[Bups-dis] Three Approaches to Defending Abortion

[J M Whiteley]

PREFACE

It seems that this list has been fairly inactive for many moons now and is,
generally-speaking, in need of a good kick up the arse.  In order to do this, I
want to start things off with a subject that everyone currently capable of
reading this text can engage with at some level:  Abortion.

Of course, I’m not going to ask you whether it’s okay to get out the gin and
coat hangers, not just because I genuinely think it is, but because that debate
is readily-available in all its prejudice-laden, fist-beating glory to anyone
who wants to know via the medium of Google.  

Instead, I’m going to try to sketch three approaches to justifying abortion. 
Those of you who’ve done Applied Ethics/Feminism courses may be bored to tears
with these arguments, and for this I apologise.

THE NON-PERSONHOOD APPROACH

Nobody can reasonably deny that the unborn foetus is biologically human, and
this is not what this approach tries to do.  Instead, it tries to drive a
conceptual wedge between ‘human’ and ‘person’, which it turns out is not that
difficult.

Typically, we take humans and persons to be one and the same, but that is not
the case.  ‘Human’ is a biological category whereas ‘person’ is a moral
category – if you’re human then you have a particular genetic make-up and if
you’re a person you hold a particular moral status. That all existing persons
just so happen to be human  may be behind this supposed interchangeability, but
now we’ve recognised the difference we can leave this behind.  

The crucial point is that being human is not a sufficient condition for being a
person.  Cancer cells in a culture dish may be biologically human, but I need
not worry too hard about incinerating them, and (to use a cruder example)
spermatozoa may also be human, though we wouldn’t consider fellatio to be
morally equitable to cannibalism.  We might now go further and ask whether
personhood logically entails humanity – the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm appear
as people, though they aren’t human – but this would be straying a little off
topic.

How this distinction relates to justifying abortion should be obvious by now. 
Abortion can be justified because it doesn’t involve the killing of a person,
just a non-person human, which seems fine:  If we can herd foetuses into the
subordinate moral pen alongside the sperm and the cancer cells, then it seems
that we have a defence of abortion ready-made for us.

It is at this point that we run into a hurdle, because we haven’t actually shown
that the foetus isn’t a person, because we haven’t laid-out the criteria for
personhood and pointed to where our foetus falls short.  This is a difficult
task, as we have to ask the puzzling – and somewhat clichéd – question ‘What
makes a person a person?’  There are a million ways you could answer this:  I
will offer one.

A person is an organism that ‘has experiences, is capable of thought and of
using language’ (Tooley, 1972). This model is usually characterised as ‘persons
have a sense of self’, which is a worryingly fuzzy definition, but one I’m
willing to run with.

This definition has immediate intuitive appeal:  We like to think that we have
this sense of self, and this is really at the heart of what makes us a person. 
Moreover, it helps us form a great defence of abortion, because the foetus does
not meet its rigid criteria and must take its place as a non-person human.

Problems arise, however, when we start to consider the implications of this
view.  Newborn infants do not have this sense of self that we demand of
persons, and so they are not persons.  Tooley recognises this issue, but digs
his heels in, grudgingly accepting that there is no relevant difference between
abortion and infanticide.  Another group shunned from the personhood club are
the mentally disabled – and whilst it seems to be the case that severe mental
handicaps could bring about a situation where life is not worth living (Singer,
1993), we would be less willing to admit that killing an adult human who has no
sense of self is no different from performing an abortion, or destroying the
cancer cells.

Perhaps this doesn’t cause a problem for you, the reader, as you may just be
willing to shrug off the wrongness of these consequences as ‘irrational
nonsense’.  Furthermore, you may think we can condemn infanticide and killing
the handicapped for auxiliary reasons without heavy-handedly considering them
as murder:  After all, no one is going to argue that no abortions are wrong,
forced abortions are most definitely bad things, but for reasons that have
nothing to do with murdering the foetus.

To respond to this, we could go on to discuss the idea of the self being central
to our personhood, asking the question ‘Just what is so important about having
a sense of one’s self?’  After all, contemporary thinking concerning what the
self actually is doesn’t seem to support the claim that it is of great moral
importance (see Dennett, 1991 and Blackmore, 1999):  But I will drop this here
because, yet again, I fear I would be straying too far off topic.

Treating foetuses as non-persons does throw up challenges.  Even if you find
Tooley’s position, and its seemingly disastrous consequences, convincing you
will not still be able to say that you are standing in a particularly firm
position.  The tide is coming in, and you’re stood down on the beach, its time
to seek higher ground


THE AILING VIOLINIST APPROACH

Judith Jarvis Thomson’s article A Defence of Abortion (1971) has shaped the
abortion debate over the past thirty years, lifting it out of a fist-beating
limbo, and catapulting it back into the realm of reasoned debate.  The clever –
revolutionary even – trick she pulls is to assume nothing about the moral
status of the foetus throughout:  It could have all the rights of a fully grown
human, or all the rights of a sperm, but this makes no difference to a right to
abort.

To illustrate her point she gives an imaginative analogy:  One day, you wake up
in hospital, only to find that your kidneys are connected to the circulatory
system of a famous violinist.  A doctor walks in and tells you that whilst you
slept, a group of music fanatics kidnapped you and hooked you up to their
ailing idol, who is suffering a kidney defect.  The doctor reminds you that the
violinist himself is not to blame in this regrettable state-of-affairs, and
that if you unplug yourself you will be killing an innocent man.  Would it be
wrong to unplug yourself?  Of course not!

This analogy plays cleverly off our intuitions about the acceptability of
killing biological dependants.  The violinist clearly has a right to life, but
this does not mean that he can make unlimited demands on our body, because no
one can demand that we make that much of a personal sacrifice for them.  If it
were the case that our business with the violinist could be over inside of an
hour then he may have claim on us and the use our kidneys, but pregnancy is not
like this.

Thomson’s position is a much stronger one, we don’t get bogged down in
metaphysical debate about persons and we have a justification of abortion that
rests comfortably with our intuitions.  The analogy in its raw form draws a
parallel with pregnancy-due-to-rape, as it assumes that you are completely
without fault in the whole situation, though it doesn’t take a monumental leap
to imagine how it could be altered to account for accidental pregnancy –
Thomson suggests that maybe you were visiting a friend in hospital and
foolishly got out of the lift on the wrong floor, walking straight into the
ward for violinist-benefactors.

So far, so good, Thomson seems to have cracked it, but this is where niggling
doubts may start to creep in and eat away at the ailing violinist approach. 
Does the analogy still work when we consider the case of women who genuinely
mean to get pregnant, but then decide it was a poor idea and opt for an
abortion?  We want to allow these women the same rights we would allow the
careless woman or the rape victim, but the violinist approach just doesn’t seem
to allow for it.  If you were briefed fully about the violinist procedure and
still volunteered willingly, we would say it is absolutely wrong for you to
unplug yourself once the procedure is under way:  backing out of a contract is
bad enough, but when it results in an innocent’s death it is clearly
unacceptable.

We don’t want to leave behind our indecisive woman, but if we were to run with
Thomson’s position we’d just have to.  Even so, whilst we fend off this
problem, we are flanked on the other side by a different criticism, attacking
the analogy itself.  The mother-foetus relationship is a parent-child
relationship, a special sort of relationship that cannot be exploded by any
amount of fannying around with talk of violinists.

It’s been thirty-seven years since Thomson published her paper, and it’s due a
good kicking


THE GESTATIONAL-INTIMACY APPROACH

We’re now at a point where we have to make a serious decision, we have two
radically different approaches to justifying and essentially, the only way we
can move forward is by developing one approach whilst discarding the other. 
The approach I want to develop is Thomson’s approach, because whilst the
central violinist analogy is slightly faulty, the basic architecture of the
approach is perfect.

The reason I don’t want to run any further with the non-personhood approach is
that whilst it raises many interesting questions it doesn’t provide us with a
very stable platform upon which to argue for abortion.  Even if we tried to
pinpoint scientifically an exact point in human development where a human turns
magically into a person, we won’t be able to silence the sceptics.

Margaret Little, in her paper Abortion, Intimacy, and the Duty to Gestate (1999)
provides the step-up we need.  She starts from very much the same point as
Thomson, aiming to argue for a defence that assumes nothing of the foetuses
moral status.  Little coins the term ‘gestational intimacy’ to describe the
mother-foetus relationship alluded to above, though her approach tries to
challenge the notion of its intrinsic importance.

To explain how gestational intimacy relates to justifying abortion, we must
first look at how relationships – according to Little, and our intuitions – can
generate obligations:  Imagine a perfect stranger asks you out on a date, you
clearly don’t have an obligation to accept her proposal, but do you need good
reasons to turn down this stranger?  We would say no, you need no other reason
than not wanting to go out on a date.  Now imagine that your cousin is in town,
and wants you to go out for a meal with her, we may say again that you have no
obligation to partake in this ‘date’, but it seems that you need a reason to
decline her offer. As your cousin, she has a far greater claim on you than the
stranger.

This point probably needs a bit more labouring over, so I’ll use another
example:  On your way to lectures, you pass a tramp who asks if you have any
spare change, you have change but you frankly don’t want to give it to him, so
you politely decline.  As you pass around the next corner, you come across
another tramp begging for change, only this one just so happens to be your best
friend.  Now maybe you still don’t have an obligation to dig deep, but the fact
this tramp is your friend does seem to give him some claim on the change in
your pocket  - assuming, of course, that he isn’t going to spend the money on
crack/smack/White Lightning.

Our relationships with others do seem to affect their claims on us, even in the
case of parenthood.  If there were a child with a kidney ailment – not entirely
dissimilar to that of our violinist – that meant he required a kidney
transplant from his genetic father, we would have to ask whether the father was
obliged to give up a kidney.  If the father is a traditional father – or as
Little puts it, has a ‘history of shared experiences’ with the child – then we
would say that he does have this obligation, but if the father simply had a
one-night-stand with the mother, or was just a sperm donor, and had no formal
ties with the child, we might say that he has no such obligation.  Little’s
argument is that the relationship of ‘parenthood’ does create particular
obligations, as the conservative would concede, but that it is not reducible to
mere biology.

The question we have to ask now is whether gestating women share this
relationship with the foetus, and whether gestational intimacy is a parenthood
relationship.  The answer is, strangely, both ‘yes’ and ‘no’.  Whether there is
a genuine relationship between gestating woman and foetus rests on the
gestating woman’s perception of the relationship.  For many, being pregnant is
a wonderful experience, and they feel an instant connection with the foetus and
conceive of themselves as being in a deeply personal relationship, but for
others, being pregnant is an unwanted intimacy.  Put simply, if the woman sees
herself in a personal relationship, then she has full obligations towards the
foetus, otherwise, this is not the case.

This may strike you as problematic, and that there may be some disanalogy
between the example of the tramps and the gestating woman:  The tramp has no
claim on the money in my pocket, but he does have a claim that I don’t smother
him to death with his own sleeping bag.  To address this, we have to return to
the violinist:  An unwanted intimacy is like the relationship between you and
the violinist, he can’t make that claim on you, even if it results in his
death, whereas a wanted intimacy would be like the relationship of parenthood,
with all its corresponding obligations.

AFTERWORD

Above I have sketched three responses, which I will now condense:

1)	Abortion is not morally wrong because it does not involve the killing of
persons.
2)	Abortion is not morally wrong because no one, no matter how vulnerable or
innocent they are, has a claim on the use of anyone else’s body.
3)	Abortion is not morally wrong because for someone to want it they must not be
in a personal relationship with the foetus, and hence have no obligation to
provide sustenance for it.

It’s likely that even on first reading, you will find many problems with these
arguments, or the way I have characterised them.  Please comment freely – and
fiercely, if you so wish – on any aspect of this that takes your fancy.

SUGGESTED READING

Little, M (1999) ‘Abortion, Intimacy, and the Duty to Gestate’ in Ethical Theory
and Moral Practice, Vol. 2 pp.295-312

Thomson, J (1971) ‘A Defence of Abortion’ in Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, No.1
(reprinted in Singer (Ed.) Applied Ethics Oxford: OUP pp.37-56)

Tooley, M (1972) ‘Abortion and Infanticide’ in Philosophy & Public Affairs 2,
No.1 (also reprinted in Singer, pp.57-85)