The Frontal Cortex

One of my best friends just had his first kid. I'm almost 25, and there's something strange about seeing a person you usually associate with beer and baseball cradling his infant. It sets of all sorts of hormonal switches. Instead of thinking about Deadwood, Proust and the Red Sox (my usual stream of consciousness), I've been inundated with thoughts of babies. I think I've suddenly realized that, biologically speaking at least, I'm capable of becoming a parent. Weird.

That said, this post isn't about my twentysomething angst. It's about abortion, because my friend had a baby, Hillary Clinton gave a speech, and abortion - at least as a political issue - continues to completely befuddle me. I also think the facts of biology can some shed light on the controversy.

What can biology teach us? Well, let's begin with the obvious. Both political extremes are wrong. A zygote isn't a baby, and a third-trimester fetus isn't a zygote. If cellular biology knows anything, it's that life is a gradient. Our consciousness slowly accumulates. There is no magic spark when an egg starts dividing and differentiating. It's just DNA doing it's thing. Of course, let those cells divide for long enough, and you'll end up with something pretty miraculous. Deciding at what point the miracle begins - at what point that bundle of cells accumulates a "soul" - is, of course, the really difficult part. But other countries - like Britain, where abortion is an issue debated by doctors, not grandstanding Parliamentarians - show us that this question can be answered in a methodical and rational manner. Living in Britain during the last national campaign, I was astonished that abortion was scarcely debated, even though Blair, following the advice of the National Health Service, had recently cut the legal limit for an abortion to 24 weeks. (A plurality of British women think the legal limit should be cut further.)

What can the British teach us about abortion? That we should stop obsessing over the first trimester and the last trimester, and start worrying about the second trimester. The first trimester isn't worth fighting over because unless you are strict genetic determinist a child isn't simply the sum of its genetic material, and that is the only thing we have in common with our embryonic precursor. A two-month old fetus will never be able to live outside the womb, because it simply isn't a person yet. That said, a third trimester fetus can often survive outside the womb (at least when given state of the art medical care), so it seems dubious to deprive it of all moral agency. If there is no magic spark at the moment of conception, there is also no magic spark at the moment of birth.

Now for the really hard part: the second trimester. I'm no expert, so I won't pretend to know where we should draw the line for a legal limit. (24 weeks seems fair to me, but maybe the British are wrong...Let me know if you know better.) But it does strike me as ridiculously obvious that this is where the debate should be occurring. Yes, life is precious, sacred, etc., but this sacredness is an emergent property, which slowly unfolds over the course of a 9 month cellular cycle. Until we accept the brute facts of biology, I'm afraid our politcal debate over abortion in American will be marred by the idiotic and unscientific extremes. These biological facts aren't comfortable, and they go against many of our intuitions (I'm just a sac of cells?), and it's always eaiser to rally a crowd with false simplicities, but they just might help us get past this tiresome controversy.