Topics Abortion

Question Why do so many people on the pro-choice end of the abortion argument insist that life does not begin until after birth and that a fetus is not a human? I mean, you can say that an embryo is not a human because it has no cognitive abilities. You can use science to show that it has no cognitive abilities too, but you cannot use science to prove that cognitive abilities are the defining attribute of a person. As a matter of fact, don’t scientists identify organisms as members of their respective species based on their unique genetic signature? Human beings have a genetic signature of their own. Every human has it and no other species shares it with us. So, scientifically the fetus is a human, it’s only when we put religious sentiment into the mix that we can define it as anything else than a member of our species. The life argument is more effective except that biologically there’s no significance to the instant of birth. It’s culturally significant but is there any real transformation in the 32-week old fetus as it slides into the hospital?

Accepted:
February 8, 2009

Comments

If someone says of a (human) foetus that it is not human, then presumably they are not making a biological remark. They are not foolishly assigning it to the wrong species!

Rather, they are expressing -- not in a very happy way -- a moral view. The claim is that a foetus. at least at sufficiently early stages in its development, doesn't have the same moral status as a developed human being (a fully-fledged person).

Now, given the gradual biological development, it would -- as the question implies -- seem intolerable to suppose that there is, somewhere along the line between conception and birth and beyond, a point where there is a sudden jump from having no moral standing to having the standing of a full person. The natural view is that there is a corresponding increase in moral standing as you go along. And indeed, that seems to be what almost everyone actually thinks when considering the natural death of embryos and foetuses. A high percentage of conceptions (over 25%) result in very early natural terminations: we don't, in practice, think of that as a moral scandal as we might regard a similar level of neo-natal death. We don't think of a woman's rejoicing when an unwanted pregnancy naturally comes to an end after a couple of weeks as being on a par with a woman celebrating the death of an unwanted baby. The fundamental "pro-choice" thought is that we should think of the seriousness of bringing about the death of embryos and foetuses in proportion to the seriousness with which we do in fact mostly regard natural deaths of such things -- i.e. not very serious (so not on a par with the killing of a developed person) at the very outset, more serious as time progresses. But putting that thought in slogan form, and saying that foetuses aren't human, would -- I agree -- be misleading, to say the least.