A Pious Fraud

Bearded dragon, via Big Al's Pets.

Shorter Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, "The Abortion Mysticism of Pete Buttigieg", New York Times, 17 September 2019:

According to Buttigieg, there are passages in the Bible claiming that human life begins with the baby's first breath. This proves that the pro-abortion position is the most mystical, least scientifically defensible of possible positions, and anti-abortion absolutism is the simplest and most scientifically coherent one. Indeed, the reason most people reject my view is that it leans too heavily on scientific definitions and biological-philosophical rigor, in contrast to ordinary people's muddle of moral intuitions on the status of the embryo and the requirements of female equality. So in fact I'm much smarter than Mayor Pete and he's much more fogged by medieval theology.

No. I'm not sure Buttigieg understands this quite as clearly as he might, either. And I may have worked through this argument before somewhere, but here's a pretty new approach:

The Monsignor's position isn't in fact scientifically rigorous at all. It's merely the kind of half-educated scientism that makes conservatives insist that gender fluidity isn't real, arguing that you can reduce a fundamentally social question to biology and not even aware of what the biological facts are or have become since St. Thomas Aquinas learned them from reading Aristotle—which in the case of sex is pretty baroque:

The animal kingdom is rich with gender variance. In 2015, a lioness named Mmamoriri caught the world’s attention because of a genetic mutation that gave her a mane. (She is one of five maned lionesses documented in Botswana.) She looks and sounds like a male lion, and if her pride is able to keep ahold of its territory, scientists suspect the “mutation” will continue onto the next generation.

There are plenty of other animals that consistently defy gender and sex binaries. Female spotted hyenas, for example, have external genitalia that looks a lot like the penis of their male counterparts. The male clown fish can change sex when a dominant female dies, in order to replace her.  A 2016 study showed that bearded dragon eggs with typically male chromosomes “reverse sex” in hotter climates and become reproductively female, though they continue to demonstrate many male traits.

Etc., etc.

In the case of the fetus-to-person transition, there is in fact exactly one relevant biological moment, and even as he complains that the pro-choice movement is too mystical and vague, he also complains that it's too categorical on this:

It draws an incredibly bright line — here a legal nonperson who can be terminated for any cause, there a legal person whose killing is a grave offense — at exactly the moment Buttigieg’s biblical reference invoked, the moment of first breath outside the womb.

Well, it is categorical, for more than one reason. It is a very strong biological line between an organism that takes in oxygen and nourishment through the umbilical cord and has no visual, gustatory, or olfactory and very little haptic or auditory perception, to a creature assaulted by new experience who breathes and cries and stares and grasps and desires and constructs the realities of existence in its developing brain.

It is also a very strong social line, because the new creature is in society for the first time, interacting with it, which is why society is obliged to take some responsibility for it, as a being separate from its mother. This is somewhat obscured by another set of social facts, the way in a happy pregnancy the mother and her support group work at pre-creating the child, with showers and shopping, building a nursery and choosing a name and responding to its kicks and singing to it, to a point where abortion becomes unthinkable, or traumatic if it's medically necessary, unlike the case of the unwanted pregnancy, where an abortion doesn't feel like "killing" anybody because nobody has started socially constructing a child yet. The wanted fetus is becoming a child in its mother's mind as it develops.

I think it is the intersection between biology and sociality that is reflected in the biblical precept of personhood beginning with birth and its consequences for the typical Jewish legal attitude toward abortion, which has much more "biological-philosophical rigor" than any Christian approach I've seen:

An unborn fetus in Jewish law is not considered a person (Heb. nefesh, lit. “soul”) until it has been born. The fetus is regarded as a part of the mother’s body and not a separate being until it begins to egress from the womb during parturition (childbirth). In fact, until forty days after conception, the fertilized egg is considered as “mere fluid.” These facts form the basis for the Jewish legal view on abortion.

Viz.,

the  asserts the following: “If a woman is having difficulty in giving birth [and her life is in danger], one cuts up the fetus within her womb and extracts it limb by limb, because her life takes precedence over that of the fetus. But if the greater part was already born, one may not touch it, for one may not set aside one person’s life for that of another.”

Rabbi Yom Tov Lippman Heller, known as Tosafot Yom Tov, in his commentary on this passage in the Mishnah, explains that the fetus is not considered a nefesh until it has egressed into the air of the world and, therefore, one is permitted to destroy it to save the mother’s life. Similar reasoning is found in Rashi’s commentary on the talmudic discussion of this mishnaic passage, where Rashi states that as long as the child has not come out into the world, it is not called a living being, i.e., nefesh. Once the head of the child has come out, the child may not be harmed because it is considered as fully born, and one life may not be taken to save another.

The Mishnah elsewhere states: “If a pregnant woman is taken out to be executed, one does not wait for her to give birth; but if her pains of parturition have already begun [lit. she has already sat on the birth stool], one waits for her until she gives birth.” One does not delay the execution of the mother in order to save the life of the fetus because the fetus is not yet a person (Heb. nefesh), and judgments in Judaism must be promptly implemented. The Talmud also explains that the embryo is part of the mother’s body and has no identity of its own, since it is dependent for its life upon the body of the woman. However, as soon as it starts to move from the womb, it is considered an autonomous being (nefesh) and thus unaffected by the mother’s state. This concept of the embryo being considered part of the mother and not a separate being recurs throughout the Talmud and rabbinic writings.

No anxiety over the question of how anatomically "developed" the fetus is, no sentimentalized anguish over the question of whether it must be "dismembered", and no getting sidetracked over the woman's motivations, because there's no need to: if an abortion is a bad thing according to the perspective sketched here—if it's the loss of the child the woman has been creating in her mind—she simply won't want to do it (and must not be forced to do it, obviously).

Contrast Ross:

The first-breath definition... has nothing to do with fetal development at all, which means that it requires a kind of magical thinking about what happens to the fetus when it passes through the birth canal. Or else it requires believing that there is nothing that could give a fetus a right to life so long as it lives inside a woman; your unborn child could be reciting Shakespeare to you in sign language and it would still have no right to life.

It's not magical thinking at all; it's social thinking: passing through the birth canal is passing out of someone's individual body into the community (as celebrated in the Jewish world a few days later by circumcision and name-giving ceremonies). Magical thinking is that crack about Shakespeare (if the fetus was using sign language how would you know?):

(From Walburga von Raffler-Engel, "Further evidence of  verbal and non-verbal communication between the mother and her unborn child", 1994.) I get a kick out of imagining Benedict's mom saying, "I don't care if he's singing 'St. Louis Blues', I want my abortion right now!"

And one thing gives the fetus an unquestionable right to life: its mother's desire to bring it to term. Period.