Szielins, how is this not just a linguistic and semantic issue? There is no empirical basis for the view that “pregnancy” begins at any particular point; it’s just a definitional matter - and one that has been subject to different, often competing linguistic usages over time and in different places. Everyone can share the exact same in-depth scientific understanding of “reality” (i.e., in this case, the empirically verifiable process by which human beings reproduce and develop) without necessarily agreeing on the same linguistic usage of “pregnancy.” This dispute over the terminology of pregnancy strikes me as akin to disputes over biological taxonomic classification: the classifications may be useful for one purpose or another, but everyone realizes (or should realize) that phyla, orders, genera and so forth are merely semantic and conceptual categories overlaid on empirical reality, not part of that reality itself.
Moreover, the dispute over usage of “pregnancy” seems particularly pointless in the case of the Hobby Lobby litigation, since it relates principally only to another linguistic dispute over “abortion” and “abortifacient” - and even if both of those linguistic disputes were resolved as a definitional matter (i.e., all parties concerned adopted the same usages of those terms), it would not help resolve the litigation, because the real controversy underlying the litigation is not itself linguistic. It is a thing itself (the destruction of a human zygote, blastocyst, embryo, fetus or later-stage development by artificial means) - and not the name that one attaches to that thing - that Hobby Lobby’s owners find objectionable. Whether one calls it an “abortion”, or a “termination of a pregnancy”, or simply “apple pie”, semantic shifts don’t advance the argument one whit.
UPDATED to respond to one of Brodmann_10’s points: In fact, the principles that, when Aquinas applied them to his empirical understanding, led him to assume a later ensoulment, would (when applied to a modern empirical understanding) have led him to associate ensoulment with what we now understand as conception (fertilization). Aquinas believed that a ensoulment required the presence of some self-organizing matter that he assumed was not present early on because he had no way of knowing otherwise. So it would be more accurate to say that Aquinas understood ensoulment to occur at conception; he just didn’t know yet at what stage “conception” that sense actually occurred. I’d submit that the Catholic understanding of ensoulment hasn’t really changed since Aquinas’ time, but it is now applied to a more sophisticated biological understanding, as one would expect.
FURTHER UPDATED: Szielins wrote:
Because it’s a term of art from biology, brought up in the context of an argument about the law. In both the context of biology and in the context of the law, we can legitimately point at biology textbooks and the dictionary and say, ‘Pregnancy begins at conception’ is an incorrect statement, just as `Pregnancy begins when the man and the woman undress’ is incorrect, or ‘Pregnancy begins when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun’ is incorrect.’ A couple of savants somewhere explain why they don’t much care for the standard definitions of ‘pregnant’ and ‘pregnancy’ because Kant and natural law; that’s great, but it’s irrelevant to biologists, lawyers, and members of the general public interested in the underlying policy issues.
It’s worth bearing in mind a couple of things. “Pregnancy” is not solely a term of art from biology; it was first, and remains also, a term of general parlance (even though it’s referring to something that has to do with biology). You will find some general dictionary definitions of “pregnant” that are broader than the post-implantation-only view (for example, “having a baby or babies developing inside the body” (Merriam-Webster)). You’ll even find specialized dictionary definitions that do (for example, “Carrying developing offspring within the body” (Am. Heritage Stedman’s Medical Dictionary). In fact, the current Stedman’s Medical Dictionary defines “pregnancy” as " The condition of a woman or female mammal from conception until birth"; check Dictionary.com. It should come as no surprise that some words have more than one customarily accepted usage.
While trends in usage may take different directions over time as with any word in the language, it seems clear enough that one cannot deduce the (putative) incorrectness of “Pregnancy begins at conception” in anything like the way one can about “Pregnancy begins when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun”.
At any rate, I can’t see how the outcome of Hobby Lobby’s case depends in the slightest upon such things - they certainly don’t seem relevant under RFRA - so I wonder why anyone is getting hung up on it.
develop an artificial uterus (an external artificial uterus capable of growing a fertilized zygote into a full-term baby), it will also then be the case then that a “pregnancy” exists without anyone’s being pregnant (since the fetus will reside not in someone’s body but in its artificial womb).
But, as I see it, both the “pregnancy begins at fertilization” and the “pregnancy begins at implantation” views can lead to the counter-intuitive result that a pregnancy is possible without anyone’s being pregnant.
