With a change of regime at the Vatican, many are praying for a progressive pope to be appointed. The time is right to move forward on two of the most vexing issues for the laity — contraception and abortion.
This is a highly sensitive area but the chance to change the Vatican’s stance could come from new discoveries in embryology.
Conception, or ”fertilisation”, the process by which the male sperm fertilises the female egg, is now known to be not a single moment, but rather a continuous process, taking two to 12 hours.
More important, perhaps, is the recognition that, as late as 14 days after fertilisation, the embryo may divide into twins or triplets or more.
This so-called ”twinning argument” is the strongest yet against the view that life begins at fertilisation. Because, theologically speaking, the soul cannot split, it can be said that the soul does not enter the pre-embryo (called a zygote) until the point at which it can no longer divide into several individuals.
The British government’s official position is that human life begins at 14 days, when the rudimentary nervous system starts to form. Ian Wilmut, the British scientist who holds a human cloning licence, will work on human embryos only up until that deadline.
Another neurological view would put the beginning of human life even later. It assumes that the defining mark of a human individual is its electroencephalogram, or EEG.
But not until about the eighth week after gestation does a developing embryo first show a detectable EEG pattern, and thus have the foundation of neural pathways essential for brain activity.
If any of these definitions of the moment at which life begins can be accepted by the Vatican, there exists a gap of two weeks or more in which procedures such as the morning-after pill and abortion might take place — without any need for moral debates.
Definitions of when the soul enters the body have certainly changed over the centuries. St Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, held that male foetuses only became ”animated” — in other words, acquired a soul — around the 40th day after conception. Females were believed to develop more slowly and to need 90 days for ”ensoulment”.
One of the Vatican’s medically trained monsignori tells me that, on the question of the embryo’s development, ”much has been said, and much will be said”. This does not sound like unthinking dogmatism.
My hope as an ex-Catholic is that, over time, such arguments might move the church away from its absolute stand on abortion.
Human life would be no less sacred if the timing of its inception were advanced by a matter of weeks or days. — Â