A couple of days ago USAToday ran a piece on God’s stance on abortion. Yah. It was written by Tom Ehrich, an Episcopal priest from North Carolina and columnist for Religion News Service.

The column itself is less on what "God" thinks about abortion than what modern churches think about it. Which is, of course, all over the map. So not much of a problem with that part, to be honest.

But for some bizarro reason, the sidebar for the piece was pulled from Daniel Maguire’s pro-abortion scripture, "Sacred Choices." You all know Daniel Maguire, ensconced at Marquette, a moral theologian whose career has been centered on demonstrating that Catholic moral tradition isn’t what you think it is, you fools. The take on Catholicism and abortion, quoted in the sidebar:

The popes have taught that abortion is always forbidden, and the church hierarchy has held to a doctrine that strongly opposes it. Even so, grounds for permitting abortion exist in the Catholic tradition, and many Catholic theological authorities permit abortion in a variety of situations. There is even a pro-choice Catholic saint, the 15th century archbishop of Florence, St. Antoninus. He approved of early abortions when needed to save the life of the mother, a huge category in his day. There is thus no one Catholic view.

The Amercian Papist tries to begin the task of sorting this out, and gets some help in his combox, but really – we need one of our many theologian friends to tell us exactly what St. Antoninus said on this score. It is not clear whether or not the question is related to the biological understanding conception and fetal development, and therefore of ensoulment that Antoninus might have been working from or a possible application of the principle of double-effect, which then would probably have been concerned with late pregnancy, not early pregnancy, especially since "early pregnancy" is almost not applicable to pre-pregnancy test days, in the same sense we speak of it.

On the first point, in case you are wondering, this article, which is actually focused on the cloning and pre-embryo issues, explains the Aquinas point well as does Michael Liccione, in his series on doctrinal development (which I have been meaning to read closely for ages, and will get to soon, I hope, takes it on as well:

In the case of abortion, for example, the Church’s teaching has developed toward greater strictness and gravity. Somehow that seems objectionable to many people who nonetheless have no problem with greater moral strictness about warfare, capital punishment, and domestic violence now than in the past; but I shall leave that fact aside as one of more psychological and political than theological interest.

To be sure, the Church has always considered abortion immoral; and many early Christian writers condemned it as murder (see, e.g., Didache 2:2 and this list). But that injunction appears to have applied only to women who are unmistakably pregnant, either by their appearance or by the detection of quickening. It was not clear on that account that procuring abortion at any stage of gestation is a form of homicide, which is what the Church teaches now.

St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, held that the process of conception required forty days for boys and eighty for girls before the conceptus was ready for the infusion of the rational soul (Commentary on the Fourth Book of Sentences, d. 31 exp. text.). And that was the common view through the eighteenth century. Abortion prior to said infusion was not held by the Church to be the killing of a human person; it was condemned only as a particularly nasty form of contraception.

What changed that, of course, was the development of the modern disciplines of obstetrics, gynecology, and above all genetics. As soon as it became clear to the Church that even the blastocyst, under normal conditions, was a genetically unique individual member of homo sapiens—twinning being a separate, still controversial case—Pope Pius IX included abortion at any stage of gestation as a form of homicide in his renewed list of offenses incurring excommunication (Apostolicae Sedis [1869]). And so the teaching and discipline remain today.

The reasonable-enough assumption has been that whatever is a genetically unique individual member of the species is a human person, not just part of a person such as an organ or a gamete. Disputes about the time or process of ensoulment thus recede into obsolescence. A good defense of that development, for which pro-lifers of varying or no religious affiliation are rightly fond of citing natural science, may be found in Robert George and Patrick Lee, Acorns and Embryos. Granted that science just by itself has nothing to say about moral norms, its considerable relevance to this question is the chief basis for claiming that opposition to legal abortion needs no specifically religious premises. That of course is politically very important.

The change here, then, has not been in the precept that abortion is gravely immoral but in the explanation why: due to the advance of science, the Church now condemns all, or almost all, abortion as murder, not merely abortion after a certain stage of gestation. What’s changed is the understanding of the empirical conditions under which the Fifth Commandment is applicable.

So that takes care of the general misconceptions and mischaracterization spewed forth in that piece, but we still have the specifics. What did St. Antoninus say about this matter? Anyone? Anyone?