Why Abortion is Morally Untenable

16SEP

Until a few months ago I was firmly pro-choice, to the extent that I believed even 3rd trimester foetuses lack a right to life.  During this time I found it simply intuitive that the foetus’s life is only secondary to the mother’s choice.  However, my sudden about-face came after reading Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics chapter on abortion.  What changed was that I came to the realise that I could not advocate abortion without also advocating infanticide.  I will summarize the pro-choice arguments and show how they all fail at drawing a morally significant distinction between the foetus and newborn.  It’s worth adding at this point that I concede that abortion is a very difficult choice for all women and I don’t claim that the morality of the issue is anything but murky.  However, it seems to me that the woman’s choice to abort involves not just one life but two.  For this reason, it is important to maintain a healthy, respectful discourse on this topic.

From the outset I will make it clear that none of what I say pertains to the woman’s right to abort after rape or if her life is in danger.  I am a lot less clear on the morality of such cases and am sympathetic to the mother’s choice in these circumstances.  What I say here deals only with the vast majority of abortions that take place because of the mother’s financial situation, preference…etc.

The foetus is not a human

This is perhaps one of the most widely used arguments by the pro-choice camp to justify abortion.  It can take many forms, but the general idea is that the foetus, until a certain stage of development–sometimes intentionally undefined–does not fulfil the criteria for humanhood.  So it is lack of membership to the species Homo Sapiens that precludes defining the killing of the foetus as murder.  But it is unclear that there is any point between the continuum of development between zygote and newborn at which we can say the organism has ascended to the status of Homo Sapiens.  If we lack a morally significant dividing line between zygote and newborn, then we should either elevate the rights of the foetus to match those of the newborn, or lower the rights of the newborn.  However some pro-choice advocates may argue that there are significant dividing lines between zygote and newborn. Peter Singer rightly categorizes these arguments, in his book, into three categories: birth, viability, and the onset of conciousness.  Each of these fails as a morally significant dividing line.

Birth

Birth as a dividing line relies on little more than a geographical distinction.  There is little reason to grant the offspring greater moral value just because it is now located outside the mother’s body.  In fact any intuition based on birth as a dividing line likely results from the fact that we can see the newborn before our eyes, whereas the foetus is out of sight.  This is not too dissimilar to the instinct we have to do everything within our power to help an emaciated child starving on the street in front of us, but the lack of such an instinct, in many of us, to do a great deal to help children starving in 3rd world countries.  This is a well-documented psychological phenomenon and should not form the basis of our moral judgement of the foetus.  Does the newborn differ physiologically or developmentally from the foetus?  It seems not.  A pre-term foetus differs from the newborn only insofar as it has a slightly different circulation, and relies on the mother’s gas exchange surface to survive.  Here, some advocates of abortion will employ violinist type arguments; which I will deal with later.  Arguing from stages of development here also bears little fruit.  A 28-week foetus is more developed than a 26-week premature newborn.  Therefore it seems that birth as a moral dividing line is too ad hoc and does not reflect any significant changes between the foetus and the newborn.

Viability

Perhaps we can draw a line at the first point at which the foetus could survive outside the body.  The first problem for this kind of argument is that it is not quite clear why a viable foetus should have a higher moral status than a non-viable foetus.  Furthermore, we cannot know what point, if any, represents a stage before which the foetus could never survive outside the body.  For this is exactly the kind of point we would need to find if we are to make viability the cut-off for abortion.  It is no good choosing a point at which there is 5% chance that the foetus would survive.

Continued advances in medical sciences mean that the earliest point at which the foetus is viable, is constantly being challenged.  Decades ago it was unheard of for a 2 month premature foetus to survive, however, today it is not uncommon for foetuses that are 3 months premature to survive.  Even today, how do we know how premature a foetus we can keep alive?  Perhaps with a sufficiently large sample size we will find that in some exceptional circumstances we can keep even more premature foetuses alive.  In principle though there is no reason to believe that there ever will be an objective point during foetal development before which the foetus cannot be viable.  After all most, of the developmental processes appear to be self-contained within the foetus in the form of genetic programs and signalling cascades that cause the cells and tissues to develop, with only nutrient support provided by the mother.  There is no reason why a laboratory cannot replace the role of the mother some time in the future.

Viability as a moral dividing line leads to some absurd conclusions that anyone should wish to avoid.  For example, was it moral for women to abort 26-week foetuses 30 years ago but immoral for women today?  What about a pregnant woman in Uganda where premature foetuses are unlikely to survive, is it moral for her to abort foetuses later than it is for a woman living in the United States?  What about an American woman on holiday in Uganda with no possibility of flying back to USA, does it become moral for her to abort her foetus in Uganda later than she would have in USA because the foetus is non-viable in Uganda?  No, it seems that viability just isn’t feasible as a morally significant dividing line.

Perhaps one could argue that as long as the foetus is dependent upon the mother, the mother’s choice takes precedence over the foetus’s life.  But this is clearly wrong as a moral principle.  We would not agree that an elderly person dependent upon their son/daughter is at the mercy of the son/daughter’s right to choose whether they live or not.  We would also not argue that a baby dependent on its mother for practically everything takes less of a priority than the mother’s preference.

Conciousness

At first glance, the onset of conciousness would appear to be a sensible dividing line.  Any number of other characteristics can be used in its place, such as perception of pain (linked with conciousness), self-awareness (also linked with conciousness)…etc.  But the science here is highly sketchy and in fact leads us to some unwelcome conclusions.

The cerebral cortex is responsible for conciousness and awareness of ourselves and our surroundings as well as our perception of sensory stimuli.  Some argue that thalamocortical connections at 25 weeks are the point at which conciousness arises and therefore it is this point that should represent a morally significant dividing line.  However these connections are likely to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for conciousness.  There is evidence that suggests the foetus remains in a dormant concious state until around 30 weeks.  Furthermore, even in newborns there is weak evidence for a very basic kind of conciousness, far less than the average rabbit, or dog, or cow.  The newborn has no concept of self and there is no good evidence that any of its behaviour, including response to pain, is associated with an actual perception of pain rather than merely a stereotyped innate response.  Psychologically speaking, the newborn scores lower than many animals in terms of conciousness.  More importantly, the crucial thalamocortical connections are still not yet fully established even weeks into the newborns life, and take time to develop and form any sophisticated kind of conciousness in the baby.

There is a more serious point to be made.  In principle, using conciousness as a dividing line implies that we can kill newborn infants.  What would be the moral status of a pre-30-week, or even pre-25-week newborn?  If it is not concious, is infanticide okay?  And what about levels of conciousness? Should we make a sliding scale of human conciousness whereby a fully grown, fully concious adult has more rights than a 1 or even 2 year old who scores lower on conciousness?  As medical advances continue, we will be able to provide support to even more premature infants, for which conciousness is but a distant prospect.  What will be the moral status of these newborns?

Making abortion illegal does more harm than good

This argument more or less states that any move to make abortion illegal will not actually reduce the number of abortions, but will put the woman’s life at risk because she will be forced to seek the medical procedure from a back-alley clinic; thus increasing her chance of being harmed or even killed.  There are two main problems with this argument.  First of all, it is an argument that pertains to abortion law, but says nothing about the moral status of abortion.  It seems that the pro-choice advocate is willing to bite the bullet here and admit that abortion is wrong but is in fact the lesser of two evils.  But it is perfectly consistent for one to argue that X is wrong without having to argue that X should be made illegal.  The second problem with this argument is that the pro-life proponent can easily reject it.  They can say that a third alternative is to enforce the law better, to try to crackdown on back-alley abortions.  Furthermore, if the pro-choice advocate has failed to show why the moral status of a foetus is different to that of a newborn or even an adult; legalising abortion becomes little more than state-sponsored mass murder.  Obviously no one would be willing to swallow such a bitter pill, and therefore, I think, the legal argument fails for the two reasons outlined above.

Violinist

The violinist argument expounded by Judith Jarvis Thompson is a rather contrived but clever analogy that attempts to show why the mother is not morally obliged to host another person in her body for 9 months.  Here is the argument in Thompson’s own words:

 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 now is 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 you’ve now 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.

This analogizes pregnancy after rape, since the woman had no choice in the matter.  However the argument can easily be altered to include instances where the woman becomes pregnant perhaps by chance or through carelessness.  Suppose the woman enters a hospital elevator and accidentally chooses to go to the 3rd floor rather than the 2nd.  On the 3rd floor the doctors are expecting the ‘body donor’ and upon seeing the woman jab her with an anaesthetic needle and place her onto the bed.  The argument would state that although it was perhaps the woman’s own carelessness that led to her being hooked up to the violinist, she still has no moral obligation to remain hooked up for another 9 months.

The reasons why this argument fails are two-fold.  Firstly it is important to note that Thompson grants the foetus personhood and a right to life.  The argument boils down to whether one is morally obliged to have another person use their body to survive while at the same time extremely limiting one’s own quality of life.

The most serious objection to Thompson’s argument is that it is a disanalogy.  With any analogy, if it is not sufficiently similar to the scenario being analogized then the logical reasoning used in the analogy breaks down when applied to the scenario in question.  The crucial omission in Thompson’s analogy is the cause of the violinist’s ailment in the first place.  The woman engaged in an act that is ‘designed’ (evolutionarily speaking) to give rise to pregnancy.  Whether she intended for the pregnancy to occur or not is beside the point, since we must add this crucial point to the analogy.  A better analogy, then, would be to suppose the woman decided to go driving and accidentally hit the violinist, causing his ailment.  Suppose the woman had a fair bit to drink then decided to go for a cruise (analogous to sex without contraception), she has a relatively high chance of hitting the violinist.  Upon hitting the violinist he is rushed to hospital and it is found that the woman is the only person in the world with the correct blood type/antigens to hook up to him and keep him alive.  Even if the woman went for a cruise sober (analogous to sex with contraception) and had a much lower chance of hitting the violinist, she may still hit him and we would have the same situation.  In this analogy, it is far more difficult to accept that the woman has no moral obligation to keep the violinist alive, since it was her action–even though unintentional–that put the violinist in this position.  Perhaps she can be forgiven for deciding to unplug, but it still cannot be said that her actions are not immoral.  In fact driving is still disanalogous, since, as we said before, the woman was specifically engaging in an act ‘designed’ to cause pregnancy.  So we can replace this analogy with one where the woman engages in activity X, where X is designed to give the violinist liver failure if the woman is careless, and less likely to give the violinist liver failure, if she is more careful.

The second reason this argument fails is because it assumes that the woman’s duty of care to a stranger is equivalent to her duty of care to her own offspring.  This is quite clearly not the case and is reflected by the legislation in most civilised countries.  A mother who leaves her child to starve for example will be prosecuted for neglect, manslaughter…etc. whereas she has no such obligation under law to care for a stranger.  If we change this analogy so that the woman is hooked up to her own child rather than to the violinist, what would we then say about her obligations?  What would we think of her if she decided to unplug herself from her child?  The kind of language used by some pro-choice advocates is sometimes frightening.  The foetus is described as a parasite and a foreign body, which perhaps is biologically correct.  However would we conclude that if a newborn or a 2-year old is sufficiently burdensome the mother should be allowed to kill it?

Other objections to this argument exist.  For example some ethicists make the distinction between negative and positive rights; the act of abortion involves actively killing the foetus whereas the violinist dies because help is withdrawn.  I will leave the reader to explore the discourse in more detail.

The arguments above are extremely brief summaries and I would suggest that anyone reading this should delve further into the literature and make their own mind up.  This article was intended to outline the reasons I have decided that I can no longer defend the woman’s right to choose to abort the foetus.  It seems any attempt at drawing a morally significant dividing line between zygote and newborn is either ad hoc or inadvertently implies that infanticide should also be permissible.  While Peter Singer accepts the conclusion that killing newborns is morally justified, I simply cannot share his view.  I therefore see his argument as a strong reductio ad absurdum against abortion.