In July I wrote a post regarding Frank Pastore’s opinion in TownHall.com, “Why Al Qaeda Supports the Emergent Church.” I said the title of Pastore’s opinion was “one of the more ridiculous statements of the year.” Not to be outdone, this Sunday’s Los Angeles Times ran an opinion by Garry Wills entitled, “Abortion Isn’t a Religious Issue.”

Wills writes, “[Abortion] is not a theological matter at all. There is no theological basis for defending or condemning abortion.” He quotes Catholic theologians who said in the past that the issue of abortion was in the realm of natural law, not in special revelation. Wills goes after Evangelicals on the matter, as if they were the only group opposing abortion on religious grounds. It seems strange for him to use so much Catholic theology to make his point. Who in the past 30 years has been a stronger opponent of abortion than the Vatican? I fear that in his arguments he has made something of a caricature of the position many evangelicals hold.

Wills is correct in stating, “The question is not whether the fetus is human life but whether it is a human person, and when it becomes one.” All cells are living organisms. To say that life begins at conception is something of a non sequitur. We are at a question of human personhood, not of biological life. The issue of personhood is a deeply religious question in Christian and Jewish traditions.

Wills writes,

If we are to decide the matter of abortion by natural law, that means we must turn to reason and science, the realm of Enlightened religion. But that is just what evangelicals want to avoid. Who are the relevant experts here? They are philosophers, neurobiologists, embryologists. Evangelicals want to exclude them because most give answers they do not want to hear.

It seems strange to me that if this is a realm of natural law, that theologians would be excluded from the discussion, especially since natural law has much theological discussion concerning it. In the West, natural law concepts funnel through Thomas Aquinas, a Doctor of the Church. If it is a matter of natural law, then special revelation may not have a role, but all areas of expertise are welcome to the table. I’m not one to draw such a distinct line between philosophy and religion since they often swim in each other’s waters. I’m also not sure who these evangelicals are who want to exclude the other experts.

While it is true that the Christian Scriptures (the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament) say nothing directly about abortion, the followers of these traditions have been against abortions for millennia. There are Diaspora Jewish texts from the Second Temple period decrying Roman and Hellenistic practices of chemically ending pregnancies and abandoning unwanted children in the wilderness (think of Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Rex). So while there may have not been a Scripturally revealed mandate to protect the unborn, the communities of faith rooted in Judeo-Christian traditions applied their beliefs in being created in the image of God and in protecting life to the issue of the unborn.