St. Augustine: What Has Been Injured Shall Be Renewed

I had made a point of not watching the recent videos exposing the barbaric evils of Planned Parenthood and Stem Express, put out by the Center for Medical Progress. You find out what is in them without that. Why expose myself to seeing images I would not be able to erase from my mind? Why watch babies be severed and cut apart and sliced open so their insides could be boxed and shipped and sold for profit? Who wants to look upon any of that horror?

But then, earlier this week, perhaps because I had an article to write, I watched the sixth of them. I knew what I was going to see.

In that video, titled “Human Capital – Episode 3,” we watch an intact child, pink and smooth and wet, its eyes closed but its heart still beating, slowly move its arms and legs. It is still alive.

Holly O’Donnell, who was a procurement technician at Stem Express, describes how she cut open the face of one such baby in order to remove his brain for harvesting. The supervising technician begins by starting an incision from the chin to the lip. Then, she hands scissors to O’Donnell, who continues cutting from the lip all the way to the crown. She removes the brain. The whole time, the child was alive and had a beating heart.

That is what is being done in the name of medical research and women’s health.

St. Augustine’s Enchiridion

I am going to talk more about Holly O’Donnell, but first I want to talk about St. Augustine.

Today is the feast day of St. Augustine of Hippo, whom dissenting Catholics sometimes cite as though he is an ally in their defense of abortion. The idea is that, because Augustine was unsure when a child in the womb acquired a soul, and thought that abortion might not be the same as homicide (see here for a discussion of this), pro-choice Catholics today are justified in thinking that the Church is undecided on the question and allows latitude.

This article is not the place to go into a thorough rebuttal of all that. Others have done that very well before (here, here, and here). But one particular passage from Augustine’s Enchiridion often gets cited in this context, and it is worth looking at for what it tells us about Augustine’s view of the humanity of the child in the womb. Augustine wrote the Enchiridion, or “Handbook,” to answer a series of questions posed by one Laurentius. The topic comes up in chapter 85.

Hence in the first place arises a question about abortive conceptions, which have indeed been born in the mother’s womb, but not so born that they could be born again. For if we shall decide that these are to rise again, we cannot object to any conclusion that may be drawn in regard to those which are fully formed. Now who is there that is not rather disposed to think that unformed abortions perish, like seeds that have never fructified? But who will dare to deny, though he may not dare to affirm, that at the resurrection every defect in the form shall be supplied, and that thus the perfection which time would have brought shall not be wanting, any more than the blemishes which time did bring shall be present: so that the nature shall neither want anything suitable and in harmony with it that length of days would have added, nor be debased by the presence of anything of an opposite kind that length of days has added; but that what is not yet complete shall be completed, just as what has been injured shall be renewed.

Here, Augustine is not talking about induced abortion, but “abortive conceptions”—that is to say, miscarriages. Those who want to claim that the Church has not been able to decide when life begins, and who cite Augustine to their support, read his words that “unformed abortions perish, like seeds that have never fructified” and stop there. But Augustine describes this view only as what some are “disposed to think”; he sets it up only to strike it down. He continues; he says that:

• At the Resurrection, every defect will be made perfect.
• God fulfills in an aborted child “what length of days would have added.”
• “What is not yet complete shall be completed, just as what has been injured shall be renewed.”

Whatever the insufficiencies of Augustine’s knowledge of biology – and we would expect that from someone who lived in the fifth century – he approaches the question more from a theology of the Resurrection. He views the human person less in the light of its current imperfections, or stage of development, and more in the light of what Resurrection will make us.

In chapter 86, Augustine puts the matter more directly. He admits that no one knows when a child in the womb begins to live and wonders whether that will ever be known. But then he says this:

To deny that the young who are cut out limb by limb from the womb, lest if they were left there dead the mother should die too, have never been alive, seems too audacious. Now, from the time that a man begins to live, from that time it is possible for him to die. And if he die, wheresoever death may overtake him, I cannot discover on what principle he can be denied an interest in the resurrection of the dead.

Thus Augustine asserts their humanity in the light of their “interest in the resurrection of the dead.” This is not a biological argument (and we would not want to acquire our biology from Augustine, anyway) but a theological one. It is the certainty of Resurrection that assures him of the humanity of the child, even in the womb. That is why he can condemn abortion (On Marriage and Concupiscence I.17) as a form of “lustful cruelty,” equally cruel regardless of the stage of development.

Consciences That Are Broken and In Ruins

Augustine, whose feast we celebrate today, assures us that those infants “cut out limb by limb from the womb,” and those whose face is cut off from the jaw to the crown to rob them of their brain, will be put back together, will be renewed, will be resurrected.

But I hope we already knew that.

What interests me a great deal more in this passage from Augustine, particularly in light of the videos that have come out, is what it may remind us about consciences that are broken and in ruins.

How wounded and dead must a conscience be to be able to laugh about the shipment of severed infant heads?

The things that are being exposed in these videos are barbaric beyond description or adjective, and yet the people who are doing those things seem casual, unmoved, unembarrassed, even amused.

In his first letter to Timothy, St. Paul describes people like that, who have “given heed to … doctrines of demons.” Their consciences, he says, have been “seared” (1 Timothy 4:1-2). (The King James translation adds “with a hot iron,” which is an especially striking image, although it is not in the Greek text.) You get the sense of a conscience where all the nerve has been burned away so there is no longer any feeling. Feeling has been replaced with coldness, a lust for money, and joyless laughter.

Surely St. Paul would not have been surprised by Planned Parenthood and those who defend it. Surely he would not be surprised that many of us remain unmoved by, or willfully ignorant of, those things shown in the videos, or that they insist on denial and soft euphemism.

“I told you before,” he would say.

But consider Holly O’Donnell, the technician who cut off the face of a living child and took out his brain. This is what she says:

I didn’t want to do this. So she gave me the scissors and told me that I had to cut it down the middle of the face. And I can’t even describe what that feels like. And I remember picking it up and finishing going through the rest of the face and Jessica picking up the brain and putting it in the container. … And she left and said, “Okay, you can clean it up.” And I sat there thinking, “What did I just do?” And that was the moment I knew I couldn’t work for the company any more.

In all the discussions I had read on social media about this video, before I watched it, I never once heard this mentioned: that the very person who cut that face off left Stem Express because of it and is now working with the Center for Medical Progress to expose their evil.

It was that very act that resurrected a dead, or broken, conscience. She repented, and whatever the cost to herself she left. And it may be that working to expose the evil of Planned Parenthood and Stem Express is how Holly O’Donnell is trying to find healing. We must pray for her. We must ask Mary to comfort her.

That part of this story needs to be told too. Every defect in the conscience of those who kill can be repaired and made new.

It is not enough to expose the evil of Planned Parenthood, and abortion, and try to defund it, and overturn Roe, and save babies from death. It is not enough to express outrage over all this barbarism in our midst, and the carnage of nearly 60 million abortions in the United States since 1973, or roughly five times as many innocent people as Hitler killed.

Those are necessary and upright things to do, to be sure. But the guilty are in need of saving too. The guilty were also made for resurrection. We admit this, but often it seems we admit it only as an afterthought to outrage and our desire for the guilty to be punished. But when we pray in front of abortion clinics and Planned Parenthood, we must pray not only for babies and mothers but for those who work there, because those who work there can be saved. Their consciences can be reclaimed and redeemed and resurrected. And they are in desperate need of healing. We must love them.

Abby Johnson reminds us of that. And Holly O’Donnell reminds us of that. When we talk about these videos, that too is part of the story that we need to tell people about.

What has been injured shall be renewed. What is dead shall be made alive again.