-->
Search the ArchivesNavigationContact InformationThe Citizen Newspapers For Advertising Information Email us your news! For technical difficulties |
How To Think About AbortionA couple of people chose to take potshots in another thread at republicans who are pro-life. In a sort of hit-and-run style, they suggested that such pro-lifers are "hypocrites" but included that they did not want to get the thread sidetracked. So here is the appropriate thread. Notice that I title it how rather than what to think about abortion. Both sides of the abortion debate include individuals who display an astonishing lack of facility for critical thinking, and end up merely emoting rather than arguing rationally. Catapulting to the conclusion that anyone otherwise against big government is a "hypocrite" if they would invoke governmental restrictions on "that most private of places, the womb" assumes much without argument. One blogger here seems to think the pro-life stance is reducible to the following formula: "I'm agin' it, so everybody ought to be agin' it." The old (well,"aging") saw of pro-choicers, displayed on the bumpers of Beemers and Buicks, "Don't like abortion? Don't have one!" utterly fails to address the fundamental issues. (Buggies in 1857 bore a similar sticker: "Don't like slavery? Don't own slaves!) Merely observing that the fetus, from conception, is a genetically distinct human, and concluding from this that abortion is immoral assumes that genetic humanness is morally relevant and sufficient for the enjoyment of rights. Perhaps. But it requires some argument. Appeals on either side to raw emotion tend to evade the issues that are objectively at stake. The pro-choicer asks, "If your 12-year-old daughter was raped would you want her to carry the result of that rape to term?" I don't know. But whatever I say does not address the question of whether a fetus has a right to life, and whether that right to life trumps any rights enjoyed by anyone else. Pro-life dramatic presentations that depict the unborn child looking forward to being "Samantha's little brother" but then wondering "Why mommy doesn't love me" and "Why she wants to get rid of me" insert fantasy into the debate: Fetuses are no more likely to be harboring these thoughts and emotions than they are doing calculus or campaigning for president in that dark environment. (A good analogy to this is an anti-hunting argument that assumes the terrified deer have all of the emotional equipment of Bambi, distressed over the murder of his mom.) Two questions must be addressed by both sides: (1) Does the fetus enjoy any rights at all, in particular, a right to life? (2) If the fetus does have a right to life does it automatically follow that abortion is impermissible? Is it always wrong to kill someone or allow them to die when they have a right to life? Actually, I should toss in a third question: (3) Assuming that abortion is morally impermissible, does it follow that it ought also to be illegal? Do we think that there should be a law prohibiting each and every immoral action, such as lying to one's grandma or extending the middle finger in traffic? Issues (1) and (2) can be addressed effectively by assessing two seminal articles on abortion. Both argue that abortion is morally permissible. Mary Anne Warren argues in "On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion" as follows: (1) All and only persons have rights She supports (2) with a subproof that takes this form (without including the details here): (2a) All and only persons have some significant subset of properties X, Y and Z. (These are things like self-consciousness, rationality, sentience, etc.) In a postscript to the article, she anticpates an objection that takes this form: (2d) Newborn infants up to age N do not have a significant subset of X,Y and Z. And, of course, it follows that newborns do not have rights, including a right to life. If murder entails the intentional and unjustified killing of something with a right to life, then, although it is possible to kill babies, it is not possible--by definition--to murder them. The success of her argument thus seems to hinge on the plausibility of saying that newborns do not have a right to life, as there is no relevant difference--not on her criteria, anyway--between fetuses and newborns. What we say about the one class we should also say about the other. (And, of course, if babies do not have any rights, then neither do they have a right not to be tortured. If we imagine someone brutally abusing a baby (e.g., Dostoevsky's story of Turkish soldiers snatching Bulgarian babies from their mothers' arms and tossing them in the air to catch them on their bayonets), we might say that it is wrong of him to do what he does, but we will not then be able to explain the wrongness out of direct consideration for the baby itself. (Instead, we might talk about how "recreational baby-bayoneting" All of this re-opens an issue that Warren thought she had closed and sealed tightly: Might we suppose that some notion of potential personhood is what counts? The late philosopher Alan Donagan argued that kind membership is what ought to count rather than the actual possession of various properties or capacities. This, of course, would include babies and toddlers (and the mentally defective), but it would also include fetuses. (See Alan Donagan, A Theory of Morality (U. of Chicago Press, 1977). The second important article is "A Defense of Abortion" by philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson. Thomson allows, at least for the sake of argument, that fetuses are persons with a right to life. (She thinks that by at least the third trimester this is likely true, but probably not in the earliest stages). But, she asks, if we think that fetuses have a right to life, does it automatically follow that abortion is wrong? What of cases in which the pregnancy threatens the mother's life? Here, her own right to life is put up against that of the fetus. Shall we take the seemingly extreme position of saying that abortion is wrong even to save the life of the mother? It would seem to fall into the same sort of category as killings out of self-defense. (And it is possible to find yourself having to kill even an innocent person in order to save your own life. Aliens, say, have control of an otherwise friendly neighbor's mind, and they are directing him to kill you. It's kill or be killed even though you know that your neighbor is, left to himself, as pure as the driven snow.) The centerpiece of her article is an analogy. You wake one morning to find that, in the night, you were kidnapped and taken to a kind of hospital, Here, you are lying strapped to a hospital bed. You look over and discover that there are IV lines running from you to the next patient. Somehow, the Society of Music Lovers has discovered that you have exactly the right blood type for the life-saving transfusion, and there was no time to search for volunteers. The doctor comes in and says, "I'm sorry that this has been done to you. But now that you are hooked up, you'll have to stay there for the entire duration of this treatment which, by the way, takes about nine months. The reason, of course, is that all persons have a right to life, this violinist is a person, and, so, this violinist has a right to life. To disconnect you would be to kill him, thus violating that right. Does anyone suppose that you are morally obligated or should be legally compelled to stay there? If you think not, but if you also think that abortion is impermissible, then you need to show where the analogy fails. The general point that Thomson wants to make is that X's right to life does not entail a right to the use of Y's body, even if that use is necessary in order for X to survive. Her humorous analogy: Suppose that she is deathly ill, and the only thing that could save her was for Henry Fonda to fly from the west coast to New England to "lay his hand on [her] fevered brow." The fact that she has a right to life does not entail that he has a moral obligation to hop a flight, much less does it entail that the police should escort him and see to it that the deed is done. No doubt, it would be awfully nice of Fonda to do so. We would regard him as a Good Samaritan. And there are other cases in which we might think that "minimal decency" calls for such deeds. Suppose he is in the same room or otherwise in close vicinity and learns that he can save a life by this simple laying on of a hand. Then, if he is a "Minimally Decent Samaritan" he will do it. But it is not clear that even here she has a right to his doing it. But is it true that no one ever has a right to the "use of another person's body"? You and I are hiking, and attempting to make our way across a narrow spot in the trail around a mountain side. To our left is a sheer vertical wall that climbs higher than we can tell. To our right--just inches away--is a precipice that drops away some thousand feet. You slip and go over the edge, but are just fortunate enough to have landed on a small shelf some twenty or thirty feet down. You may have broken a leg. There is no climbing up, and unless I intervene you will certainly perish, either from exposure or from a wrong move that sends you toppling from your precarious perch. The saving of your life depends upon the use of my body in hauling you up somehow. Perhaps Thomson would say that if I am a Good Samaritan, then I'll help, but this still does not entail that you have a right to that "use of my body"--particularly if the task would entail some danger to myself. But suppose that I toss down a rope and persuade you to take hold. I begin hauling you up, and have you about half way to the top. Were I to let go now, it is wildly improbable that your resultant fall would land you back on the shelf. You would more likely fall to your death a thousand feet below. Now where do things stand? Your survival depends upon the continued use of my body in hauling you up, and you are in this dependence relation because of a decision that I made. Is it not plausible now to suppose that your right to life entails that I have a moral duty to you to do my best to follow through? We have but to ask which analogy--Thomson's violinist or my hikers--is more akin to the case of abortion. And, of course, both analogies can be tweaked to adjust for complications such as rape, failed contraceptives, extraneous circumstances, etc. My point here is not to argue one way or the other on the abortion issue. Rather, it is to observe that there is much more to discuss than some of our bloggers seem so glibly to assume. muddle's blog | login to post comments |