Posted on May 31, 2006
Clarifying the Abortion Debate
My last article about abortion created some controversy, most of it unnecessary. That’s the thing about the abortion debate: the parties of pro-choice and pro-life — and all the others not confined by this artificial binary — talk past each other, rarely hitting on the same — and crucial — foundational beliefs. What I’d like to do in this short essay is drill down to those important questions. It is only by truly understanding what the proponents of the charged and disparate abortion related views believe that we can make some progress toward a solution. Let’s begin with the most important question of them all.
What is a human being? Answering this is the starter pistol for the entirety of the abortion debate. After all, we’re not concerned with killing animals or demolishing rocks. No, what’s at stake here is human life. So, I ask again, what is a human? Generally speaking, pro-lifers see anything immediately beyond the moment of conception as within this category. Just as soon as the sperm penetrates the egg and genetic material is combined, the resulting cell — and soon small collection of cells — is as human as you or I. This may or may not be correct. Evaluating the answer depends on a wildly vast array of factors, none of them easy. But, since the abortion debate is about humans, we have to define human. Hand waving this difficult question away merely postpones its involvement.
The second question is about human rights. Most of us agree that a mother who kills her five year old child is guilty of murder. That child has a right to live, a right that is more important than any reason the mother might have for taking it away. For those parents who are incapable of providing for their five year olds, for example, we provide systems of foster care. So how important is the right to life?
This leads to more questions. Do all humans have a right to life? What if the human is technically speaking alive but in a vegetative state? Can we pull the plug? If not, why? Now go back to your answer to the first question above. Is an unborn child a human? If it is, does it have the same right to life as the five year old? If it does, clearly killing it — having an abortion, in other words — is just as murderous an act as the one committed by the despairing mother.
These questions, then, must be the basis for any discussion of abortion. In brief, they are:
- When, if ever, is an unborn child a human?
- Do humans have a right to life?
- Under what circumstances can the right to life be superseded by the needs and desires of others?
To see how these play out, think about the views held by abortion activists. Strong pro-life advocates would answer that a child is human as soon as it is conceived, that all humans have a right to life, and that there are no circumstances (except, maybe, critical danger to the life of the mother) under which that right may be taken away. Someone who is strongly pro-choice, on the other hand, might answer that a child is human only after the moment of birth and, therefore, the second two questions are inconsequential to the debate.
Before closing, I’d like to quickly address some of the poor arguments I’ve seen against such a systematic and careful examination of the abortion issue. The first is the notion of privacy. It claims that choices the mother makes ought to be hers alone, without society having any say. Clearly, this is nonsense. There are all kinds of choices a mother might make that every reasonable person sees as falling under the authority of society and its laws. For instance, we would hardly appeal to privacy if a mother knowingly and negligently locked her children in a hot car with the windows up while she went grocery shopping. If the children were to die in this terrible situation, all of us would clamor to see her punished by the courts. Therefore, if your answers to the three questions above lead you to see abortion as murder, you have to believe it must be a criminal act and subject to the same laws and consequences as all other crimes. To claim that abortion is always a private matter is to have assumed answers to the three crucial questions, answers that must first be defended against opposing views.
The second bad argument against a philosophical approach to the abortion debate is that it’s hypocritical of us to be so concerned about the lives of the unborn when children around the world are starving, sick, or abused. Only when we have taken care of the troubles of the born can we worry about the killing of the unborn. This position is considerably more specious than the first. If our criteria for caring about any issue is first having solved all related issues, we’d be forced to care about nothing. We cannot solve all problems and we cannot accurately and objectively weigh all concerns against each other. We pick and choose what to deal with at any given moment and, in so doing, must set aside some issues in favor of others. Abortion is — or may be — a problem. So is the regrettable fact of malnourished children. To grant primacy to one, however, does not cause the other to go away.
What I’ve sought to do in this essay is provide a starting line for what is often a contentious and bilious debate. I ask than anyone responding first set out as carefully as possible to answer each of the three questions I raise before making any additional comments.
