Letters to the Editor

When does personhood begin? Answer determines all

Tue, 03/07/2006 - 5:18pm
By: The Citizen

In the abortion discussion there is only one question that really matters and it is a preeminent question that is almost never asked. Last week there were three letters basically defending the pro-choice position. These letters did not ask the question, as the question has nothing to do with the Constitution, a right to privacy, a right to choose, the Supreme Court, how a woman feels about her abortion, how many abortions have taken place, regretting or non-regretting or any of the other aspects of abortion. Compared to the preeminent question all of those issues are irrelevant.
Here is the question. What is it that is being aborted? Answer this question and all the other questions go away.
If it is NOT a person that is being aborted, then you don’t need to defend your right to privacy or any other challenge.
But if it IS a person being aborted, then none of those other questions matter either.
Can you imagine making the privacy argument, the painful decision argument or any other argument if the question was terminating the life of a 2-year-old? The only question that really matters is whether a fetus is a person or not.
How do we define personhood? What distinguishes humans from the rest of God’s creation was the endowment of the spirit which makes us in the image of God.
Here’s the rub. Neither you nor I know whether the fetus has that human spirit or not, only God knows. The pro-choice person cannot know if God has given the spirit to that fetus at conception. Likewise, the pro-life person does not know that God does not wait until the birth event to give the fetus that spirit.
Near as I can tell, the only significant Biblical commentary on God’s perception of the unborn is in Exodus 21 and it is not particularly supportive of the pro-life position.
So if we do not know the status of the fetus regarding personhood, where are we? Imagine finding a box somewhere that may or may not contain a 2-year-old. Would not knowing the status of that box make you feel like you had the right to destroy that box or not?
I believe being unsure of the status would require us to err on the side of caution just in case. I believe this is the only civilized answer to the question of abortion. If we don’t know, we MUST honor the sanctity of the fetus just in case.
By the way, every person who hides behind the “Constitution as a practical, working document” on this or any other issue, meaning the Constitution is whatever the Supreme Court says it is, is living in a dangerous world.
Many point to Supreme Court decisions as “the law” meaning they are the determining factor rather than the laws they are interpreting. If you hide behind Supreme Court decisions in this way, just remember that you may be just one or two Supreme Court appointees away from having your “laws” changed if the Constitution is indeed a “practical, working document.”
Pepper Adams
Peachtree City, Ga.

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Two Levels of Abortion Debate
muddle's picture
Submitted by muddle on Wed, 03/08/2006 - 8:19am.

I agree that the question of personhood *ought* to be the crux of the debate. And I would argue that one ought morally to qualify as a person on the basis of *kind membership* rather than whether one is in actual possession of one or more of the characteristic traits of personhood (e.g., reason, self concept, etc.).

But, unfortunately, the debate has often moved to a different level. Philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson argued over thirty years ago that even if the fetus is regarded as a person with a full range of rights, including the right to life, it does not follow that abortion is impermissible. And this is because whatever rights the fetus has must be counterbalanced by the rights of the mother. She argues through a series of examples that having a right to life does not entail a right to the use of another person's body. (One of her examples: Suppose that she is dying of some dread disease and can be cured if and only if Henry Fonda flies in from the west coast and "places his cool hand on her fevered brow." She argues that it would, of course, be a very good thing for him to do this, but there is certainly no sense in which he is morally obligted to do so. And he is certainly not violating her right to life if he refuses--even though she will die without it.)

Not every instance of killing is murder (or, to say the same thing, the violation of someone's right to life). Killing in self-defense, for instance, is not regarded as murder, and the reason here is that one's own rights are at stake.

A complete pro-life argument needs to address Thomson's sort of argument. What must be argued is that the mother has a moral duty to follow through with the pregnancy and that this duty is grounded in the fetus' right to remain in the mother's womb.

Can this be argued?

_____

[Nietzsche had] the strange notion that the greater and stronger a man was the more he would despise other things. The greater and stronger a man is the more he would be inclined to prostrate himself before a periwinkle. --G.K. Chesterton


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