A Deeper Dive Into Abortion

Let's improve the abortion debate

First of all: yes, I lied when I said I’d avoid a controversial topic in the next post. Whoops.

After the recent Supreme Court leak, we’ve seen an uptick in discussion about abortion. As with every other important issue, this discussion doesn’t feel productive. One side accuses the other of indifference towards the mass murder of children, while their opponents accuse them of wanting to control women’s bodies. I doubt anyone finds these arguments convincing, and I think both fail to address their interlocuter’s actual beliefs.

This discussion occurs alongside rising popularity of “standpoint theory,” which essentially posits that you can’t have an opinion on certain issues until you belong to the relevant demographic group. I have little patience for this for idea, but I’ll address it anyway. A recent Gallup poll shows that about 50 percent of women identify as pro-choice and 40 identify as pro-life. In other words, there’s no singular “women’s perspective” on this issue.

For the remainder of this article, I’ll discuss various arguments for and against first-trimester abortion. I’m limiting the discussion to the first trimester since over 90% of abortions occur in the first 13 weeks. I’ll also ignore cases of rape and incest, since there’s little public disagreement over abortion under those circumstances. Finally, I won’t consider instances where the pregnancy puts the woman’s body is danger, since I think that reduces to a straightforward case of self defense.

“My Body, My Choice” Doesn’t Work

The most common pro-choice argument rests on bodily autonomy. Under this framework, a women can abort the fetus because she has a right over her body. We’ve seen similar slogans employed by anti-vaccine advocates, who argue that mandates violate a similar right to bodily autonomy. I don’t think the argument makes sense in either circumstance.

As best as I can understand it, the bodily autonomy position argues that the state can’t override the right to our bodies. That might work for anarchists or hardcore libertarians, but it doesn’t make much sense for the rest of us. Traffic laws force me to do something with my body: I have to move my foot into the brakes when I see a red light. Similarly, taxes require me to move my fingers on a keyboard. If the unthinkable occurs, the military can conscript¹ my body into an armed conflict. In all cases, most of us accept the state’s right to override our bodily autonomy when doing so serves a greater social good. If I didn’t have to follow traffic laws, I’d violate the rights of the people I’d hit. If I didn’t have to pay taxes, we couldn’t fund social program and the military. In the case of conscription, able-bodies males need to defend the rest of the population.

We can list numerous ways in which traffic laws differ from pregnancy, but mere difference doesn’t help us separate right from wrong. Murdering someone with your left hand differs from murdering someone with your right hand, but we condemn both equally. Thus, we need to find some morally relevant difference between pregnancy and bodily requirements. Is pregnancy different because it occurs inside the body? Following traffic laws requires me to send electrical impulses inside my body, so that can’t work. What about the permanent impact of pregnancy? I heard this argument with vaccines, and I can’t see the case there either. Doesn’t paying taxes permanently lower my income? We also mandate vaccines for schoolchildren, and none these, besides the COVID vaccine, face much opposition. Though the bodily autonomy argument doesn’t hold, there’s a similar argument that might.

The Supererogatory Argument

In moral philosophy, we categorize three types of actions:

1. Permissible: No moral value. It’s acceptable where or not you do this action or violate this rule

2. Obligatory: If you don’t do this action or follow this rule, you’ve done something wrong

3. Supererogatory: If you do this action or follow this rule, you’ve done something great, but it would have been permissible not to have done.

Someone is committing a supererogatory action if she saves a stranger from a burning a building. We’d condone someone who refrained from this act and let the stranger die. For the most part, we don’t expect an individual to risk their life for another human being. If she does, however, we consider that an exceptional act, one above and beyond the moral call of duty.

In Judith Jarvis Thompson’s thought experiment, she attempts to place childbirth into the supererogatory category. If you choose to give birth, that’s great, but you don’t have to. In her article, she imagines a situation in which an individual becomes medically tethered to an adult violinist. For the violinist to survive, the individual must remain connected to said musician for nine months. In this case, Thompson argues, we wouldn’t require the individual to remain stuck to the violinist for the full nine months. As such, we can’t expect a woman to do the same for her growing fetus.

I don’t find this argument convincing, particularly from the progressive left. I don’t see how someone can argue that everyone needs to sacrifice for climate change, racism, economic inequality, and numerous other issues, but we can kill a dude if it would inconvenience us for a handful of months. Furthermore, Thompson’s argument relies on a random hook up to this violinist. While this analogy works for rape, I can’t see how it applies to pregnancy resulting from voluntary sex.

Imagine that Nintendo hands me a special version of Super Mario Odyssey. In this version, every time Mario dies, I find myself attached to Thompson’s imaginary violinist. Note that I’m not deliberately killing Mario to attach myself to more violinists. I’m just playing the game as I normally would, and, when I screw up, a violinist manifests an attaches himself to me. As with before, I’d need to stay attached to these violinists for nine months to prevent their deaths. In this case, could I just let them all die? Given that I play the game, it seems like I need to accept the consequences. I don’t think that we should condone killing people when it gets inconvenient. At the very least, it seems like I shouldn’t play this game unless I planned to bring the violinist to term. We might also want some increased government regulation around this game. While I think this thought experiment provides allows pro-lifers to make an exception for rape, I don’t think it makes a strong pro-choice claim. Instead, the best pro-choice arguments show that there’s nothing wrong with killing a fetus in the first place.

Reframing the Debate: Is the Fetus a Person?

We can define many concepts in terms of “necessary” or “sufficient” conditions. For example, having four sides is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a polygon to be square. If a polygon lacks four sides, we know that it cannot be a square. Otherwise, we need further information to determine its square-ness. Let’s also consider a case of sufficient conditions. Divisibility by two is a sufficient condition for a number to be even. If we can divide a number by two, we know it’s even without further information.

When it comes to fetal-personhood, the pro-choice and pro-life sides face different goals. Pro-life advocates must find sufficient conditions for personhood, and show that fetus meets them. Pro-choice advocates must find necessary conditions for personhood and show that a fetus doesn’t meet them. Ultimately, I think that only the pro-choice side can fulfill its end of the bargain.

Sufficient Condition 1: Homo Sapien DNA

Readers might find themselves confused by the idea of a fetus not being a person. He² has human DNA, so how can be not be a person? This question confuses two different meanings of the word “person”. In one sense, “person” refers to the homo sapien specie. In another, human refers to an entity with a special consciousness (more on this later) and level of moral value. For the most part, these definitions align, so we see no contradiction. Yet, we can imagine a couple of scenarios where these concepts diverge. Star Trek introduces us to a series of species, like Vulcans and Klingons, that fit the the second definition of “second.” These people exhibit conscious behavior, and we don’t see their lives as having any less value than those of their homo sapien crew mates. However, these individuals lack human DNA (potentially any DNA), so they don’t fit the first definition of “person”. We can also imagine³ a case where something fits the first definition but not the second. Consider a laboratory that grows artificial organs like lungs and hearts. Each of these organs, using would human tissue, would be biologically homo sapien. Still, it doesn’t seem like most of us would take any moral issue with killing a lab-grown lung. As such, I don’t see the relevance of homo sapien DNA.

Sufficient Condition 2: Counterfactual/Potential Life

Unlike the hypothetical lab lungs, the fetus would grow into a fully formed human if he weren’t aborted. The heart, meanwhile, would stay a mere organ. In this scenario, let’s pretend that scientists discover a strange virus that can slowly turn Venus fly traps into fully-grown humans. Like the Omnicron variant, imagine that this virus spreads throughout the world even if countermeasures in place. Would it be immoral to kill Venus fly traps? Doing so would prevent the development of adult humans. However, I don’t think most of us would object to killing Venus fly traps in this scenario, so it doesn’t seem like “humanness” arises from adult potentiality.

Furthermore, I think this argument misunderstands why we condemn murder. Imagine that I get bored on a Friday night and decide to kill a random individual. Unbeknownst to me, a local gang decides to kill to the same man. Later that night, a gangster and I happen to shoot our victim at the exact same time. Hence, my shot didn’t cause a death; the victim would have died anyway. If we accept the counterfactual framework, I didn’t cause this man any lost life. Still, I think most people would condemn my action as murder.

Before moving on, I also want to add a curve-ball objection. Would an aborted fetus have become a fully grown adult. He was aborted, so there’s no timeline in which he becomes an adult. In all actually existing version of the universe, he does not become an adult. Does morality depend on alternate universes? Are you morally counterfactual futures? I genuinely don’t know, just food for thought.

Sufficient Condition 3: Viability

Many argue that we should use viability as the cutoff date for abortion. In other words, we shouldn’t abort a fetus if it can live outside the womb. I’ll present two objections to this idea, starting with the weaker one.

1. Relativity. If we use viability as the cutoff, the morality of abortion depends on place and time. Maybe, someone will invent a device that can develop a fetus from the third week. Will week-three-abortions become immoral after the technology develops? Furthermore, we can expect to see the newest technology deployed more in wealthier areas than in poorer ones. Would the same abortion be acceptable in Mexico but not in the United States? What if the technology needed for viability is super expensive? Would certain abortions be acceptable for the poor but not the wealthy?

2. Collapsing to #2. We can almost repeat a thought experiment from the last section. Let’s say that, due to some strange virus, any Venus fly trap can transform into a human child with some special medical equipment. Hence, all Venus fly traps represent a viable human child. It still doesn’t seem like there’s anything wrong with killing a Venus fly trap in this scenario. A pro-life advocate might counter that a fetus is all ready a person, while my hypothetical Venus fly trap could merely become a person at some later point. Of course, that’s only true if assume the conclusion! We still need an argument as to why a fetus counts as a person in the first place.

Necessary Condition: Human Consciousness

I’ve rebutted the pro-life arguments, but I still need to present a necessary condition that the fetus fails to meet. Let’s return to the Star Trek example. Why is it wrong to kill Vulcans and Klingons? As discussed before it can’t be human DNA. It’s not intelligence either. Plenty of computers can play chess, produce music, and nail IQ tests, but we don’t see any moral issues with deleting their software. To solve thsi quandary, philosopher Mary Anne Warren lists five traits that make humans special:

1. Consciousness (of objects and events external and/or internal to the being), and in particular the capacity to feel pain.

2. Reasoning (the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems).

3. Self-motivated activity (activity which is relatively independent of either genetic or direct external control).

4. The capacity to communicate, by whatever means, messages of an indefinite variety of types, that is, not just with an indefinite number of possible contents, but on indefinitely many possible topics.

5. The presence of self-concepts, and self-awareness, either individual or racial, or both.

While I appreciate the concept, I think these criteria miss the mark. For one, I don’t think we’ll ever agree upon the moment a fetus hits all five criteria. More importantly, I worry about the strictness of this list. Children, or even some mentally incapacitated adults, may lack some of these abilities. I also wonder if anyone meets criteria three, depending on how we define “relatively independent.”

I think the five-point criteria overcomplicates the issue. To defend abortion, we don’t need a grand unified theory of human importance. We only need to find one criteria that applies to post-birth children but doesn’t apply to a fetus. For that, I think we can stick with only the first point.

For that point, we need to define consciousness. That’s a hard problem, but I think Thomas Nagel takes a decent crack at it:

But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism. There may be further implications about the form of the experience; there may even (though I doubt it) be implications about the behavior of the organism. But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism.

You can be an adult, a Klingon, or even a bat, but you can’t be a Venus fly trap, a lab-grown heart, or a chess-playing artificial intelligence. Obviously, there’s some difficult questions around the boundaries for consciousness. As AI technology improves, we’ll need to start asking if our AIs have reached human-level consciousness. Maybe there’s something that it’s like to be a next decade’s super-computer. Fortunately, the answer is easier for humans: our consciousness arises from our brains and central nervous systems. A fetus’ brain doesn’t control his central nervous system until the second trimester. Thus, there’s nothing that it’s like to be a first-trimester fetus. A first trimester fetus is therefore not a person, so there’s nothing wrong with killing him.

1. For argument’s sake, I’m thinking about conscription during an invasion. I assume that most of us oppose the Vietnam conscriptions on the grounds that the war itself wasn’t justified.

2. I’m going to refer to the hypothetical fetus as “he”. As you will see, I’m pro-choice and I don’t feel that the fetus deserves the a pronoun like “he” or “she” any more than a hand or a table. However, I don’t want to assume my conclusion, so I grant the fetus a “he” for the remainder of the article.

3. I say imagine, but such a thing might exist. I didn’t check.