Topics Abortion

Question How can abortion be so easily accepted in a civilized society? Sure, it is important that a woman or any person be able to have control over their body, but the fetus is a separate entity, a new person completely, as is logically shown by the fact that a mother can give birth to a male child. Anyone can tell this without having to use the available scientific evidence which proves my point. So, what gives any person the right to kill someone else so that they can live the way that they want?

Accepted:
April 10, 2008

Comments

There are plenty of hard issues about when and whether abortion should be allowed, but the particular argument you're offering won''t work. You seem to be saying: a typical newborn is a person (I take that to be the point about giving birth to a male child) and you go on to conclude that a fetus is a person. But this simply doesn't follow. It's perfectly consistent to think that, say, a two-week-old embryo isn't a person, i.e., a being with the same sorts of rights that you and I have, even though other things being equal this embryo will eventually become a person.

There's something else in your question that doesn't seem quite right. Allen Stairs queries your claim that the foetus (please pardon the British spelling!) is "a new person": for my part, I have some misgivings about the claim that it's "a separate entity". In what sense is the foetus separate from the mother? In the literal sense of the term, it blatantly isn't separate from her. It's inside her own body, and connected to her body through the placenta, no more separate from her than are her liver or kidneys. You might say: okay, but it's separate in the sense that it has the potential to survive in separation from her, as her liver and kidneys do not. But, for a foetus in the early stages of development, that's not true either. Many countries permit abortion, but -- except in really extreme cases where the mother's life is endangered -- only up to a certain time, that time being principally determined by the stage of development at which a foetus becomes capable of surviving outside the mother. Prior to that time, the living foetus not only isn't separate from the mother, but cannot be. You might say: fine, but what the foetus does have, even at that early stage of development, is, as it were, the potential to develop the potential to survive in separation from the mother. If left unmolested, it will eventually develop that potential, and then finally actualize it in birth. And that much does seem true.

Of course, this doesn't answer the moral question, it merely recasts it in a new form. Indeed, I fear that I may have been indulging here in the sort of subtle nit-picking that tends to give philosophers a bad name. But it's important to get the question straight before we can hope to answer it. The issue becomes one of whether this potential potential is sufficient to confer a right to life onto the foetus. Life by itself is not enough to establish a right to life. A person's kidney is alive, for instance, but it surely doesn't have a right to life. If one of a woman's kidneys is causing her harm, it'll just be removed and tossed in the bin while she carries on with the other, and no one will bat an eyelid over that loss of life. As I've indicated, the thing that sets the foetus apart from the kidney is its future potential. Is that enough of a difference to give it such an enormously elevated moral status? Some would say that it is, others would say that it isn't, and there are strong feelings on both sides. Unfortunately (not being an ethicist myself) I don't feel qualified to answer that question for you.

Allen Stairs rightly queries the claim that the foetus is already a new person: killing an early foetus is not straightforwardly killing a person -- it is at most killing something that would otherwise become a person.

Still, you might be tempted to say -- indeed, many people do say -- killing a potential person is as bad as killing a fully-fledged person.

Well, I disagree. But just asserting a disagreement is hardly very interesting. So what sort of grounds could I give to support my position? What sort of grounds could you give for yours?

At this point, we might be tempted to bandy about very general principles about the morality of killing or the "right to life" which are supposed to settle things one way or the other. Now this might help. But more likely, it will just shift the debate from a clash of intuitions about abortion to a clash of intuitions about these more general principles about killing and we will find ourselves going around in circles. What to do?

Well, I think it can help to set our thinking about abortion not just in the wider context of principles about killing but in the wider context of what we think about other early foetal deaths which happen naturally, or by accident or misadventure.

Now it does seem a notable fact that while the natural miscarriage in the very early weeks of a pregnancy may be, for some mothers, a misfortune, very few people regard it as the moral equivalent of e.g. the death of a newly born baby. Suppose a young woman has accidentally become pregnant, to her distress, and then a couple of weeks after a very early test gives a positive result she has a natural miscarriage. She feels much relieved and cheered at the outcome. Her girl friends even buy her a drink to celebrate. Very few of us would morally condemn the woman or her friends for their feelings! Very few would regard the woman as morally on a par with a mother who cheerfully celebrated the death of an inconvenient baby.

Here's another notable fact. It is estimated that 25% of all pregnancies are miscarried by thefourth week. Yet no one seems to campaign for medical intervention toreduce that figure in the way that they might campaign to raise money to reduce a highrate of child deaths in a developing country. We let nature take its course, even if that course involves the spontaneous miscarriage of a very large number of "potential people".

You can probably multiply such examples for yourself. And they do suggest that -- when we turn our attention away from the intentional causing of an abortion to other 'natural' cases of early foetal death -- we do not in general seem to regard the death of an early foetus as morally on a par with the death of a child. (I'm not saying we think of it as entirely insignificant, just that we seem to give the death increasingly more weight as the foetus develops.)

But now the question obviously arises: if in practice we do not believe that the death of an early foetus is in other cases straightforwardly the moral equivalent of the death of a full-fledged person, and if we are happy to reflectively retain that general view about foetal death, then why should we think that the intentional killing of an early foetus is the moral equivalent of the intentional killing of a full-fledged person? If the natural death of a potential person doesn't matter as much as the natural death of a child (think again of all those spontaneous miscarriages), when why should the unnatural death of a potential person be thought of as particularly grave -- a sort of infanticide? I for one find it difficult to see any reason for treating the gravity of the natural and unnatural deaths very differently.

Now, there are of course various further things that might be said here (but not in the confines of a short answer!). But at least we have here a hopefully illuminating suggestion about how to start thinking about abortion. Try thinking first about the moral weight you actually do give to other kinds of embryo/early foetal death at various stagaes, in particular to natural or accidental deaths. Consider whether you are content to rest with those views you have. Now try to make your moral views about the level of seriousness of causing foetal death fit together consistently with those views about the seriousness of natural and accidental deaths.