Monday, March 15, 2021

Some (Pro-Life) Notes from Campbell, Mormonism, Medicine, and Bioethics (2021)

Latter-day Saint leaders, even when they believed the spirit entered the body at “quickening,” did not believe abortion prior to such was permissible:

 

During the founding years of Mormonism, U.S. states largely followed English common law permitting abortion prior to quickening (the mother’s experience of fetal movement within her womb), while criminal sanctions could be imposed for abortions post-quickening (24). This gradualist approach was radically altered by the latter part of the 19th century. The profession professionalization of medicine, exemplified by the establishment of the American Medical Association, aimed to ensure safer medical procedures for childbirth in the context of high neonatal and maternal mortality. The professionalizing of medicine and medicalization of pregnancy coincided with various cultural, philosophical, and religious paternalistic controls over women’s reproductive lives (Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction [Boston: Beacon Press, 2001]). Advancing medical knowledge about fetal development also increased religious interest in the moral status of unborn human life, as illustrated by a radical departure from seventeen centuries of Roman Catholic teaching in an 1869 declaration of Pope Pius IX that ensoulment occurred at conception, meaning that any direct abortion was the moral equivalent of homicide (Lisa Sowle Cahill, “Abortion: Roman Catholic Perspectives,” in Bioethics, 4th ed., vol. 1, ed. Bruce Jennings [New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2014], 37-41). By the end o the 19th century, the common-law approach to abortion had been supplanted by restrictive laws on abortion in all U.S. states, with provisions for legal pregnancy termination limited primarily to a moral threat to the mother from continuing the pregnancy.

 

Early LDS teaching on abortion reflected this prohibitionist approach. 19th-century leaders portrayed abortion as a form of “murder” and a sin of “shedding innocent blood” for which there was no forgiveness. In contrast to Catholicism, LDS condemnation of abortion was formulated in the absence of definitive teaching on the timing of the union of the enlivening spirit with the developing physical body . . . (Courtney S. Campbell, Mormonism, Medicine, and Bioethics [New York: Oxford University Press, 2021], 194-95, emphasis added)

 

The Latter-day Saint belief in “Free Agency” does not mean one can support Pro-Choice/intrinsically evil movements/procedures

 

Given the continual ecclesiastical criticism of legalized elective abortion in the wake of the Roe decision , the LDS Church issued a rather remarkable statement in the context of a 1991 Utah legislative proposal to narrow the range of legally permissible abortion. While condemning “the devastating practice of abortion for personal or social convenience,” the statement maintained the church “as an institution has not favored or opposed specific legislative proposals or public demonstrations concerning abortion.” LDS members were encouraged to “let their voices be heard in appropriate and legal ways that will evidence their belief in the sacredness of life” (Lester E. Bush, Jr., Health and Medicine Among the Latter-day Saints: Science, Sense, and Scripture [New York: Crossroad, 1993], 165). (Ibid., 200, emphasis added)