Abortion should be Illegal
Trigger warning: I use some very graphic language here. May not be suitable reading for a person who has had an abortion. Style is a bit “philosophy paper.” May be boring/impenetrable.
The killing of unborn children is the greatest human rights issue of our time. More than half a million children are poisoned, dismembered or otherwise intentionally killed in utero in the US every year. That this is legal is gravely unjust.
There are three attitudes you might take about abortion 1) a fetus is not a person, so abortion is fine, 2) a fetus is a person, but abortion must be allowed for feminist reasons, 3) a fetus is a person, and deserves legal protection from abortion. I will assess each of these arguments in turn.
“A fetus is not a person.”
There are three reasons that you might think a fetus is not a person. One relies on developmental abilities: a young embryo is less intelligent and capable than a mouse. Another relies on location: whether you’re a human or not might depend on where you are located. The third relies on sentimentality: it’s usually less upsetting to have a miscarriage than to see your two-week old baby die.
The main problem with the developmental approach is that it concedes too much. If you take the view that we should only count someone as “human” or extend human rights to them if they reach a certain developmental threshold, then the threshold is much higher than a newborn. In other words, if fetuses aren’t humans, then neither are newborns. (This is why Peter Singer argues that infanticide should be legal.) We don’t protect human newborns on the grounds that they are intelligent, autonomous, or capable. Babies are incompetent and vulnerable, and we protect them because they are human. Similarly, we shouldn’t deny human rights to people who are severely disabled. Even if a person is less intelligent than a pig, chimpanzee, or dolphin, we still owe her more protection than we owe to these animals.
Some people ridicule the idea of protecting very young embryos, and ask sarcastically if we also need to protect sperm, if ejaculation is a genocide. The answer is—obviously—no. From a biological point of view, life begins when the sperm and the egg unite and form a new organism with his or her own DNA. This organism is the same person, although much younger, than the adult he or she will eventually become. A zygote is essentially different from a sperm in that a zygote will continue developing into an adult if she’s provided with the right environment and ample nourishment (and provided that she isn’t killed by violence, an accident, or a disease). If you provide a sperm with these things, it will just remain a sperm. In the absence of a specific, well grounded reason to think otherwise, we should accept the biological definition of when a new organism comes into being—i.e., at conception.
Some people think that a baby’s location in the womb means that she is not a person. This is, frankly, ridiculous. A creature’s location cannot affect whether or not she is a person. It might affect other things, like whether or not they have citizenship in a particular place, but I can only think of nationalist reasons for declaring that you’re not human if you exist in a certain location. (For instance, perhaps someone might argue “only American citizens are humans, the unborn are not American citizens, therefore the unborn are not humans.” But this argument is wrong: humanity cannot depend on citizenship.)
I think sentimentality is the most common reason for imagining that a fetus isn’t a person. It’s pretty common for very young embryos to die, but parents don’t always react to these deaths as strongly as they would to the death of a two-week-old newborn. I suspect location and development both play a role in our sentiments here: by living outside the uterus, a child is able to develop more of a relationship with her parents, and older babies look more like adult humans.
To be clear, considerations like do I have a relationship with this person? can be relevant when we think about our moral obligations. Relationships are often the source of moral obligations. For instance, you may feel a moral obligation to adopt the children of a friend or sibling who suddenly dies, even if you don’t feel a moral obligation to adopt in general. However, our relationship with a person (or our lack of relationship with a person) is never a good reason for thinking that someone isn’t a person, or that they don’t have human rights. This is why we recognize the full humanity of people with extreme ASD: the fact that a person is non-verbal and “difficult to relate to” doesn’t affect whether she is a person. Similarly, this is why we protect newborns who are severely disabled and disfigured, even if they don’t look like a “cute baby,” and even if they don’t look much like a baby. We recognize that these children are human and we respect their human dignity; their humanity is not affected by terminal illness, deformity or disability.
Similarly, we need to be clear that, to quote Dr Seuss “a person is a person, no matter how small.” All human babies are human persons, even ones who are small as zygotes. The only question is whether it’s always wrong to abort a person.
“A fetus is a person, but abortion should be legal”
Some defenders of legalized abortion have argued that even if fetuses are humans, abortion is acceptable. For instance, the philosopher Judith Jarvist Thomson has proposed the following thought experiment: Suppose one morning you woke up and found that a famous cellist was attached to you in such a way that if you disconnected him, he would die. He’s going to be there for nine months. Surely you have the right to detach him. If you decide to let him stay attached, that’s a choice, not something that can be imposed on you.
Whether or not we have an obligation to keep him attached, this analogy faces a problem: abortion usually doesn’t involve “detaching” the baby who then peacefully dies. Instead, abortion typically involves poisoning the baby, dismembering her, or crushing her skull. If I woke up one morning to find a cellist attached to me, I’m quite confident that I would not have the right to detach him by, say, poisoning him or sawing him in half.
In other words, since a fetus/embryo is a person, the only situations in which abortion might be acceptable are ones that don’t involve directly killing the child. If pregnancy is like having a cellist attached to you, there’s an argument for saying that a woman has the right to detach the baby non-violently even though she knows that the child will die. For instance, hospitals might offer a procedure where they induce labor very prematurely, and then provide hospice care to the infant while she dies. The mother could elect to be awake or asleep for this process to avoid the trauma of seeing the child die.
This kind of arrangement would only be acceptable if you really don’t have an obligation to stay attached to the cellist. And frankly, I suspect that in most cases, you would have a moral obligation to stay attached even if detachment involved a non-violent death for the cellist. If you were doing really vital work—say you’re the only doctor for hundreds of miles, and dozens of people will die if you stay attached to the cellist—you might be justified in detaching him (in a non-violent way). But most of the time, if you’re the only person who can keep another person alive, and the time for which this will be true is limited, you have an obligation to keep them alive even if it’s inconvenient.
“A fetus is a person and so abortion should be illegal.”
Given that abortion usually involves the direct killing of a child, it should be illegal. Just as immigrants and non-citizens should be protected from violence by American citizens, so too, children who are in a uterus. This right to freedom-from-violence should apply to people in the womb, and to those who live abroad, as well as to those who are more visible to US citizens. (There’s much to be said about the injustice of American foreign policy, but that’s a rant for another day.)
I said earlier that relationships can give rise to moral obligations. This can apply to chosen relationships, like marriage or friendship, but it can also apply to unchosen relationships, like the relation with a sibling. An unplanned pregnancy is an unchosen relationship that can give rise to moral obligations, both because the mother is the only person capable of keeping the child alive, and also because the parent-child relationship is morally relevant. Because of this, Thomson’s “cellist” analogy isn’t quite right. There’s a difference between waking up attached to a famous cellist and waking up attached to your own sibling, or—in the case of pregnancy—to your own child. Our obligations to our children are stronger than our obligations to strangers; this is true before and after they are born (though it’s particularly true before they’re born, because we’re the only people who can keep them alive), and it’s true whether or not their conception was planned (if we have a planned child and an unplanned one, we don’t owe the unplanned child less). This is another reason for thinking that the “abortion alternative” I proposed above—premature induction with hospice care—is a form of neglect that is very, very hard to justify.
But if abortion should be illegal, what does this mean for women’s rights? If a woman can’t terminate an unwanted pregnancy, how can she be equal to a man?
I believe this is the wrong way to approach women’s equality with men. To quote Leah Libresco:
Often, our equality is premised on remaking ourselves to be more like the median man, whether that means changing our style of speaking to exclude apologies, changing our breastfeeding plans to keep up with work’s minimal accommodations, or changing our bodies to suppress fertility and destroy our children.
We say no, and that, instead, the world must remake itself to be hospitable to women, not the other way around. That means valuing interdependence and vulnerability, rather than idealizing autonomy.
The fact that people can become pregnant—and indeed, that every person alive was gestated by a pregnant person—suggests that humans are not, by nature, independent. Instead, we are interdependent. The fact that all reproductive labor is done by people with female biology suggests that we need to restructure our society in a way that is more supportive of this work. Instead of viewing women as defective men, instead of trying to correct our “defects,” we should confront the facts of female biology. Sometimes people get pregnant. All those people are women. Those people owe something to their babies. And other people owe something to them.
In other words, we should view a woman who experiences an unplanned pregnancy as the normal person, rather than regarding a 25-65 year-old male with no dependents as the standard. Interdependence is, in fact, more representative of the human experience. It’s normal to be suddenly imposed upon by the needs of another human, and to suddenly impose upon others. Most people are at least one of: children, elderly, sick, capable-of-pregnancy, pregnant, or parenting children under the age of 15. The group made of healthy childless adult men and healthy childless post-menopausal women is a minority. If we really viewed women as normal humans, instead of seeking equality by making women less imposed-upon, we would try to make being-imposed-upon more normal. Pregnancy is always an imposition, even when it’s actively sought. But in the model we’ve chosen, the model where abortion is available, society can say “pregnancy is always the pregnant person’s choice,” which is to say, “we owe nothing to those who are pregnant.”
As it happens, “those who are pregnant” always have female biology. A more authentic feminism would regard pregnancy, even unplanned or difficult pregnancy, as a normal part of life, and it would find ways to include people other than pregnant women in the group of those who are imposed-upon. Instead of insisting that women have the right to imitate male autonomy, we should insist that men have an obligation to imitate female availability-to-others.
This original version of this article is available on my Substack, the Journal of Embarrassing Catholic Studies.