Now that we've got a sizable number of Democrats in Congress who aren't pro-choice, people have begun to wonder what sort of rhetorical and philosophical position the Democratic party should take on abortion. Some argue that Democrats should resort to the Clintonian mantra that abortion should be "safe, legal and rare". But others, like Julian Sanchez, argue that this makes too big a concession to the pro-life side, since it implicitly suggests that fetuses are "moral entities":
Abortion is a difficult and complex question if we suppose that the fetus is a person with interests and rights that must be weighed against those of the mother. But the proposition that fetuses are not moral persons is both true and worth defending loudly. Even very late in pregnancy, when a fetus may have some sort of rudimentary awareness, it lacks all the features traditionally advanced as moral distinctions between humans and other animals: a sense of self or identity, the capacity for abstract thought and reflection, and the capacity for moral choice.Treating fetuses as persons has harmful consequences, even if we simultaneously insist that their interests are trumped by women's right to control their bodies. For one, it means endorsing the notion that the one-third of American women who will have an abortion will be killing a child. And in the political realm, how uneasy we are about abortion will determine what measures short of an outright ban we are willing to entertain as means of ensuring that abortion remains "rare."
There is, of course, one immediate problem with denying fetuses any sort of moral agency. As a commenter asked Julian:
By your reasoning, what is the moral difference between a fetus and a baby the instant after it leaves the womb?
To which Julian replied:
No intrinsic difference, but there are a lot of pragmatic reasons to make birth the legal line, insofar as we need some line or other.
I think Julian is wrong. I'm adamantly pro-choice, but I don't think his is a coherent position. If the line separating murder and abortion is nothing but vaginal birth, then perhaps we should try to ground the issue in something besides "pragmatic reasons". Of course, I also don't want to default to some vague religious instruction, which holds that life begins at conception, and is thereafter immutably sacred.
So where can we turn? As I've noted before, I think we should attempt to ground the abortion debate less in our ethical intuitions, and more in the facts of biology. 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" or "mind" or "brain" - 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 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 any 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 unscientific extremes. These biological facts aren't comfortable, and they go against many of our dearest intuitions, and neither side gets exactly what it wants, but they just might help us get past this tiresome controversy.
Comments (13)
In regards to the Clinton mantra (abortions should be "safe, legal, and rare"), I don't think this position necessarily elevates fetuses to the status of a moral entity. I think it might just capture a healthy recognition that abortions are often hard on the women who have them.
I think it's also a savvy statement in that it pre-empts the kind of anti-choice argument which implies that some women might use abortion as a lazy alternate form of birth control. I mean, puh-leeze. An abortion isn't a walk in the park, emotionally OR physically. Nobody likes having an abortion.
I think that's where anti-abortion people sometimes get it wrong. They assume that the pro-choice faction has NO regard for the moral status of fetuses (that's not true; I think that a third-trimester and maybe a second-trimester fetus do have a moral status, and even though I happen to regard the moral status of the mother more highly, I don't think a later-term abortion is something to just shrug off), and the Clinton mantra speaks against that perception.
Posted by: katherine | November 16, 2006 12:04 PM