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.
- Log in to post comments
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.
Julian's argument is basically the one posited by Peter Singer in Practical Ethics. I agree with it completely. Singer ends up working himself up into infancide being ok in some circumstances - then he backs down and says, "well, birth is just such a nice convenient line". And isn't it, really? If you can get yourself past birth in the argument, then the line is convenient. If you're trapped somewhere in the second trimester, you'll never resolve anything.
Abortions, by the way, should not only be safe and legal, but frequent (relative to the number of unwanted births, that is). Our world is bursting at the seams, and having more than two children is pretty selfish. Grated that birth control is the best option, but on the rare occassions proper birth control fails, we should never hesitate.
Thanks for your comment Jeff. I agree that birth is a very convenient line, but aren't their issues here that are more important than convenience? I also agree that depending on biology and medicine to draw a tenuous line somewhere in the second trimester doesn't "resolve" anything, at least not permanently. As has happened in Britain, the line is constantly being redrawn. But the fuzziness of that line just reflects the inherent fuzziness in trying to say when a sac of cells becomes a moral agent worth protecting. I'm not saying that biology will give us all the answers, but it can provide us with (inconvenient) facts that can augment our moral intuitions. If we knew nothing about fetuses, or fetal development, then drawing the line at birth would make perfect sense. But we know a lot about fetuses, and about how their central nervous system develops, and about when they can be viable outside the womb. Shouldn't we also take those facts into account?
I think we should take facts about fetuses into account, but we know perfectly well a newly born infant is less intelligent than a pig, and I ate one of those for dinner last night. I think the source of a lot of anti-abortion sentiment in this country is that to be reasonable about it, you need to remember our status as animals and nothing more, and that makes people uncomfortable. I guess I mean it's convenient only insofar as we can make the argument that infancide is ok, which clearly isn't trivial - it's extreme and fairly prickly in nature, but I recommend checking out the relevent chapter of that book, which I think should be more often used as a guide for discussion on this topic. I suspect that won't be happening for the majority of Americans any time soon, so maybe we should fuss over the second trimester.
Anyways, if we had good policy with regards to sex education, and abortion (and sex, for that matter) lacked stigma, then I suppose there would be little need for post first trimester abortions anyways.
Yes, I suppose I should clarify that my position's as the commenter above suggests: I agree that personhood is a gradual emergent property, but think that just about all of the interestign stuff happens well afterbirth, at which point the fetus is in-itself due, at most, the kind of consideration we owe other animals. My suggestion is that insofar any legal line we choose will be somewhat arbitrary (why not five minutes earlier? later?) we're justified in action on the many practical reasons to choose birth, extending legal-person status to infants that don't yet actually have it morally.
Thanks for the comments. I clearly have to read my Singer. While I agree that it's morally incoherent to bestow moral agency on infants but not pigs or cows or parrots or chimps, I also think that politics rarely reflects or aspires to the coherent logic of philosophers. Abortion is a political decision, and I'm not sure we'll convince many pro-lifers by calling them hypocrites and pointing to the bloody hamburger on their plate. Most Americans can't even accept Darwin, let alone admit that their babies are dumber than their dinner.
So if we are offering political advice to Democrats, I don't think Singer is the way to go. (But I appreciate his thought-provoking thoughts nonetheless.)
Well, I'm not suggesting that Dems make "very young infants lack moral personhood" a campaign slogan. I'll be delighted if we can get as far as agreeing that the 98 percent of abortions that happen before fetuses have *any* kind of consciousness don't present a moral problem. Then at least the debate is in the right place: What kind of consciousness matters, and what line does that imply? The line people like Saletan want to hew to is that *every* abortion is, not just difficult for the woman choosing it, but a moral evil and cause for national shame.
Ok, we agree. I just think the best way to get other people to agree that 98 percent of abortions don't involve the killing of a moral entity is by grounding the debate in biological facts and medical realities. The only way to purge this debate of its shrill rhetoric (Saletan included) is to focus on the cellular mechanics. That seems to have worked for Europe. (I know, I know, Europe doesn't have Pat Robertson. But still.)
Excellent post.
World estimations of the number of terminations carried out each year is somewhere between 20 and 88 million.
Over 3,500 per day / Over 1.3 million per year in America alone.
50% of that 1.3 million claimed failed birth control was to blame.
A further 48% had failed to use any birth control at all.
And 2% had medical reasons.
That means a staggering 98% may have been avoided had an effective birth control been used.
People have to stop using abortion as birth control.
I'd like to see effective birth control made available to all who can't afford it.
If conception is NOT when life begins,and a clump of cells is just that and not a living human being.
Then at least concider this-
Soon after you were conceived you were no more than a clump of cells.
This clump of cells was you at your earliest stage, you had plenty of growing to do but this clump of cells was you none the less. Think about it.
Aren't you glad you were left unhindered to develope further.
Safe inside your mother's womb until you were born.
Yes, people should "stop using abortions as birth control" but only because they're expensive and inconvenient. The reason there's not enough use of birth control is largely due to the same people that can't deal with abortions so go figure.
"soon after..."
That argument is philosophically vapid. Something that never attains conciousness cannot weep for its lack of never having attaned conciousness. It's like crying for all the sperm I merciliously kill. They could have become babies, but tough shit, they didn't.
jeffk,
And it would be tough shit if you had been aborted. right?
World estimations of the number of terminations carried out each year is somewhere between 20 and 88 million.(likely 55 to 60)
Over 3,500 per day / Over 1.3 million per year in America alone.
50% of that 1.3 million claimed failed birth control was to blame.
A further 48% had failed to use any birth control at all.
And 2% had medical reasons.
That means a staggering 98% may have been avoided had an effective birth control been used.
People have to stop using abortion as birth control.
I'd like to see effective birth control made available to all who can't afford it.
If you think the point of conception is NOT when life begins, and all you have is a clump of cells and not a living human being.
Then at least concider this -
Soon after you were conceived you were no more than a clump of cells.
This clump of cells was you at your earliest stage, you had plenty of growing to do but this clump of cells was you none the less. Think about it.
Aren't you glad you were left unhindered.... to develope further.
Safe inside your mother's womb until you were born.
At the point of conception is when life began for you. This was the start of your existance. Your own personal big bang. Three weeks after conception heart started to beat. First brain waves recorded at six weeks after conception. Seen sucking thumb at seven weeks after conception.