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The Morality of Abortion: A Critique
I welcome constructive feedback; I'd like to improve this essay and my
understanding of the topic. The analysis of utilitarian defenses of abortion
should probably be tighter.
The Morality of Abortion: A Critique
B. Sharvy | Other Topics
In this essay I will canvass the main arguments of the abortion debate, with the hope of sharpening that debate.
The goal is to clarify ideas, rather than to defend
a political position. Only the central ground of the debate is considered:
the morality of "convenience" abortion stemming from consensual, adult sex.
The conclusions this essay demands are: 1) the morality of abortion is
a complex topic with reasonable arguments available to both sides; 2)
greater respect than is typically found in public forums is due to both
sides; 3) it is impossible to hold a standard pro-choice or pro-life
position without contradicting some other widely held, intuitive belief.
Those who enjoy intellectual challenges in life will find this last
conclusion particularly exciting.
The abortion debate begins with the moral status of the fetus. If the fetus has no rights, then abortion is a non-issue--it is as easy to justify as an appendectomy. But, if the fetus has rights, then abortion doesn't solely concern the freedom of women, since personal freedom is constrained by the rights of others. The most prevalent
argument that the fetus has a moral status disallowing abortion is:
A fetus is a
member of the biological species homo sapiens (i.e., a human
being).
To destroy a human being
deliberately is unethical (it's murder).
Therefore, abortion is unethical (murder), since it constitutes the
deliberate destruction of a
human being.
However, there are some widely granted exceptions to the rule
that to destroy a human being deliberately is unethical. (In this
essay "human being" refers strictly to an animal of the species
homo sapiens; it has no intrinsic sense of being a member of a society,
or person with rights--using the term in those senses, in this particular
discussion, tends to produce circular arguments.)
A popular justification for intentionally destroying a human
being is self-defense, and the principle of self-defense is widey advanced
on behalf of abortion. But it doesn't justify abortion. A claim of
self-defense doesn't defend against a criminal charge when it comes from
the party who brought about the conflict. For example, parents can't invoke self-defense and treat their (minor) children as trespassers,
because parents bring it about that there are children needing shelter.
Parents also bring about pregnancy, so self-defense
can't justify ending pregnancy in ways that are
normally criminal, such as killing a human being. An occasional rebuttal
here is that parents aren't responsible for the pregnancy if
they didn't intend it. But, responsibility for the consequences of one's
actions isn't limited to intended consequences. Causing accidents and
gambling are two examples of how we can be responsible for unintended
consequences. Unintended, unwanted pregnancy due to consensual sex is
merely a lost gamble (or maybe an accident, if the possibility of
pregnancy was poorly understood). So in general, when liberties are in
conflict the rights of the party that brought about the
conflict--intentionally or not--give way. If it is granted that fetuses
have the "basic human rights", then the rights of the mother must defer to
those of the fetus, and the principle of self-defense doesn't justify
abortion.
Murder is sometimes defended on utilitarian grounds; for example, in the
case of war. To wage war is to bring about the death of innocents knowingly;
such deaths are unavoidable as a practical matter. Nonetheless, many believe
that war can be justified, if the good outweighs the evil. So perhaps
abortion could be defended as a moral choice, even if it were murder, on the
same grounds. This approach has a number of problems. It is
difficult to see how utilitarian principles could justify a rights violation
as serious as murder in order to avoid an outcome which is merely burdensome
(childbearing) and which can be avoided with peaceful methods
(refraining from intercourse). Most utilitarian defenses of
abortion seem also to work as defenses of infanticide: both might reduce the
number of unwanted children (and attendant social problems), and
increase the freedom and autonomy of women (by reducing their
obligations). A utilitarian approach requires that competing outcomes be
valued (in order to compare them), and that valuing seems
arbitrary when the competing outcomes are of different types. For example, in
war, one might weigh the number of murders that will result if no war is
waged against the number of murders that will result from waging war; the
value assigned to murder isn't an issue in such a comparison as long as
it is consistent. In the case of abortion, however, the possible outcomes
are of different types, e.g., the increased freedom of women vs. death of
human beings innocent of wrongdoing. The value of each outcome
relative to the other is an extra issue that is subjective and complex
(possibly involving many outside factors, such as the availability of
adoption), and perhaps can only be settled by
expedient means such as "majority rule." Finally, overriding individual
rights on utilitarian grounds may not serve the pro-choice movement well,
since the pro-choice movement is typically rights-based. For example, to
make the utilitarian argument outlined above is to allow, in principle, the
possibility that abortion may be coerced by the state, if it can be shown
that the abortion benefits the society more than permitting the birth would.
Regardless of whether such a thing could actually be shown, even to allow
the principle--to legitimize an inquiry into whether such a thing can be
shown--is inconsistent with a pro-choice position grounded in women's
rights (which seems to be the mainstream pro-choice position). In summary,
using
utilitarianism to defend against the charge that abortion is murder
is probably a mistake and certainly
problematic. It seems to require that a life be valued less than
personal convenience, or that abortion be no different morally from
infanticide. It also seems to entail a complex and subjective
weighting of outcomes. Utilitarianism itself is controversial and rejected
by many (it has a "commie" flavor), although it seems necessary in some form
to justify war (also pollution).
Implicit in the claim that it is unethical to kill a human being
deliberately is the idea that we have rights because we are human
beings.
Therefore, the reasoning goes, a fetus has rights, since a fetus is a human
being. This idea has been rejected by some philosophers (especially Michael
Tooley, in Abortion and Infanticide). The alternative view is that
membership in a biological species is not morally significant in itself;
that is, if most human beings have rights, it isn't because they belong to a
biological species that is innately morally privileged, but because of some
other feature or features that human beings typically possess. Such features
are usually held to be mental: self-awareness, self-determination, etc.
Exactly which features, and to what degree, a being needs in order to have
rights seems very complex, but it is reasonable to attach them to a capacity
for self-determination, on the grounds that self-determination is the
individual right from which others (such as the right not to be murdered)
derive. Such features would be mental then, e.g., a capacity for acting by
choice (as opposed to reflex), for sustained interests and thought, for
having goals, and so on. In any case, the collective of mental capacities
needed to endow a being with rights is typically called "personhood";
the position that mental capacities rather than biological specieshood
determine an entity's rights is sometimes called the "personhood" argument.
We are thought to have rights not because of our biological species, but
because we are persons. The personhood argument has some results that are
intuitively appealing to many:
It justifies letting a human being in a persistent vegetative state
die, which is difficult when the relevant moral criteria derive from
being a homo sapiens rather than being a person.
It would explain the feeling that an animal's moral status varies
according to its typical ontological status: that it is more wrong to
kill a dog for no reason than a fly, that whales and other primates
(but not shrimps and ants) deserve humane treatment because they are
"intelligent," and so on.
It would explain rights in a way that avoids "speciesism." It seems
true intuitively that a non-human species that could talk, laugh, cry
and aspire with us would have the same rights that we have--a result
not produced by the theory that being a human is what causes these
rights.
It explains why spontaneously aborted zygotes (usually never even
detected) are not a great loss.
So according to the personhood view, the morality of abortion depends on the
mental capacities of the fetus. In normal human beings, none of the mental
capacities generally referred to as "higher" capacities, e.g., thought, are
detectable until after birth. So it is unlikely that a fetus or a neonate is
a person, even granting considerable uncertainty over which capacities,
exactly, personhood requires. Pro-life advocates make the point that brain
activity occurs in fetuses, but their point has problems. The
conventional pro-life view needs to account for the zygote, not the
fetus, and there is no brain activity in zygotes; in fact, there is no
brain in zygotes. So the conventional pro-life view can't incorporate
personhood criteria at all. More importantly, brain activity is not in
itself
relevant. Brain activity--EEGs, REM, reflexive functioning, etc.--occurs in
many animals that aren't persons. The "higher" capacities in humans have
been located in the upper layers of the cerebral cortex, which is physically
incapable of significant functioning until after birth. So, it appears that
fetuses are not persons, and if the personhood view is correct, that they
have no rights and that abortion is moral in any term. However, if the
personhood view is correct, neonates have the same moral status as fetuses,
and infanticide is equally moral, since the event of birth doesn't
correspond to the event of attaining personhood (significant psychological
plateaus seem to occur at two to three months and one year). Birth
determines where the human is, not what he or she is. In summary, the
personhood view has much intuitive support, and results in a justification
of abortion, but by the same token it justifies infanticide of neonates. Yet
infanticide is a practice which most people are intuitively and emotionally
unwilling to accept.
Conclusion: it is not easy for most people to reject the standard pro-life
argument without rejecting other beliefs they have, such as the belief that
infanticide is wrong, or murder isn't justified to serve society. Most
people cannot disprove the pro-life position without also disproving some
other strongly held belief.
The same problem exists in the pro-life camp. More than half of
conceptions are naturally aborted within a month. If the loss of zygote
life is equivalent to the loss of a person's life, then the spontaneous
abortion of zygotes is an enormous natural disaster, the numbers dwarfing
death from any other natural cause. Yet the activism on behalf of medical
research to reduce such abortions is nil, and dead zygotes (when noticed)
conventionally don't receive standard ceremony. In their practices, people
don't seem to care about zygotes as they do people. Additionally,
according to the pro-life argument presented, which I think is the most
representative, a woman who has an abortion is a murderer. Criminal
treatment is therefore required, in the harshest acceptable form, since
abortion is premeditated and predicated on a philosophy denying the rights
of a group of people: it fits the definition of hate-crime. Yet most
pro-lifers are intuitively and emotionally unwilling to endorse treatment
of such women as murderers in our justice system. The pro-life movement
largely distances itself from "extremists" who resort to violence to stop
abortion, and yet such violent methods are justified in order to prevent
bona fide murder (not to mention genocide). Pro-lifers sometimes explain
the forgiveness of women who have abortions by depicting them as hapless
victims, brainwashed by profiteering doctors--a sweeping
theory for which there seems to be zero research. Nor is the theory
consistent even if true: We do not usually excuse hate-crimes because the
perpetrator was swayed by the prejudice of others (unless the perpetrator
is a child or insane, which presumably does not describe the average
woman).
Pro-life sometimes counters the personhood argument by arguing that having
the potential for personhood endows the fetus with the same rights as having
personhood. The argument doesn't work. The general situation is that there
are some properties a thing may have that make it unethical to destroy that
thing--that give it "human" rights." Such properties could be personhood, or
membership in homo sapiens--it doesn't matter. The proposal, then, is that
the potential to possess such a property is, in itself, such a
property.
But that proposal leads to infinite regress, since it implies that the
potential for the potential to possess a certain property endows one with
rights as well, and so on. It only takes a few iterations of that principle
to get the result that amino acids have rights. To say that the potential
for X is an example of actual X renders the distinction between potential
and actual meaningless. (Potential differs from capacity: a person in deep
sleep has a capacity for thought and other mental feats definitive of
personhood, even though those feats are not being performed; a fetus lacks
those capacities, although it has the potential for them.)
In any case, the upshot is that the morality of abortion is not a simple
topic. It is less simple than many people with opinions on it will
acknowledge, not only in public, but, it seems, to themselves. One of the
most exciting features of this topic, intellectually, is that it has
something to violate the intuitions of everyone. Neither pro-life nor
pro-choice can generate a logically consistent position on abortion without
abandoning other beliefs which are strongly and widely held. Perhaps less
self-righteousness from both sides is in order, then.
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