On when human life begins, Cardinal Gregory flubs the question

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 09, 2021

President Joe Biden laid a trap, and Cardinal Wilton Gregory walked right into it.

“The Catholic Church teaches, and has taught, that life—human life—begins at conception,” Cardinal Gregory told the National Press Club yesterday.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Well, all right, the Catholic Church says that human life begins at conception. But only for the same reason that the Church says 2+2=4. These are facts: realities. And the Catholic Church bases her moral teaching on reality.

But it is not the Catholic Church that teaches human life begins at conception. It is science. The existence of human life in a fertilized human ovum is observable, verifiable, undeniable.

To say that the Church teaches when human life begins is to allow the possibility that someone outside the Catholic communion—someone who does not feel himself bound by the authority of the magisterium—could disagree. It is a suggestion that this is religious belief, a sectarian position that other reasonable people might not embrace.

And that, of course, is precisely what pro-abortion apologists want people to believe: that opposition to abortion is based solely on a religious belief. That non-Catholics might allow the killing of unborn humans, just as non-Hindus might slaughter cows, with a clear conscience. If you can persuade enough people that an unborn human life is somehow not a human life, then you may be able to sidestep the condemnation that the Catholic Church—and every other moral authority—attaches to the deliberate killing of innocent human beings.

Forty-eight years and 62 million deaths after Roe v. Wade, Catholic prelates should know enough to avoid obvious rhetorical pitfalls—to give pro-abortion politicians the help they need to keep a spurious argument in circulation.

When President Biden said that he doesn’t agree with people who “think” that human life begins at conception, he exposed the weak flank of his position. (He also exposed the malleability of his principles, since a decade ago he told the world that he did accept that fact.) Anyone moderately familiar with the terms of this debate should pounce.

Let’s focus the debate on that moment of conception. Ask the scientists, ask the doctors to explain what this thing is, growing in a woman’s womb. Is it alive? Absolutely. What kind of life is it, then? Trust the science, President Biden. Trust the science, Cardinal Gregory.