Against Abortion
It looks as though the American Ennéarchy might finally be content to return the question of abortion to the political sphere. Judicial supremacy being what it is1, the law must be discovered by pushing its limits, and it is the brave people of Texas who have made the first sally with Senate Bill 8 — which law protects the unborn from the moment they have a detectable heartbeat. This slight arrestment in the industrial-scale slaughter of children has been greeted, predictably, as the imposition of theocratic tyranny, with the greatest part of the ire directed at Texas’ Christians. And fair enough; those who do the heavy-lifting must take the lion’s share of the credit, and there is no denying that our Christian friends have been the chief and most effective advocates for the unborn. Credit and blame are duly theirs. This fact, however, has created the impression that only religionists oppose abortion, and that there are no secular arguments against it. So that’s what I will endeavour to lay out here: the godless case for not killing children.
1.
I begin the discussion of abortion stating the position of those opposed to abortion, which I shall refer to as the conservative position. I shall then examine some of the standard liberal responses, and show why they are inadequate. Finally I shall use our earlier discussion of the value of life to approach the issue from a broader perspective. In contrast to the common opinion that the moral question about abortion is a dilemma with no solution, I shall show that, at least within the bounds of nonreligious ethics, there is a clear-cut answer and those who take a different view are simply mistaken.
~ Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, Chapter Six “Taking Life: the Embryo and the Fetus2”
There’s much to admire about Peter Singer, despite the fact that he is the exemplar of those who have been driven mad by their own reason. Chief amongst his qualities is his intellectual honesty, which disallows him from addressing anything but the strongest form of his opponents’ argument. It’s therefore not necessarily that strange that upon first reading Chapter Six of Practical Ethics, I found myself more opposed to abortion than I had been to begin with, quite against the writer’s intentions. Here’s how Singer presents what he calls the “conservative position”:
First premise: It is wrong to kill an innocent human being.
Second premise: A human fetus is an innocent human being.
Conclusion: Therefore it is wrong to kill a human fetus.
Efficient enough, and while it’s not the only possible argument against abortion (it wouldn’t be incoherent to argue that it’s inherently wrong in itself), it identifies the key features of the battleground. Singer claims that most liberal responses involve denying the second premise — specifically the part of the second premise which claims that foetuses are “human beings”. I’m not entirely sure this is a good characterisation of the most common liberal arguments for legal abortion — more on that later — but it is where arguments tend to end up when liberals and conservatives debate the question.
Singer thinks this is pretty hopeless. A new-born infant is certainly a human being, so any claim that a foetus isn’t must identify some property an infant has that a foetus lacks which makes the difference. Considering the possible moments at which this property might arise, he rejects birth (because it’s implausible that the child’s moral status should depend on its location — inside or outside of the womb), viability (too contingent), and quickening (too mediævel). Instead, Singer proposes that the advocates for abortion reject the first premise: “It is wrong to kill an innocent human being.”
The weakness of the first premise of the conservative argument is that it relies on our acceptance of the special status of human life. We have seen3 that 'human' is a term that straddles two distinct notions: being a member of the species Homo sapiens, and being a person. Once the term is dissected in this way, the weakness of the conservative's first premise becomes apparent. If 'human' is taken as equivalent to 'person', the second premise of the argument, which asserts that the fetus is a human being, is clearly false; for one cannot plausibly argue that a fetus is either rational or self-conscious. If, on the other hand, 'human' is taken to mean no more than 'member of the species Homo sapiens', then the conservative defence of the life of the fetus is based on a characteristic lacking moral significance and so the first premise is false.
It’s a muddle, and can’t be expected to compel anyone who doesn’t already agree with Singerian ethics. We can cheerfully and intuitively reject both legs of Singer’s argument — first that personhood is somehow identical to rationality or self-consciousness, secondly that membership of the species Homo sapiens is morally irrelevant. Personhood is that which is possessed by persons. Do we know of persons who lack rationality and self-consciousness? Yes! New born babies lack rationality. Coma patients lack self-consciousness. What they have is the potential to acquire (or reacquire) these things (and numerous other capacities that we might consider relevant) in the future — which same potentiality is possessed by foetuses. But this is to pursue a strict definition for a concept, “person”, which is known intuitively. How do we intuitively answer the question “Is this a person?” When “this” is, as Singer put it, a “member of the species Homo sapiens”: always yes. When “this” is a toaster: always no. There may be edge cases in between but those edge cases (plausibly, Elephants; possibly chimpanzees, if you like that kind of thing) must necessarily lie outside “members of the species Homo sapiens”. Indeed, “person” is, in truth, a synonym of the term “human being”, which natural category preceded by many centuries the empirical discovery that every member of that category is a member of the genus Homo. That discovery now having been made, we can say that membership of the species Homo sapiens does indeed have moral significance, because membership of that species means membership of the category “human being” — not, we should note, the other way around. Had our cousins the Neanderthals and the Denisova people survived into modernity, there’s no doubt that they ought to have been considered “human beings” and “persons”, by the same intuitive faculty by which we identify one another as such; the category “human being” is broader than the category “Homo sapiens”, and contains it entirely. Consider this well-drawn diagram:
This shows the local neighbourhood of thing-space — the space of all possible4 things varying along every axis they could possibly vary along. It’s represented here in 2D because Microsoft Paint wouldn’t let me draw in a trillion dimensions. Here we have, in white bubbles, things that actually exist (or have existed or will exist). In blue we have the empty space of things which could exist but don’t — all of those things which are partway between human and chimp, all of those things between human and robot. (Technically most of the area in white should be coloured in blue as well, because, for example, the vast majority of possible Homo sapiens will never be born. I trust the reader to make the mental adjustment.) Now say we have to draw in this space the boundaries of personhood — a bubble inside which everything is a person, and outside which nothing is. There are a few ways we could go about this. Here’s probably the most natural:
The boundary passes through the serene blue of unrealised things. This is an advantage — we know that some things in the blue area, if they existed, would be persons. But it’s also a matter of moral indifference if we’ve drawn the boundary in slightly the wrong place — which we certainly have! Natural categories contain some things with certainty — their own archetypes — and exclude some things with certainty, but there are also edge-cases about which we can only say “sort of”. The boundaries of natural categories are fundamentally fuzzy and indeterminate. Drawing our boundary through the space of non-existent things frees us from the obligation of deciding the undecidable.
Here’s another option, more generous to our hairy cousins:
Now, given that “person” and “human being” are naturally occurring categories, we should expect no sharp line between person and non-person. The boundary, as I said, is necessarily fuzzy. Bearing that in mind, consider the perversity of drawing it so precisely as this:
Here, the indeterminacy of meaning which results from the ostensive procedure by which meaning is derived (the meaning of words begins in the use of words) has been confounded by the unjustified precision of an extensional definition, and we are left with an undecidable problem: are those entities which lie near the boundary persons? If we really do decide that this is where we must draw the line (which premise I don’t grant except hypothetically), the metaphysical question cannot be answered, but our moral obligations are clear. Just as we feel, rightly, that the higher apes, elephants, dolphins etc. are entitled to a certain amount of moral consideration in light of their person-like capacities, we ought to err on the side of caution and treat foetuses as people. There is a moral asymmetry: it is not in general morally wrong to treat non-persons are persons, but it is morally wrong to treat persons as non-persons.
Singer’s attempt at intentional definition — which really only means to identify one category with another, in this case personhood with the capacity for rationality or self-consciousness — allows him to draw a brighter line (although the problem of indeterminacy can never be entirely eluded). Leaving aside the question of whether this is really what we mean by personhood (it’s clearly not), Singer’s definition yields further problems:
We have already seen that the strength of the conservative position lies in the difficulty liberals have in pointing to a morally significant line of demarcation between an embryo and a newborn baby. The standard liberal position needs to be able to point to some such line, because liberals usually hold that it is permissible to kill an embryo or fetus but not a baby. I have argued that the life of a fetus (and even more plainly, of an embryo) is of no greater value than the life of a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel. etc., and that since no fetus is a person no fetus has the same claim to life as a person. Now it must be admitted that these arguments apply to the newborn baby as much as to the fetus. A week-old baby is not a rational and self-conscious being, and there are many nonhuman animals whose rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel. and so on, exceed that of a human baby a week or a month old.
And:
I do not regard the conflict between the position I have taken and widely accepted views about the sanctity of infant life as a ground for abandoning my position. These widely accepted views need to be challenged.
You can now see why all those years ago I finished this chapter more pro-life than I was when I began: the Singerian argument for abortion is actually a Singerian argument for infanticide (neither he nor his followers, therefore, have any right to object if we refer to abortion as the killing of children). Singer is so honest he provides his own reductio ad absurdum. And if you reject his argument for this reason, what are you left with? The conservative argument where we began: that abortion is the killing of an innocent human being, and therefore morally wrong. Thanks for the help, Peter.
2.
Okay — let’s return to that second premise, which I actually think can be given stronger advocacy than Singer gave it. The pro-choice might well say: so we can’t locate a plausible moment or event in which an embryo or foetus becomes a human-being — but come on, the small clump of cells that exists in the first few weeks after conception just isn’t, intuitively, a person, and therefore, fast or slow, the change must occur.
The problem with this is it isn’t our intuitive belief that embryos aren’t people — “clump of cells” rhetoric exists solely for the purpose of the abortion debate. Elsewhere, whenever abortion isn’t the issue at hand, we instinctively talk about “unborn children”. Expectant parents’ attachment to their children is immediate, as long as they intend to carry the child to term. Often they will be nicknamed and, once the sex is known, himmed and herred — “it” is left quickly behind. In normal circumstances, by the time the child’s heartbeat is detectable, it will already be the object of love and fierce attachment, and accompanied by the handmaiden of all loves and attachments: the fear of tragedy. Miscarriages are recognised as such, and miscarried children are mourned by their parents — their passing is not a matter of indifference. We know that if a pregnant woman dies in a car accident, something worse has happened than a single death. We know that if a man assaults his pregnant partner, he has added to the repugnant crime of wife-beating a still greater repugnance in threatening not one life but two. And recognition of the fragility of new life must play some part in the concern and higher regard we feel obligated to show for pregnant women — it is not only out of concern for her welfare, but for the welfare of both parties.
It is only when we’re discussing abortion that these things are forgotten, and the unborn child downgraded to a canker. The belief in the unborn child as a member of the moral community is not some religious fetish; it is the ordinary belief of the masses, religious or otherwise, when politics does not intrude.
3.
You will sometimes see a thought experiment that seeks to show that no one really believes that an embryo is a child — a simple “who would you save?” dilemma, which goes like this: You’re in a burning building, and have time to save either a newborn baby, bawling in a wicker basket, or else a stainless-steel tray holding a hundred frozen embryos. Which do you choose? It’s a dilemma which has at times frustrated its proposers, because to their interlocutors the answer doesn’t seem as obvious as they wish it to seem. You’re supposed to say: obviously I save the baby, because saving the inert embryos is madness. But in that word “inert” we see the problem: the dilemma is under-specified. What happens to the embryos once they are rescued?
Why is it good to save a life, anyway? Or rather: who is it good for? It’s not a good that can be accounted for in the moment; having one’s life saved is not necessarily an enjoyable experience. Rather, it’s good because it preserves a future for the person who is saved; a future of which they can make some worthwhile use.5 This applies as much to the embryos as it does to the baby — so long as their future really is preserved. For that to be the case, the embryos would have to be gestated and birthed — if they remain frozen, their preserved life is not good for them, and therefore not a good at all, and we should prefer to save the baby. Whereas if these embryos are awaiting implantation, well, I won’t say we should prefer to save them over the baby, but we would certainly be saving more lives. Other considerations might move us: the cries of the baby, the thought of it suffering and so on, and being moved by pity choose to save fewer lives. Both pity and the desire to save the most lives possible are virtuous motives6, and I therefore condemn neither decision made according to those motives — so long as the embryos have a real future awaiting them.
4.
I said earlier that Peter Singer’s characterisation of the pro-choice position was not entirely accurate: they are not primarily concerned with whether or not the foetus is a human being, as we conservatives are; rather, their chief concern is the bodily autonomy of the pregnant woman. It is along these lines that they first express themselves, and where their “talking points”, which are free of the constraints of debate, are directed. Think of the slogan “my body, my choice”. This mode of argument was given its most famous expression by Judith Jarvis Thomson. Thomson, while not granting (except hypothetically) that an unborn child is a person from conception, acknowledges that a foetus is probably a person well before birth. She, like Singer, prefers to deny the first premise of the conservative argument: that it is wrong to kill innocent human beings (or perhaps it could be said: she denies that a foetus is innocent).
Here’s Thomson:
I propose, then, that we grant that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception. How does the argument go from here? Something like this, I take it. Every person has a right to life. So the fetus has a right to life. No doubt the mother has a right to decide what shall happen in and to her body; everyone would grant that. But surely a person's right to life is stronger and more stringent than the mother's right to decide what happens in and to her body, and so outweighs it. So the fetus may not be killed; an abortion may not be performed.
It sounds plausible. But now let me ask you to imagine this. You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, "Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you--we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you." Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says. "Tough luck. I agree. but now you've got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person's right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him." I imagine you would regard this as outrageous, which suggests that something really is wrong with that plausible-sounding argument I mentioned a moment ago.
The point of this kind of reasoning by analogy is to compare a situation in which our moral intuitions are certain to one in which our moral intuitions are vexed, and extract from the former knowledge about the latter. Necessarily there must be some differences between the analogy and the subject of interest — a thing cannot be analogised to itself — but the procedure can, in theory, work, so long as there are no morally relevant differences between the two situations. It seems odd to me, then, the Thomson’s thought experiment has been so widely discussed, as it seems to be almost nothing but morally relevant differences. To make Thomson’s violinist story morally equivalent to pregnancy, we would have to imagine that it takes place in a world where some common, pleasurable act — say eating a kiwi fruit — regularly and predictably created violinists out of thin air7 who need the blood of the kiwi-fruit-eater for nine months in order to stay alive. Would we think the right of people to eat kiwi fruits so pressing that we would recognise a second right to create life — and leave it to die? Or would we rather think that the kiwi-eaters know what they’re getting themselves into, are responsible for the life they’ve created, and have an obligation to keep it alive if they can. If they don’t want to give their blood to a violinist, they can simply not eat kiwis — those who are truly hungry can find another fruit to masticate.
We need not even propose such odd metaphysical circumstances — take Thomson’s original specification and make one change: that the person kidnapped is the violinist’s father. In this case, we can view the kidnappers as doing nothing more than holding the man to his parental obligations, which he should have been willing to perform even without their intervention. We can and do expect more than this of parents, and parental neglect is a criminal offense. We may not want the obligation enforced by law in this case — but that’s precisely because we visualise the violinist as an adult, to whom parental obligations are diminished. In fact we see that Peter Singer’s ideas of moral status are exactly backwards; children most strongly command our obligations to them because of their weakness and dependency, not their well-developed capacities. Weakness and dependency are most strongly exemplified by the unborn child, who is at that time more dependent on his parent than he will ever be again. So we see that if the thought experiment is made properly to correspond to pregnancy and abortion, it confirms quite the opposite conclusion to that which Thomson proposes.
5.
What about IVF? In the process, more embryos are created than can be brought to term. The left-over embryos are discarded — which is to say, they die. Is IVF therefore immoral? Ideally we would not want to create any more lives than can be properly lives — for each embryo we would like to offer a future that they can make use of. But this cannot be achieved because of current technological limitations. So should IVF be illegal? I think it can be defended in this way: you’d make that deal, wouldn’t you? If twenty lives have to be created for one to live, you may not like those odds but you’d take that one-in-twenty chance as better than nothing. However this has an implication: that the embryos chosen for implantation must be chosen randomly. We cannot morally pick and choose; to do so would be to create lives — those of the embryos not chosen — which have no chance and are simply exploited. This means no sex selection, no genetic screening. It also means that we cannot create embryos for research or medical purposes. (Whether the left-over embryos of an IVF procedure can be used in this way is a vexed question, and depends on how you think we’re obligated to treat corpses.)
6.
Are there any exceptions, or is abortion always morally wrong? Rape, incest and disability are the most common candidates, and I will address them in turn.
In cases of rape, we can no longer say that the pregnant mother is responsible for the life of the child; her will was not involved in its conception. She may, however, have a different kind of responsibility to the child: not as its creator, but as its mother. This depends on how we think the obligations of parenthood arise: are they freely entered into when we undertake the sex act, or are they unchosen obligations which exist simply as the result of the relationship between parent and child? I incline to the latter view, but not strongly, and am forced either way to admit that the mother in question does not have the stronger obligations arising from responsibility for the child’s creation. Possibly, therefore, abortion might be morally permissible in this case. How the law should treat it, though, is a separate question. How much do we want simply to believe women who say they are raped, and how much do we want to investigate the claim? I don’t know.
As for incest, it is easier to deal with. Why should the poor in-bred child be killed for the crime of his parents? It has as much right to live as any other child; abortion in this case, therefore, is not permissible.
With regards to disabled children we must say, of course, that abortion is in general not permissible. It doesn’t matter whether or not their life is as good or as enjoyable as another person’s; what matters is that their life is good for them; that it is a life worth living. We would therefore only make an exception if the live would not be worth living; if it is likely to be short and full of suffering to no purpose (though of course even a life full of pain can be a good life if faced with bravery and a noble spirit).
7.
The thought that always occurs to me when I encounter advocates for abortion is: you have no skin in the game. You already made it; you know laws allowing abortion can’t threaten your existence — though you too were once just a “clump of cells”. Here you are, having received the gift of life (whether or not you have made laudable use of it), seeking to deny it to others. Faithless traitor: you have the laws against murder to protect you, but would deny their benefit to the unborn who are you fellow human beings.
One tries not to think too much of the scale of the slaughter, especially given that the prospects for arresting it seem so slim. In the UK the pro-life movement is politically irrelevant. At least in America there is a fight — and one in which the advocates for the unborn are beginning to gain some ground. The Texas law is slim pickings, but it’s a start, and will hopefully prove to be the pebble that starts the avalanche. Let the advocates of abortion screech about the theocracy they imagine is coming; we who value the lives of unborn children must remember to be thankful to our religious friends who lead the way in this cause, and remember with gratitude that, thanks to them, lives in Texas are already being saved which would otherwise be lost. If this is religious fanaticism, let us have increase of it.
Kurt Gödel claimed in 1947 to have discovered a “loophole” in the American Constitution which would allow the nation to legally become a dictatorship. I suspect the flaw he was referring to was the fact that the Constitution invests power over its own interpretation in the Supreme Court, whose authority to say what the Constitution means is unlimited and unanswerable, so long as a suitable question is laid before it. Of course any nation which has a written constitution must have a body of some kind to interpret it — for that reason, the constitution that can be written is not the real constitution; in itself it recognises a higher authority. This has nothing to do with the subject at hand.
Peter Singer is Australian — hence “fetus”, not “foetus”. I notice that substack’s spell checker prefers the British spelling.
In Chapter 3, “Equality for Animals?”
I use the term “possible” casually, but it would be more accurate to say that this is the space of describable things. Amongst possible things there are none which go unrealised — the reasons why things are not real are also reasons why they couldn’t be real; unrealised things in some way contradict the generative principle of reality, whatever it is, because if they didn’t then they would be realised. There can therefore be no mere possibility; all possibilities must be realised, and modality is a fiction. This has nothing to do with the subject at hand.
This also explains why most animals should not be considered to have a “right to life”. A sheep can feel pleasure and pain, and therefore our treatment of it can be good or bad with regard to its phenomenal experience; we have an obligation to have some regard for its welfare while it is living. But whether it lives or dies is a matter of indifference. A sheep has no use for a future; it cannot make any worthwhile life for itself. It is a sheep.
Moral judgements are always and everywhere character judgements; in saying that some act is good or evil we are always saying that the actor is a good or evil person. Judgements which don’t judge the character of some person lack a moral dimension; though they might recognise good and bad outcomes, they do not apportion blame and credit.
“What, without asking, hither hurried whence?
And, without asking, whither hurried hence!
Another and another Cup to drown
The Memory of this Impertinence!” ~ Edward FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, XXX