Nana Dvalishvili

“And God blessed them, saying, Increase and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28)

A meeting took place… A whole arose… Life flared up. The little one was conceived, the littlest one…

Here are the figures too: size — 0.01 mm; weight — 0.004 mg. Invisible to the eye, but already existing. It does not yet have the marks of an individual, but it has a plan of what it is to be. It must follow this plan… Later the marks will appear too — such as only it will have. Then it will be born, will grow up… The preliminary period The human embryo — the unity of soul and flesh “I am already alive!” In the mother's womb Modernised “morality” The preliminary period

Let us unfold what has been said…

Before they give rise to a new life, the gametes, that is, the sex cells, go through a certain preparatory period. For the female gamete, the egg cell, this period is drawn out in time and differs from the process by which the male gamete, the sperm, is formed. The number of gametes, their size, structure and motility also differ. What they have in common is that gametes are formed in paired organs (the ovaries and testes); the sex cells move through special networks or tubes; these processes are controlled by hormones and other secretions of the glands. The smooth working of each link is one of the preconditions for healthy offspring.

Before completing their maturation, the gametes shed half of the double genetic set characteristic of the body's cells (23 chromosomes with their genes), so that when they meet they may complete one another and “become whole.”

The halving of the genetic material in the gametes is achieved by so-called meiotic division, which comprises 2 stages. In women the 1st stage begins before birth, in the embryo itself, and halts until the girl is 12–13 years old. Then the 1st stage is completed and the 2nd stage of meiosis begins, which is destined to be completed only if it meets the male gamete; otherwise the immature cell is expelled from the woman's body. As for the sperm, it passes through both stages of meiotic division at once, without pauses (the full cycle of its formation takes about 2 months).

My thoughts ran away with me… May the Lord forgive me a bold thought, but is not the divine wisdom that implies the woman's subordination to the man shown in this too?! Even the cells that precede the gametes are arranged differently: the woman's cell is immature, and only the man's cell can complete its formation — only after the gametes have met does the egg cell complete its maturation.

The number of such immature cells is also fixed in advance and limited in the woman's body: in a newborn girl their number reaches a million. From the age of maturity one cell a month begins to be released (ovulation) to meet its partner gamete, while in boys several trillion cells mature over a lifetime — the sperm is constantly renewed.

Perhaps this too is a kind of material grounding for the prevailing view that a woman, along with guarding her spiritual purity, ought with particular care to guard the purity of her body and protect herself from harmful physical or chemical factors. In children too, the greater share of congenital pathologies comes from the mother. The use of drugs by a future mother, the drinking of alcohol or saturating the body with nicotine directly harm the cells already present in the depths of the woman's body that precede the egg cells — cells that will not be renewed, cannot be renewed, because this is how the Lord ordained it for woman…

There is one more factor that points to the mother's special role. The egg cell is many times larger than the sperm. The difference in size is due to the fact that the female gamete has stored everything necessary that will be needed, in case of fertilisation, to supply the newly conceived life with food and energy. The “cellular units” that provide the energy supply of the fertilised egg, the so-called zygote, have their own genetic apparatus. Unlike the nuclear genetic apparatus, which is combined and unites the hereditary information brought from both parents, the genes outside the nucleus are the mother's alone, and the mother alone is responsible for their purity. Today a great many serious pathologies have been identified that are caused by hereditary defects in such genes and are passed on to offspring only through the female line. A woman ought to take care of what was given her from the beginning and keep it undefiled. Motherhood of a healthy child is gained by abstaining from vicious acts, and by ascetic effort. The teaching of the Church preaches this too: in the Book of Needs there is even a special prayer for “luckless” mothers — “A prayer over a woman when she has miscarried.” This, of course, in no way lessens the father's responsibility with regard to childbearing — the genetic burden is passed on to the helpless being from both parents. The human embryo — the unity of soul and flesh

The woman's cell, prepared to meet the man's cell, sets out on its way. This is its first journey — the journey to meet life. Here the Lord alone reigns; He governs whether the meeting will happen, and which of the man's cells (their number here reaches 400 million) will become the one and only chosen! Human will steps back; the parent has no choice here.

Again I stopped, remembering the “achievements” of modern medicine. Before my eyes rose an army of 250,000 real young people conceived by artificial insemination; I remembered the money-grubbing “surrogate” mothers and their babies, and there surfaced in my memory samples of human sperm frozen like the sperm of pedigree bulls, and many biotechnological novelties. Today this is already reality; great “successes” have already been achieved in “playing God.” It is a vast subject, and we shall return to it when we speak about modernised “morality.” For now, let us follow the egg cell that has set out on “the way of life.”

The egg cell is ovulated into the Fallopian tube. The tube carries it towards the uterus. Its fertilisation must take place in the tube itself. As soon as it meets the male gamete, chemical changes take place in the membranes of the female cell that prevent any other sperm from entering it — the way is cut off, the choice has been made! The immature egg cell completes its delayed meiotic division, its nucleus fuses with the nucleus of the man's cell, and the zygote is formed — the first cell of a human being… A real or only a potential human being?!

This question stands before society today with special urgency: is the zygote to be regarded as the beginning of a new human being, the starting point of a new life?! Whoever does not recognise the image of God in man, whoever identifies the human being with other living organisms, asks wittily, in the language of a parable: “Is the acorn already an oak, or only a potential oak?!” Others “philosophise”: to answer this question, it must be considered from many angles — biological, theological, philosophical, bioethical…

Let us consider the question from the biological angle and say unequivocally: the fertilised egg cell, the cell made whole from two halves, must be recognised as the starting point of a new human being, a new life. The zygote meets every criterion set for living matter. This is a scientific fact; the proof can be found under the microscope. Immediately upon fertilisation a new organism is conceived, which will have individual features — like its parents', yet unique. There are no two genetically identical beings (even identical twins differ from each other); the number of genes and the order in which they are arranged in the chromosomes are never repeated.

The zygote has the complete genetic information on the order and intensity with which the growth and development of the future organism should proceed. The rest is only a matter of time and of the timely supply of “building blocks.” It is not a potential being, but a real being with the potential for further growth and development.

Every human being consists of a material body and an immaterial soul. “The body without the spirit is dead,” we read in the New Testament (James 2:26).

Since the most ancient times, representatives of religious circles, theologians and thinkers have argued over questions of ensoulment. In the ancient Christian view, the unborn child is a complete person, and abortion is equivalent to killing one's child. Let us give a few extracts from Holy Scripture:

“…The Lord hath called me from the womb; from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name… And now, saith the Lord that formed me from the womb to be his servant…” (Isa. 49:1, 5);

“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations” (Jer. 1:5);

“Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?.. Or as an hidden untimely birth I had not been; as infants which never saw light” (Job 3:11, 16);

“But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by his grace…” (Gal. 1:15).

“And it came to pass, that, when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost” (Luke 1:41). Here the evangelist Luke calls John the Forerunner in the womb a “babe” (Luke 1:41–44). He uses the same word for Jesus already born: “And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger… And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger” (Luke 2:12, 16). The same coincidence of words is found in the Greek (brephos) and English (babe) versions, which should point us to the fact that the line between a born and a not-yet-born being is a conventional one.

According to Orthodox teaching, the soul is united with the body at the moment of conception. This needs no experimental confirmation. Nor shall we inquire into the origin of the soul: that is God's affair, and, as the holy fathers teach, our curiosity would not be pleasing to God.

Many of the most ancient Christian sources point to the synergy of soul and flesh already present in the human embryo. Everywhere abortion is judged to be the killing of a human being not yet born.

The early Christian apocryphal “Epistle of Barnabas” has come down to us, in which abortion is openly condemned: “Do not kill (Greek phoneuseis) a child (Greek teknon) by miscarriage (Greek phthora); do not commit infanticide.” The early Christian (1st-century) catechism, the “Didache,” instructs us in the same way. In both sources abortion is condemned as the killing of a child, and not as the removal of some meaningless growth in the womb.

In the early Christian Church there were many newly converted pagans among the faithful, who tried to bring the pagan spirit into the Church of Christ. What the Law of Moses forbade the Jews, and what Christian morality forbade, was a customary thing for them. Miscarriage was seen merely as getting rid of an unwanted and useless fruit, and it remained one of the essential features of pagan life.

Painting a picture of hell, the author of the apocryphal “Apocalypse of Peter,” written in the second century (probably in 125–150), condemns abortion. Whoever the author may be, the vision he relates is soul-shaking: “…nearby I saw a level place where the blood and shreds of flesh of the punished had collected into a lake. In the lake, sunk in blood up to their necks, sat women, and there sat children born before their time, many and weeping. And from them fell sparks of fire that burned the women, who had been condemned for getting rid of the fruit they had conceived.”

Here we recall the vision of the elder Gabriel, beloved of every Georgian, which he told to the doctor Z. V.:

“I had a vision: two bodies caught up with me, took me by the arms and led me to a white building. The stone floor of a great hall was strewn with dead, bloodied children the length of a finger. Through a hole in the ceiling more slaughtered children kept falling. Suddenly I heard a voice: ‘The Mother of God is coming, she is coming.’ I turned and pressed myself against the wall. The Mother of God stood at the entrance door and looked at me with a wrathful face.

— You beseech Me to save these? Their hands are stained with the blood of their own children.

I could not have imagined the Mother of God angry. I would rather the earth had opened and I had fallen in. The Mother of God looked down at the slaughtered children, then silently turned and went away.”

…Father Gabriel, they say, had tears in his eyes when he spoke of this.

The ardent champion of Christianity, St Athenagoras of Athens, wrote in 177: “Why do we consider abortion murder? Because the foetus does not belong to her in whose womb it is; it is a created being and therefore the object of God's care — and they kill it.”

The 2nd–3rd-century author Tertullian sees no difference between destroying the life of one who is born and preventing birth. As he holds, preventing birth is simply a speedier murder (“Apology,” 197). …Here I recalled a remark soaked in cynicism by a modern abortionist “doctor,” which I read in the pages of the Western press: “Of course this being is human, but we are not obliged to give it a visa for life.”

Clement of Alexandria (2nd–3rd centuries) called abortion “an assault on the plan conceived by the Creator.”

“A woman who deliberately destroys her unborn child is guilty of murder,” wrote St Basil the Great. At the same time he noted that the instrument of murder makes no difference — whether it be poison or something else.

Preaching in Antioch (381–397), St John Chrysostom, condemning the act of a woman who intended an abortion, pointed also to the guilt of the one who performs the abortion and likewise accused him of murder.

In ancient times the Church excommunicated the offenders and barred them from Communion for a long time. The Church later replaced this very severe punishment with a ten-year penance.

At the end of the 9th century a collection of church canons, the “Great Nomocanon,” was compiled, which unambiguously condemned any attempt at abortion.

…There are very many historical sources of this kind. Many saints, both of ancient times and of the recent past, have touched on this question. Quoting them, or even simply listing them, would take us far and lead us away from the main theme of our article. Only for this reason do we stop here.

To be continued…