Virgin Mary as “the Mother of God.” One Protestant apologetics website argues that “Mary most certainly isn't the mother of God,” since “God is eternal, Mary was not.”  The author concludes that calling Mary the Mother of God is thus “a serious blasphemy attacking the very nature of God” since “God was NOT born of a woman.”  And another suggests that calling Mary the “Mother of God” would signal (somehow) that Mary is God:

If Mary is the mother of Jesus, and Jesus is God, does it follow that Mary is the mother of God? What kind of logic is this? Seriously thinking about it, if this syllogism is theologically sound, doesn’t it also follow that since Mary is the Mother of God, Mary is also God? Or, since God is Triune, doesn’t it follow that Mary is also the mother of the Holy Spirit, or, Mary, the mother of the Father? Of course they’re not saying that but do you see how inconsistent their position is on this matter? Even though Mary to them is not the source of Jesus’ Divinity, they’re still bent on calling her the Mother of God. Why call Mary God’s mother in the first place?

Protestants are not the first to raise this objection. The Nestorian heretics in the early Church argued that Mary could be called “the Mother of Christ” (Christotokos), but not “the Mother of God” (Theotokos). 

I. The Answer from the Third Ecumenical Council

Neroccio di Bartolomeo de' Landi,
The Virgin and Child, St. Benedict
and Saint Catherine of Siena (1490)

The Nestorian position was based on a deeper heresy: the notion that Jesus Christ consists of two Persons one human, one divine). In 431 A.D., The First Council of Ephesus, the third of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, clarified that Christ is one Person, not two, and for the first time, laid out a specifically Marian doctrine, calling Mary Theotokos, the Mother of God. 

Immediately, we can see why the Marian doctrines matter: because they protect Christological truths.  And that is still why they matter.  When Protestants claim that “God was NOT born of a woman,” that’s not just an attack on Mary (at least, not primarily). It’s an attack on the Incarnation, and on the Divinity of Jesus Christ. As I’m fond of saying, anti-Catholic Protestants aim at Mary, and hit Jesus.

Based on the reasoning of the First Council of Ephesus, most of the arguments for calling Mary the Mother of God follow this general syllogism:

1. Jesus Christ is a single Person, fully God and fully Man.  Jesus is God, and always has been.
2. The Virgin Mary is the Mother of Jesus Christ.
3. Therefore, the Virgin Mary is the Mother of God.

After all, it is not as though the Virgin Mary conceived and bore a mere Man who later became God.  He was God while He was in her womb.  And of course, nothing in this argument requires that Mary be eternal. Still less does it require that Mary be the Mother of the Holy Spirit, or the Mother of God the Father. That argument makes no more sense than refusing to say that Jesus is God, on the basis that He’s not the Holy Spirit. That’s not how syllogisms work.

So I think that this syllogism is sound, and easily withstands the unfounded arguments that these Protestants raise.  But there are two other ways of approaching of the issue, as well, that might help show the Catholic case to someone unconvinced by the Ephesian syllogism.

II. The Witness of the Church Fathers

Andreas Ritzos, The Mother of God of Passion (1490)

Now, I realize that many of the Protestants who raise arguments against the title “Mother of God” are also suspicious of the Church Fathers, and quite reasonably so. After all, many of these are people who are trying to “restore” Christianity to what they imagine are its pre-Catholic roots. Actually reading the writings of Christians in the primitive Church, or studying the early Christian liturgies, would demolish this worldview.

That may seem glib, but it’s true. My favorite example of an Evangelical who understands how dangerous the Church Fathers are to Evangelicalism is Dave Hunt, author of the popular anti-Catholic book A Woman Rides the Beast. In this episode of his radio show, he and co-host T.A. McMahon lament the number of Evangelicals who convert to Catholicism after reading the Church Fathers and discovering that “they believed in the Real Presence in the Eucharist and so forth.”

Their response is to simultaneously claim that the Church Fathers weren't Catholic, that Evangelicals shouldn’t read the Church Fathers for themselves, and that they shouldn’t “go to history” to determine which is the true Church. Of course, if the Church Fathers really weren’t Catholic, folks like Hunt and McMahon would be eager for Evangelicals to read the Church Fathers.  All in all, they end up running from the Church Fathers, precisely because these early Christians undermine the notion that the Church that Christ built looks remotely like the Church they claim He built.

All of this is by way of preface to the main point here: that the Church Fathers, from the very earliest days of Christianity, affirmed that in the Incarnation, God had been born of Mary.  St. Ignatius of Antioch, a first-century student of the Apostle John, who was martyred for the faith in c. 110 A.D., said in his letter to (quite fittingly) the Ephesians:

There is only one physician—of flesh yet spiritual, born yet unbegotten, God incarnate, genuine life in the midst of death, sprung from Mary as well as God, first subject to suffering then beyond it—Jesus Christ our Lord.

And then:

For our God, Jesus the Christ, was conceived by Mary, in God's plan being sprung both from the seed of David and from the Holy Spirit.

This is an unambiguous affirmation that Mary is the Mother of God.  And again, we’re not talking about the fourth or fifth century here, where an Evangelical might argue that heresy has crept into the Church. We’re talking about one of the earliest Christian martyrs, and a man who was a disciple to one of the Twelve Apostles.  Nor was Ignatius alone, either. Irenaeus, writing in 180 A.D., compares and contrasts Eve and the Virgin Mary:

For just as the former [Eve] was led astray by the word of an angel, so that she fled from God when she had transgressed His word; so did the latter [Mary], by an angelic communication, receive the glad tidings that she should sustain God, being obedient to His word.

In other words, Eve is tempted by a fallen angel, disobeys the word of God, and flees from Him. The Virgin Mary encounters the Angel Gabriel, obeys the word of God, and bears God in her womb as a result.

III. The Scriptural Case for Mary as the Mother of God

In addition to the declaration of the Third Ecumenical Council, and the testimony of the earliest Church Fathers, there is also clear evidence from Sacred Scripture.  In Luke 1:41-49, the Visitation, the Virgin Mary (pregnant with Jesus Christ) goes to visit her cousin, Elizabeth:

Domenico Ghirlandaio, Visitation (1491)

And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the voice of your greeting came to my ears, the babe in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.”

And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,  for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden. For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed; for he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name.”

So Elizabeth explicitly calls Mary “the Mother of my Lord.”  The word being translated “Lord,” Kyrios, is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word Adonai.  Adonai is the word for God that Jews used (and use) in place of YHWH, which was considered too sacred to say, even in prayer, outside of the Temple.  So when Elizabeth calls Mary the Mother of her Kyrios, she’s calling her the Mother of YHWH, the Mother of God.

And that’s plenty clear from context: Elizabeth proceeds to praise Mary for believing “what was spoken to her from the Lord.” That’s unambiguously a reference to God. So is Mary’s declaration, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”  In each of these cases, the word Kyrios is the word used for God.

And remember, it’s the Holy Spirit Who inspires Elizabeth to praise Mary as the Mother of her Lord.  So not only the Bible, but the Holy Spirit Himself, makes it clear that Mary is the Mother of God. There’s not really another way to take these Scriptures. Could we say that “Lord” refers only to Jesus’ Humanity? Of course not. It makes no sense to try to reduce Christ’s Lordship in that way, nor would that explain the other two references to the Lord in this passage.

So when modern Protestants take up the Nestorian attack on the notion of Mary as Mother of God, they’re not just going against an early Church Council, or the testimony of the earliest Christians. They’re going against the New Testament. But more than that, they’re undermining orthodox Christology, and undermining the direct testimony of the Holy Spirit. Aim at Mary, hit Jesus.

The Untold Story of the Ecumenism of the Trenches

This week, in addition to being the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade and the 40th annual March for Life, is also the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. It’s fitting that these two events should overlap, since the pro-life movement seems to have done more to draw together Catholics and Protestants, particularly Evangelicals, than any official ecumenical talks. It’s fittingly been dubbed “the ecumenism of the trenches,” and this cooperation has only increased in the face of the HHS Mandate, with Evangelical schools like Wheaton joining the fight for religious liberty.

AHA’s philosophy, in a nutshell.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been some trials and tribulations in that relationship. In fact, the latest bump in this relationship occurred recently, with a rather poor-timed feud between the Crescat (who is Catholic) and the pro-life group Abolish Human Abortion (who do really good work, but really don’t care for Catholics). At the heart of the dispute are two facts, as was explained in an open-letter written by one of their bloggers.  First, AHA believes that the only solution to the problem of abortion is the Gospel.  Second, they “do not affirm the same gospel as the Roman Catholic Church,” going so far as to call the Catholic Gospel “satanic.”

There is a certain irony in all of this.  The blogger Rhology, the author of that open letter, is a Southern Baptist.  And the Southern Baptist Convention was vocal on the issue of abortion, even before Roe.  The only problem: they were on the wrong side.  This oft-overlooked history was pointed out recently by Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in a fascinating article for the Washington Post :

Two years before Roe, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution calling for “legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such circumstances as rape, incest, clear evidence of fetal abnormality, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”

That resolution reveals two very important aspects of this story. First, that the language of “the emotional, mental, and physical life of the mother” was already in use and, second, that the convention called for the legalization of what would become abortion on demand. After Roe, the language about emotional and mental health would be used to allow virtually any abortion for any reason.

Did Southern Baptists have any idea what they were doing? The leadership of the denomination’s ethics agency was then pro-abortion, but the convention itself passed the resolution. Clearly, no pro-life consensus then prevailed among Southern Baptists.

And when the Southern Baptists, along with much of the Evangelical world, looked ready to simply go with the flow on abortion (as they had with contraception), who was it who saved the day?  The Catholic Church:

From a 2009 Pro-Life Vigil

While most evangelicals were either on the wrong side of the issue or politically disengaged, Roman Catholic leaders were on the front lines opposing abortion as a fundamental assault on human dignity. By the late 1960s, the Roman Catholic Church was fighting demands for the legalization of abortion nationally and state by state - opposition that preceded the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae.

By the time Roe was handed down, Catholic leaders had developed sophisticated arguments and growing organizations to fight for the pro-life cause. In 1967, six years before Roe, Catholics had led in the creation of the National Right to Life Committee. The Catholic tradition, drawn largely from the natural law, became the foundational intellectual contribution to the development of a united front against abortion. Nevertheless, for evangelicals to join the movement in a decisive way, arguments drawn directly from Scripture had to be formed and then preached from the pulpits of evangelical churches.

Those arguments captured the conscience of the evangelical movement and produced a seismic shift within the movement and within the political life of the nation. From the 1980 U. S. presidential election until the present, the pro-life movement has been populated, funded, and directed, for the most part, by evangelical and Roman Catholic leaders. Beyond that, the emergence of crisis pregnancy centers and support systems for women considering abortion have come from the work of millions of pro-life Roman Catholics and evangelicals at the grassroots.

There are a lot of ways of reacting to this news. We could view it in a triumphalistic way, in which the Catholic Church (or at least, the Magsterium) stood strong even while Evangelicalism blinked. Or we could view it as a silver lining in Evangelicalism’s ability to change core beliefs over the span of a few years or decades. Evangelical believers are even more pro-life than their (nominally) Catholic brethren these days.

But perhaps the most edifying reaction is to remember that we’re strongest when we work together. The story of pro-life Evangelicalism can’t be told without reference to the cooperation and support of their Catholic brothers and sisters. That’s a legacy to continue, not to lightly throw away.

Why March for Life?

For priests, religious, and seminarians, each morning begins the same way, with the praying of the Invitatory Psalm, the opening prayer of the first Hour of the day in the Liturgy of the Hours. Typically, that Psalm is Psalm 95. The version in the Breviary concludes this way:

Offering to Molech (1897)

Today, listen to the voice of the Lord:
“Do not grow stubborn, as your fathers did in the wilderness,
when at Meriba and Massah they challenged me and provoked me,
Although they had seen all of my works. 

Forty years I endured that generation.
I said, ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray
and they do not know my ways.’
So I swore in my anger,
‘They shall not enter into my rest.’”

I’ve thought about these words frequently in the lead-up to today, January 22, 2013, the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Now, Roe often gets described as the case that legalized abortion in the United States, and that’s true, to a certain extent. Actually, abortion was already legal in several states. What Roe did was claim was that there was a constitutional right to abortion, which is about the most radical position possible.

As a nation, we’ve certainly seen some positive signs in the intervening forty years. For example, the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, and the plaintiff in the companion case Doe v. Bolton, have each come out against abortion. That’s pretty incredible. In fact, if it were any other high-profile case, it would probably garner a whole lot of media attention if two lead plaintiffs announced such a radical conversion, devoting their lives to overturning their own cases. Nor were these women alone, either.  Dr. Bernard Nathanson, one of the co-founders of NARAL (then known as the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, and one of the major forces behind Roe) became pro-life after the advent of ultrasound technology showed him what abortion really was.

But “forty years and roughly 55 million abortions later,” relatively little seems to have changed.  Most Americans remain deeply conflicted about abortion.  Most of us know, on some level, that it’s terribly immoral; but there’s a sense that it’s a necessary evil (necessary, at least, for us to live the sort of lifestyle that we want).  If we weren’t conflicted, we wouldn’t bother with the sort of “safe, legal, and rare” rationalizations. But on some level, we know what we’re doing is wrong. We know.

That’s a sad reality, and reflects poorly on us as a nation. And so we in the pro-life movement press on, harder and more faithfully than before. As the U.S. bishops have asked, we should be treating these next few days as days of penance and fasting.  (If you haven’t been doing that, start today).  And of course, this Friday is the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C. (with similar events happening throughout the country).  And so this year in particular, we must march.

Why March?

The pro-life movement can sometimes feel like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a mountain every day, just to watch it roll back down. More than a few pro-lifers have despaired at the lack of success. And the March for Life in particular can seem pointless: gathering hundreds of thousands of people to march, when they’re just going to be ignored by the media (who will run shots of a few dozen counter-protesters, instead). It seems that for all the time, money, and effort, nothing changes.

But the truth is, something has changed: us. Just as the “peculiar institution” of slavery degraded our national soul, the same thing is happening here, today. As Mother Teresa said to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1994,

2008 March for Life

America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. 

It has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts—a child—as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered domination over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters. 

And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners. 

Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign.

This is why we march, even when it seems like nothing changes.  If we stop fighting the currents of the culture of death, we won’t stay still. We’ll get washed downstream, over the rocks.

But there’s another reason that we march, too. Whether or not we change the minds or hearts of anyone else, the very least we can do is stand up for the dignity of the unborn children who are being silently slaughtered by the millions.

Domingo Valdivieso y Henarejos, The Descent (1864)

When you spend time praying outside of abortion clinics, you’ll have encouraging moments where you’ll see people turn around and leave, and occasionally, your mere prayerful presence may save a life. But there will also be these long, horrible stretches where nobody turns around, where nobody seems to care that you’re there, and nobody’s heart seems to change. And at these times, I’m reminded of the Virgin Mary at the foot of the Cross (John 19:25).

She’s there, even when the men Jesus chose run away (Matthew 26:56). She stays, likely praying and weeping as she watched her Son die. The Gospels record Christ’s words to her, but they don’t record anything that she says. She’s just there as a silent witness to a horrible tragedy, and she’s there quietly loving Him even when the world’s turned against Him. That’s why we pray outside abortion clinics, and it’s why we march.

Mother Teresa saw vividly what the pro-life movement in this country was about:

I have no new teaching for America. I seek only to recall you to faithfulness to what you once taught the world. Your nation was founded on the proposition—very old as a moral precept, but startling and innovative as a political insight—that human life is a gift of immeasurable worth, and that it deserves, always and everywhere, to be treated with the utmost dignity and respect.

In Roe, we made it clear that we’d forgotten not only what we stand for, but who we are as Americans, and as human beings. The March for Life is part of our effort to reawaken the nation, and draw her back to her former greatness.

The Cross, the Church, and the Mystery of Suffering

On the most beautiful things about Catholicism is that it gives meaning to suffering in a way that no other system does. No system explains suffering as well as religion does, no world religion explains it as well as Christianity, and no Christian denomination explains it as well as the Catholic Church does.

Within an atheistic worldview, suffering is meaningless and regrettable. Of course, without a Creator, everything in the universe is, in a certain sense, meaningless sound and fury, signifying nothing. Non-Christian religions get a step closer, but still view suffering as something to avoid, escape or deny.   To fully understand suffering requires the Christian revelation, and specifically, the Cross and the Church.

The Cross and Suffering

The Christian answer to suffering is rooted deeply in the Cross. Jesus Christ doesn’t try to explain suffering away, deny it, or run from it. He embraces it completely. Despite being without sin, He voluntarily takes on our sufferings. This occurs throughout His life, but particularly on the Cross.  Through His suffering and death, He brings about our salvation, giving suffering meaning in a radical and unprecedented way. The Church responded in kind: the most distinctive symbol in Christianity is the Cross or the Crucifix, and the Church seems to have latched on to this particular Image of Christ from the start (see Gal. 3:1).

So all Christian groups see a connection between the Cross and suffering.  On the precise relationship between the two,Catholics and Protestants tend to part company (a fact that emerges most clearly in debates surrounding Purgatory). Protestants tend to focus on Christ’s suffering on the Cross as a substitution: He went on the Cross in our stead. That’s true, but it’s not the full story. Christ doesn’t just go to the Cross in our place: He calls us to join Him there. That’s the meaning behind Christ’s radical call to His would-be disciples: “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me” (Matthew 16:24)

I suspect that the difference in the way that Catholics and Protestants view the Cross and suffering comes from a difference in how we understand Christ’s relation to the Church. Protestantism tends to focus on the radical otherness of Christ: the distance between our fallen nature and His Nature is infinite. Again, this is true, but not the full story.  Yes, the gap between us and God is infinitely wide. But God, being infinite, is capable of bridging it, and has.  Christ has done two radical things. First, He takes on our humanity in the Incarnation. Second, He invites us to share in His Divinity, as various passages in Scripture (like 2 Peter 1:4 and 1 John 3:2) make clear.  So there is an infinite gap by nature, but Christ bridges that gap.

The specific way that Christ invites us to share in His Divinity is through His Church.  Baptized Christians are incorporated into His Mystical Body (Romans 12:5; 1 Corinthians 12:27). So the “Whole Christ” (Christus totus) is Jesus, the Head (and the “Unique Christ”) in union with His Body, the Church (CCC 795; CCC 793). As St. Paul says in Ephesians 1:22-23, “God placed all things under His feet and appointed Him to be Head over everything for the Church, which is His Body, the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way.” That’s a radical claim: that Jesus Christ plus the Church is “the fullness of” Christ.  But there it is, from St. Paul himself.  It is for this reason that what Jesus begins in His Person, He continues in the Church. In a sense, the Church continues the Mystery of the Incarnation throughout history.

The Church as a Continuation of the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Christ

This can seem a bit abstract, so let’s take a concrete example. The Epiphany is prophesied at least twice in the Old Testament. Psalm 72:8-10 says that the “kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall bring presents: the kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts.” In Isaiah 60:6, Jerusalem (which prefigures the Church) is promised “dromedaries from Midian and Ephah; all from Sheba shall come bearing gold and frankincense, and proclaiming the praises of the LORD.”

These passages are fulfilled, in a sense, when the Magi bring gifts to Christ on Epiphany. But this fulfillment is just the beginning. The Magi come “from the East” (Matthew 2:1), while the Old Testament prophesies include gifts being brought from all over the place. Sheba and Midian are south of Israel, while Tarshish (believed to be either Carthage or part of modern-day Spain) brings gifts by ship (Isaiah 60:9), almost certainly from the Mediterranean to the west.

So the Magi begin to fulfill the prophesy, but they don’t full it completely.  The Epiphany is begun with the Magi from the east, but won’t truly end until the Church succeeds in Her Commission to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:20) and all “Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn,” (Isaiah 60:3).

The Church and Suffering

Of course, the Epiphany is just one example. The basic point is that what’s begun by Christ in His Incarnation is continued through His Body, the Church, throughout history. We can look at history and watch the continuation of specific events of the life of Christ, the joyful, the sorrowful, the luminous, and the glorious.

It's in this sense that we understand St. Paul's bold statement in Colossians 1:24, “Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions, for the sake of His Body, which is the Church.” In His Flesh, Christ's suffering is finished. In His Mystical Body, the suffering continues, and unites us to Jesus in His Passion.

In this way, we become more like Christ (Philippians 3:21). And as Paul says in Romans 8:17, this is the only road to the Resurrection: “if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in His sufferings in order that we may also share in His glory.”

You can't always be “happy” while suffering, but you should strive to have joy, that you've been found worthy to carry within yourself the Crucified Christ, to manifest His beautiful Passion to the world, in a way uniquely reserved for you, from all eternity.

Science v. Religion on When Life Begins

One of the looming questions in the abortion debate relates to when human life begins.  From a scientific perspective, this question has been solved for centuries, thanks in part to the work of a seventeenth-century Italian scientist by the name of Francesco Redi.  And it’s left the opponents of the scientific view appealing lamely to outdated religious definitions.

I. Francesco Redi and the Theory of Spontaneous Generation

In 1688, Redi debunked a then-popular theory, namely, spontaneous generation, that claimed that dead things could spontaneously give rise to new life. This view dates back at least to Aristotle, who mistakenly taught (and by the way, this is where it’s about to get a little gross) that certain insects spontaneously originated “from putrefying earth or vegetable matter,” while “others are spontaneously generated in the inside of animals out of the secretions of their several organs.”

An illustration from Francesco Redi’s 1688 work
debunking spontaneous generation. (h/t Scientus)

It was based on a simple mistake: if you leave meat out, it’ll eventually start rotting, and you’ll see maggots and flies crawling around on it, and the dead meat seems to be turning into these living creatures.  Of course, what was really happening was that maggots and flies were eating the rotting meat, and then laying tiny eggs, which eventually hatched.  But people generally didn’t know that, until Francesco Redi used a simple experiment to disprove spontaneous generation:

Francesco took eight jars, placed meat in all the jars, but covered four of the jars with muslin. Maggots developed in the open jars but did not develop in the muslin-covered jars.

In other words, dead things (like rotting meat) don’t suddenly become baby flies. So no matter who or what we’re talking about, from maggots to men, a simple principle is at play: living things come directly from other living things. Dead things don’t suddenly spring to life.

For some reason, in the abortion debate, this is still a revolutionary idea.  The scientific position, shared by pro-lifers, is simple: the father’s (living) sperm and the mother’s (living) egg form a (living) offspring when the two fuse (a moment in time known as conception or fertilization).  This living offspring is both alive and is distinct from each parent.  As Evangelium Vitae puts it:

[F]rom the time that the ovum is fertilized, a life is begun which is neither that of the father nor the mother; it is rather the life of a new human being with his own growth. It would never be made human if it were not human already.

Simple, scientific stuff.  Two living beings create a third living being.  The “pro-choice” side of the debate can’t acknowledge this without admitting that the “choice” in question is the killing of a living human being (albeit a tiny one), and yet they can’t deny it, either. To deny it would be to say that, at some point in the pregnancy cycle, a non-living embryo simply springs to life: the very sort of absurd spontaneous generation that Redi’s opponents believed in.

So what does the pro-abortion side do? Ignores the science, and obfuscates instead. Let me show you what I mean.

II. Using Religious Dogmatism Against Science

19th century engraving of
Faustus and the Homunculus

The online website My Family Doctor routinely hosts debates on a variety of issues including, “When Does Life Begin? Medical Experts Debate Abortion Issue.”  They began the article thusly:

In every political season, abortion emerges as one of the most hotly debated topics. It draws in everybody—from the religious to the political. But what about the scientists?

In fact, My Family Doctor seems to have had trouble finding actual scientists willing to claim that life begins after conception (for precisely the reason outlined above). The only doctors, scientists, and scientific organizations mentioned in the piece either agree that life begins at conception, or avoided answering the question.  This is part of a broader pro-choice strategy of simply ignoring the science and hoping that it’ll go away:

“Pro-choice docs would say that it is not their business to determine for a patient when life begins,” says Diana Philip, interim executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers and its sister organization, the Abortion Conversation Project. “Ultimately each patient determines the value and definition of life and that definition lies within her own mind and heart.”

See? Who cares about the science, when “each person” can make up their own “definition of life” within their own heart?  Maybe Francesco Redi’s opponents could have employed a similar tactic, printing bumper stickers like “Don’t believe in spontaneous generation? Don’t leave rotting meat out.”

The reason the pro-abortion side is reduced to holding their ears until science goes away is that science is really clearly on the pro-life side.  As Donna J. Harrison, M.D., of the American Association of Pro Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists put it, “any biologist in the world can tell you that a mammal’s life begins when the sperm from the father unites with the egg from the mother.”

Harrison’s debate opponent wasn’t actually a doctor or a scientist at all (despite the article’s introduction), but a professor from the University of Puget Sound’s Department of Religion, Dr. Suzanne Holland. Following the pro-choice strategy described above, Holland ignores science almost completely, and refuses to actually say when life begins.  She gives four possible answers.  First, the position that she falsely ascribes to the Catholic Church:

The Twins Georg and Regula Rahn, Zürich, 1752.

The genetic view (the position held by the Roman Catholic Church and many religious conservatives) holds that life begins with the acquisition of a novel genome; it is a kind of genetic determinism. 

As we saw above, the Catholic position is based on fertilization, not simply “genetic determinism” revolving around a “unique genome.” After all, identical twins have the same genome, but distinct epigenetics. If this really were the Catholic Church’s position, She’d have to deny that each twin was a unique individual.

Holland proceeds to lay out three alternative views, each holding to some view of spontaneous generation: that the non-living child simply springs to life.  The first alternative is the

Those who hold the embryologic view think life begins when the embryo undergoes gastrulation, and twinning is no longer possible; this occurs about 14 days into development. (Some mainline Protestant religions espouse a similar view.) 

This view requires holding that at some indistinct point in the second week of development, a non-living being becomes a living being by losing its ability to divide into two distinct individuals.  This is ironically anti-scientific, since this same process of cellular division and reproduction is used in other organisms to prove that they are alive, not dead.  Likewise, this view would “prove” that plants and microbes aren’t alive, since they reproduce asexually.

Proponents of the neurological view adhere to brainwave criteria; life begins when a distinct EEG pattern can be detected, about 24 to 27 weeks. (Some Protestant churches affirm this.) Interestingly, life is also thought to end when the EEG pattern is no longer present. 

This requires believing that a non-living creature somehow brought itself to life by ... generating its own brain.  Plus, several people who showed no EEG activity were declared “dead” before fully recovering, like Karen Arbogast or Zack Dunlap.  So maybe that’s not the best rubric to use, particularly standing alone?  Finally:

Unborn child, aged twenty-one weeks

Finally, one can say that life begins at or near birth, measured by fetal viability outside the mother’s body. (Judaism affirms something close to this position.) After all, somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of all embryos conceived miscarry.

This is the most absurd of the choices, since viability depends on the child and the culture. Roe defined viability at 24-28 weeks, but since then, plenty of children born in the two weeks before that have survived, due to technological improvements.  It makes absolutely no sense to say that a 23-week old fetus in America is alive, while a 23-week old fetus in Zimbabwe is dead.  And of course, even the prematurely-born children who died... died... which shows that they were previously alive.

Each of these alternative views is also trying to claim that life begins at a certain point in embryonic or fetal development. This is self-evidentially absurd, since the unborn child must be alive in order to grow and develop in the first place!

Holland doesn’t actually commit to any of these positions. To do so would open herself up for debate on the issue (and show the absurdity of each view). All she’s trying to do is muddy the waters, to make the issue of when life begins look unclear. It’s not.  And since she can’t marshal any science to support her claim, Holland is left claiming that some unspecified Protestant and Jewish groups support her.  But the question of when life begins is a scientific question, whatever else it may be. If some religious group comes along and defines it at your fourteenth birthday, that doesn’t invalidate the science. It invalidates the religious group.

Of course, if it was the pro-life side using religious dogmas to deny objective science, we would be ridiculed in popular culture, and quite reasonably, for waging a “war on science.” But we’re quite comfortable with the science here.

III.  When Life Begins Scientifically

As I said above, the science on when life begins is perfectly clear.  The only scientific source Holland cites to is Dr. Scott Gilbert, author of an article entitled “Against Science and Scripture.”  In it, he makes the same argument that there are four possible places life could begin, and like Holland, relies on a combination of bad science and, mostly, bad Biblical exegesis.  But while Gilbert feigns confusion on when human life begins, he has no trouble knowing when life begins for every other mammals.  From his textbook on developmental biology:

Newborn Golden Retriever puppies

Traditional ways of classifying catalog animals according to their adult structure. But, as J. T. Bonner (1965) pointed out, this is a very artificial method, because what we consider an individual is usually just a brief slice of its life cycle. When we consider a dog, for instance, we usually picture an adult. But the dog is a “dog” from the moment of fertilization of a dog egg by a dog sperm. It remains a dog even as a senescent dying hound. Therefore, the dog is actually the entire life cycle of the animal, from fertilization through death. 

[....]

One of the major triumphs of descriptive embryology was the idea of a generalizable life cycle. Each animal, whether an earthworm, an eagle, or a beagle, passes through similar stages of development. The major stages of animal development are illustrated in Figure 2.1. The life of a new individual is initiated by the fusion of genetic material from the two gametes—the sperm and the egg. This fusion, called fertilization, stimulates the egg to begin development. The stages of development between fertilization and hatching are collectively called embryogenesis.

So every new individual creature, whether an earthworm, a beagle, or a human being, is an individual from the moment of fertilization.  Whether we say “dog” or “puppy,”  “human” or “fetus” is purely semantics.  From fertilization through death, a dog remains a dog, and a human being remains a human being.

That’s science.