[NYer]

Thank you for sharing such a personal story and its impact on your life. One of my family's friends is an OB/GYN. As a part of his medical training, Dr. Levatino was taught to do abortions. He provided abortions for his patients in his office for eight years. In 1985 he quit doing abortions and is now in private practice as an obstetrician gynecologist. He not only became pro-life but spoke before the US Congress in defense of life. You can read his story here.

Perhaps the one story that continues to amaze me, however, is that of Serbian abortionist, Stojan Adasevic.

In describing his conversion, Adasevic said he "dreamed about a beautiful field full of children and young people who were playing and laughing, from 4 to 24 years of age, but who ran away from him in fear. A man dressed in a black and white habit stared at him in silence. The dream was repeated each night and he would wake up in a cold sweat. One night he asked the man in black and white who he was. ‘My name is Thomas Aquinas,’ the man in his dream responded. Adasevic, educated in communist schools, had never heard of the Dominican genius saint. He didn’t recognize the name."

Serbian Abortionist Who Aborted 48,000 Babies Becomes Pro-Life Activist

When we think of Thomas Aquinas, we normally associate him with his Summa. It is intriguing to see his intervention on abortion.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Thomas Aquinas taught (as the Church still teaches) that abortion is gravely wrong, and would be whether the early embryo had a soul or not.

In Aquinas' time (13th century) even the best scientists had little knowledge of prenatal development, and were completly unaware that the body derives its form from its genome (DNA structure).

Aquinas said that the willful killing of a being identifiably human and alive (by the best scientific knowledge at the time) is always murder; and that even IF the "form" of the body were incomplete (and therefore the hypothesis of "delayed ensoulment"), abortion would still be a grave moral evil because it violates Natural Law which reveals that a person is coming into being.

I'm mentioning this in detail, because some people (erroneously) think that Aquinas OK'd early abortions because of a delayed ensoulment hypothesis. This is false. They lacked diagnostic tools to observe that an embryo is identifiably human AND alive as soon a fertilization takes place. The moral doctrine--- that killing this entity is gravely morally wrong at any stage --- was never in doubt.

This still makes a difference, because scientists toss around the possibility of designing "artificial human life forms, partly-biologial android robots, human-chimp hybrids or other horrors. (No joke, they're talking about trying to recover Neanderthal DNA and impregnate a woman volunteer with it, for the sake of scientific research!) (Truly despicable.) Even if there were any hypothetical doubt about whether the resulting entity were truly human, it would still be murder to kill it.

Says Aquinas.