Abortion and the Unalienable Right to Life
Science Versus Ethics
Before even starting to make the case against abortion, it is important to get the scientific facts on the table. Science and ethics are two different things. Science can tell us the facts, but it cannot tell us who has rights and who does not. It is the job of ethics to determine what is morally good and what is morally wrong based upon those facts.
It is an objective scientific fact that a fetus ia member of the species Homo sapiens. An acorn may not be the same as an oak tree, but a pollinated acorn is of the same species as an oak tree. Similarly, we all became a members of the species Homo sapiens after the process of fertilization was complete.
This immediately backs pro-choicers into a corner. If you believe that every human being has an unalienable right to life, then a fetus has an unalienable right to life. This makes it very difficult to defend abortion and stem cell research.
Abortion and an Unalienable Right to Life
The best attempt to defend abortion in a manner consistent with unalienable rights was made by the ethicists Judith Jarvis Thompson. Her main argument is simple and compelling. A famous violinist has a kidney problem and you alone have the correct blood type to help him. So the Society of Music Lovers kidnaps you and hooks you up to the violinist for nine months. It would certainly be a nice thing if you decide to help the violinist, Thompson argues, but you do not have to. You would be in your rights to walk out of the hospital.
There are two problems with the violinist analogy. The first is that the scenario is more like rape than consensual sex. In the case of consensual sex the parents freely brought the child into the world, so the parents are responsible for the child’s well being. Even if procreation was not the goal, people are responsible for the intentional and unintentional results of their actions. Thompson’s argument by analogy is flawed because the violinist’s kidney problem is not a consequence of a freely chosen actions. The second problem with the argument is that while you are not morally obligated to support the violinist and could freely walk away, you do not have the right to kill him. Abortion is not gently unhooking the fetus unharmed, it typically involves violently dismembering it (even suction abortions result in the dismembering of the fetus).
Abortion cannot be reconciled with an unalienable right to life. This is a steep price to pay to support abortion. As Aristole pointed out, man is a rational animal and with that rationality comes responsibility. We have to choose logically consistent ethical positions. I would hope that people who believe in human rights would reject abortion, even if they may be sympathetic to the pro-choice position.
Read more on the problems with the rights based case here.
Personhood and Infanticide
Unlike being a human, being a person is not a matter of science. It is a matter of taste, and there are may definitions of ‘person.’ Some of these definitions revert back to science: a person is a human. But in the abortion debate the definition of person that you see most often is the philosopher’s definition. John Locke thought that a person is someone who can maintain their identity through time. Other philosophers have homed in on self-consciousness, the capacity for abstract thought, or language use. But regardless of which of these traits you choose, none of them emerge until well after birth. If non-persons can be legally killed, then newborn infants can be legally killed. In fact, infants do not even come close to developing self-consciousness, rational thought, and language use until around a year or more after birth. Most abortion defenders find the legalized infanticide of a one year old baby to be completely unnacceptable.
Of course, you can try to find an alternate basis for personhood that allows abortion while prohibiting infanticide, but this is not an easy task. A newborn infant has the intelligence of a chicken, or perhaps a sea slug. Since personhood means rejecting human rights - the belief that rights are intrinsic to our nature as human beings - we can’t simply declare by fiat that only humans get rights. But there only “tests” that do a good job of separating humans from animals are based upon mental powers that we do not develop until well after birth.
There is another problem that goes much deeper. It is fairly easy to see why someone might argue that all human beings share a basic dignity and worth that makes them equal (at least on paper). And it is fairly easy to see why we might home in on essentially human traits like self-consciousness and language use as the basis for our ethical worth. But it is difficult to see anything special about reaching other, and lesser, landmarks in intellectual development that would vault them to a greater importance than self-consciousness.
Read more about the problem with making the case for personhood while denying infanticide here.
Alternative Ethics
I have found that people who are pro-choice often start debates confident that they are on the side of science and reason. But then when confronted with the basic scientific fact that a fetus is a member of the species Homo sapiens they rapidly reject science and adopt mystical positions. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen pro-choicers start talking about “quickening” or “ensoulment.” Feminists such as Naomi Wolf have famously argued that we need to adopt a richer spirituality of sin and redemption that embraces the death of the fetus.
The only honest approach for abortion defenders is to either reject abortion, or accept legalized infanticide (infanticide could still be treated as destruction of valuable property if the baby is wanted).
The Hard Cases: Rape and Health of the Mother
Rape and health of the mother are the “hard cases” for pro-lifers. They are complicated issues and many people who are pro-life disagree. The important thing is to reason your way to an ethical position based upon the fact that both the fetus and the mother have an unalienable right to life. These cases create a more direct conflict between the rights of the fetus and the rights of the mother. The Principle of Double Effect is how natural rights based ethics handle conflicts of rights. It has given us the right to kill in self-defense, the Just War doctrine, and resolved plethora of other difficult ethical issues hundreds of years before abortion was even an issue. Here is where I do this and conclude that abortion is justified if the life of the mother is at risk, but not in the case of rape or when only her health is at risk.
Pro-Choice Challenges
Here are rebuttals to two of the more effective pro-choice challenges.
- Punishment for women who get abortions (vs. fetal homicide laws). The issue of punishing women who get abortions backs pro-lifers into a corner. Either they appear extreme by wanting to punish women who get abortions, or they concede that killing a fetus is not as bad as killing an adult. This is really an issue of logical consistency. If a fetus has a right to life then killing a fetus should be as bad as killing an adult.
Pro-choicers face the same dilemma. If a fetus does not have a right to life then there is nothing wrong with killing a wanted baby. Most states have fetal homicide laws, but with legalized abortion they should be repealed. A criminal who causes a happily pregnant woman to lose her baby should only be guilty of destruction of valuable property, not murder.
These are positions that make both sides seem extreme to the moderate general public - but this is a fault that lies with the moderate general public. They have adopted the position that wanted babies have rights, and unwanted fetuses do not.
- The Burning IVF Clinic. This is Ellen Goodman’s famous thought experiment: an IVF clinic is burning and you can save either a Petri dish with embryos in it, or a little girl. Who do you save? This purportedly backs the pro-lifer into a corner. Choose the Petri dish (or choose randomly) and you look extreme. But choose the little girl and you (purportedly) concede that the life of an embryo is worth less than the life of a more developed human being.
Suppose you have to choose between rescuing a famous cancer researcher or an obviously homeless alcoholic. Most people would choose to rescue the cancer researcher. But this clearly does not mean that we can freely choose to kill the alcoholic. The strongest conclusion you can draw is that the life of a homeless alcoholic is worth less than the life of a cancer researcher - but it is still valuable enough to have a right to life and legal protections. The same reasoning applies to the embryo. But as it turns out, even that limited conclusion is unwarranted.
All men are created equal, but then the real world starts separating them. This is one of the great challenges to democracy - maintaining the principle of equality in an unequal world. The beauty and power of the ethics of human rights is that every human being has equal dignity, worth, and moral status. It does not matter what the rest of the world says. It does not matter if you are a cancer researcher or a homeless alcoholic, a little girl, or an embryo.
However, when the chips are down and your back is against the wall, you have to make a stark choice. Since human rights ethics treats everyone with equal dignity and worth, it is impossible to use their intrinsic value as a way to make a separation. It then becomes acceptable to factor in the value that people provide to the very unequal real world. In these cases we can choose the cancer researcher over the alcoholic and the child over the embryo.
The potential to abuse this is obvious, so the logical machinery of natural rights is designed to keep the situations in which the unequal real world factors into decision down to a bare minimum. In fact, they are only allowed in these black/white situations in which saving one person means letting another die. The tool that human rights ethicists use for this is called the Principle of Double Effect. Read about double effect here and here.
Further Reading
- Moral Theory by David Oderberg. I cannot recommend this book highly enough for abortion defenders. In the course of debating abortion you will be buffetted with thought experiments and hypotheticals. Unless you understand the machinery of natural rights, you will be driven into accepting the position that some human beings are worth more than others (note that few natural rights skeptics take this to its natural conclusions, which would be that the life of a cancer researcher is worth more than that of a bum). See my review which summarizes the ethical machinery here.
- Libertarians for Life. Website with a great collection of articles from rights-based libertarians.
- Applied Ethics. This book applies natural rights philosophy to questions like abortion and euthenasia, and addresses a wide range of various rebuttals from pro-choicers.
- The Golden Rule. I’ve been making the case against abortion based upon human rights, but the Golden Rule is an even more basic ethical principle that underlies all logically consistent ethical systems.
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