Right-wingers took up the anti-abortion flag in God's name, claiming the sanctity of life as their mantra. Pope Pius IX joined the fray as an outspoken critic of the procedure, a vocal foil to the necessarily silent sufferers. In 1869 he issued his famous decree of the church's position, outlining their point of view condemning abortion. Their arguments hinged on three points of religious interpretation. First, and most weighty, that the fetus is a person and contains a soul. The Roman Catholic Church was a bit muddled on this point, as the official standpoint from the church's very inception up until the decree was that the fetus was not a person until late in the gestational cycle (Tompkins 145). Peter Singer also argues, "The life of a fetus is of no greater value than the life of a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, etc." In addition, Singer infers that potential for rationality and the like is of no consequence in this view (Wennberg 83). Second, that because it contains a soul, it is a sin to destroy it. Third, that the conception of a child is contingent upon divine intervention and is therefore sacred, and humans should have no authority in the matter. Catholic priest George Patterson debunks this theory: "Free will is only free within a divine framework. There would be no way to abort a pregnancy if God didn't allow it. (Furthermore) life is a gift of God, but conception is not a result of direct intervention. It is a human act (and) we have to take responsibility for that. And there may be times when responsibility involves terminating pregnancy" (Rosenblatt 168). Another point often overlooked in these proceedings was that the mother was often imperiled herself, through an inability to care for both herself and the child she carried, but the mission of the church was to stop the killing of "innocents", not of the sinners who would even consider the horror of abortion.