In an essay for the Los Angeles Times (Nov. 4), Garry Wills, the noted historian and author of many books which include "What Jesus Meant," "Saint Augustine" and "Why Am I Catholic?", seems to have totally lost the answer to the last question in asserting that battling abortion has nothing to do with religion.

Wills should know better.

He begins his argument with the startling proposition that "the Catholic Church has not always treated abortion as murder," then asserts that "the subject of abortion is not scriptural." Abortion, he proclaims, is not treated in the Old or New Testament.

For good measure, Wills then tosses in the speculations of St. Thomas Aquinas about human ensoulment occurring "at the end of human generation."

For many Jews and Christians, "Thou shall not kill" in the Ten Commandments is obvious enough. In the New Testament, the instruction to "love God and love your neighbor as yourself" is also reasonably apt.

It would stand matters on their head to see loving oneself as an authorization to kill.

If we observe the strongest of human inclinations to preserve oneself, we can hardly fail to extend that sanctity to others.

As for St. Thomas, can it really be surmised that Aquinas would want faith to be denied the benefit of the knowledge of modern prenatal science?

Faith and reason are partners, not antagonists, and in this instance science exhibits the essence of unborn life far more fully to us than it did to Thomas.

Of course, Wills would likely insist that any argument likening abortion to murder begs the question since the killing referenced in the Decalogue and our duty to preserve life necessarily refer to "persons," and Wills contends we really don't treat the unborn as "persons."

For example, Catholics and other religious believers, argues Wills, do not call for imposing criminal punishment on a mother who kills her unborn child.

Fair enough. We have not done this, but it also proves nothing. It is a matter of prudent discernment how strongly human law ought to be drafted to coincide with the moral or natural law.

Since Wills fancies Aquinas, he should remember that the good Dominican admonished us not to "attempt to enact every virtue or prohibit every vice" into law, as doing so would overtax human capability.

But like so many moderns, Wills mistakes what is legal (or what consensus approves) for what is moral.

Wills also overlooks the sacramental teaching of the church on forgiveness and compassion, which itself would be a basis to be hesitant about criminalizing the decision of a woman that has to be so callously misled and deliberately confused by what John Paul II described as "the culture of death."

As for Wills' claim that abortion is not a scriptural subject, he might want to take a look at the teaching of the apostles in the Didache, traceable to the end of the first century, which rather explicitly recites "you shall not kill the embryo by abortion."

In my Catholic Catechism, this scriptural reference is reaffirmed with: "This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable" (par. 2271).

Since Wills is without support in Scripture or Aquinas for his proposition that abortion is not a religious subject, he is left with little in the way of argument.

He quotes the splendid Cardinal John Henry Newman as saying "I shall drink to the pope, if you please --- still, to conscience first, and to the pope afterward."

Cardinal Newman was not licensing human conscience to contradict either Scripture or natural law, but exactly the opposite. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger pointed out before assuming the papacy, Cardinal Newman had elaborated a theory of conscience which did not shade off into individualism.

In the end, virtually all of Wills' argument is simply the timeworn claim that, because the unborn child at various stages may not yet have a functioning central nervous system or cerebral cortex, he or she is not worthy of legal or moral protection.

This is not reason but misuse of science. No responsible researcher expects a moral answer to be derived from scientific description.

And even were that not true, long ago the late Dr. Jerome LeJeune, the world-renowned researcher of Down's Syndrome, noted that no geneticist has ever doubted that all that is necessary for human life exists from the moment of conception.

No, the only thing needed for people of good will to honor the dignity of unborn life is to observe the most basic principle of medical science: "Primum non nocere" ("first, do no harm") --- an admonition that applies to noted historians and sometime religious writers as well.

Douglas W. Kmiec is Caruso Chair and Professor of Constitutional Law at Pepperdine University, Malibu.