In reality, this sort of theory – which
must, sadly, be distinguished from a
theory that is reached by means of the scientific method – is not really
science at all, but rather philosophy disguised as science. It cannot be
disproved by science, because nothing has been scientifically proven in the
first place. I call this scientific
cloaking. Going one step further, this sort of philosophy is not really
philosophy at all, but religious doctrine disguised as philosophy. It is
philosophy-lite, tailor made to “demonstrate” an existing belief. It is
unassailable by logic because it is not formulated by logic in the first place.
I call this philosophical cloaking.
Both sorts of cloaking are undertaken
to garner credibility for ideas that have been made unfashionable by the
passage of time, in the hope that the hemorrhaging of ideological adherents
might be slowed by the introduction of new “information” that appears to make
obsolete notions compatible with contemporary thought. Scientific cloaking is
generally a blunt instrument, effective only on the most ill informed and those
who are most desperate to cling to their beliefs in the face of evidence to the
contrary. Philosophical cloaking is more difficult to detect, due to the
abstruse nature of philosophical discussion, particularly from the viewpoint of
someone who might be susceptible to the claims being peddled – but also for the
general public, who might be inclined, on the basis of such “information,” to
grant more intellectual slack to outmoded ideas.
Many others have endeavored to
justify abortion in itself, but I would suggest that no such justification is
necessary. The burden is on those who wish to impose a prohibition against a private
medical procedure that has become widely accepted and practiced in the
civilized world. To that end, I will show that arguments against abortion are
inherently religious – even and especially those that claim to be secular – and
thus have no place in the debate over the legality of abortion in the United
States. (The issue of religion’s place in legislative matters is, of course, a
controversy in itself, but one that I shall not attempt to settle here.) At
best, the promulgators of these arguments are innocently ignorant of the
internal gaps of logic that persist to exist in their arguments – gaps that can
only be filled by supernatural presuppositions. At worst, they are cynically
distorting logical processes in order to justify positions that cannot be
justified by the legitimate practice of those processes.
I will limit the scope of this
paper to those arguments that pertain to abortion in the first and second
trimesters. Gregg Easterbrook makes a compelling and helpful case for drawing a
“bright line” at the start of the third trimester, “when complex fetal brain
activity begins.” From this, it should not be inferred that I am necessarily
swayed by arguments against late-term abortion. Rather, the sheer rarity of
incidence makes third-trimester abortions hardly worth debating. According to
the Centers for Disease Control’s 2006 Abortion Surveillance (the most recent
year for which statistics are available), 1.3% of all abortions were performed
at ≥21
weeks’ gestation. Beyond 21 weeks, the numbers grow murkier, but in 1997 the
Guttmacher Institute estimated that the number of abortions performed past 24
weeks – the earliest point at which viability is feasible, incidentally – to be
0.08%. It can be assumed that the vast majority of these procedures are
undertaken to save the life of the mother, a circumstance about which there is
little serious debate. Additionally, the increasing resemblance to newborns of
fetuses beyond this gestational stage adds new elements into the debate that
are less intrinsically religious and more visceral in nature.
All arguments against abortion attempt
to capitalize on the question of exactly when a collection of cells becomes
something that we might call a human
person – a being that is entitled to the same sorts of protections as you
and I. These arguments differ very little in content, ranging from “Life begins
at conception, so abortion is murder,” to “At every stage of development,
beginning at the fertilization of an egg, the organism in question is a
potential human being and is thus protected.” Obviously, many of the variations
on these arguments are unabashedly religious and need not be dealt with here.
Others attempt to cloak the underlying mystical content. Most notably, Don
Marquis, in his essay “Why Abortion Is Immoral,” attempts to secularize the
case against abortion by crafting “an ethics of killing which,” he believes, “is
close to self-evident” and which also “clearly applies to fetuses.” In a
nutshell, Marquis suggests that what makes killing wrong is that it denies the
victim of a “future-like-ours.” At this point, Marquis has already defeated his
own purpose on several counts: First, his valuation of the future of any
individual is an immediate leap into the metaphysical. At any given point in
time, for any one of us, the future is pure science fiction. It cannot be
counted among our possessions without the acceptance of mystical beliefs about
the inherent moral value of the unknown and unknowable. Worse yet, this
definition actually invites a mathematical accounting of the future value of
individual lives. In addition to the dangerous potential of logical
extrapolation of this idea, it is also seriously self-defeating, as it could
easily bolster the case for the killing of fetuses that will be born into
poverty, violence, disease, hunger, or any other undesirable scenario.
More importantly though, Marquis has
flagrantly defied Occam’s Razor in sculpting his ethics of killing. His account
goes well above and beyond what is needed to parsimoniously describe the
wrongness of killing. If we strip away the emotional baggage that comes with
discussion of killing, we find that what makes killing wrong is much simpler.
It is the same thing that makes stealing wrong: In both acts, Person A is doing
something to Person B without having been granted permission to do so by Person
A. Is it more wrong to kill someone
than it is to steal from them? Of course. It is also presumably more wrong to
intentionally throw a baseball at someone’s head without her permission than it
is to spray her with a garden hose without her permission, but the underlying
ethical construction remains the same.
So, how could an abortion opponent move
from this simpler account of the wrongness of killing to a justifiable
prohibition against abortion? In order to justifiably prohibit the murder of a
post-natal human, Man A need only hold the position that he would not like to
be killed himself and that he would not like any viable human organisms for
which he is a surrogate to be killed. He does not, in other words, give his
consent to anyone who might wish to perform either act. Man A may hold the position that he
would not like his neighbor to be killed, but this is not relevant to the
justification of his position that murder should be illegal. In fact, Man A may
well wish his neighbor dead – as many of us have done in the privacy of our own
heads – but if he wishes to claim the negative right to not be killed, he must also be willing to impose a prohibition against murder upon society as a whole –
and he is morally justified in imposing that restriction.
In attempting to apply that construction
to a prohibition of abortion, Man A might argue that he would not like a fetus
for which he is a surrogate to be killed. This sounds rather convincing at
first, but upon closer examination it becomes clear that he has no standing to
make such a claim. You see, I have not chosen the masculine pronoun
accidentally here. Man A, as the provider of fertilizing semen, is not yet a
surrogate for the organism in question. He has no prima facie standing to make a claim on behalf of any fetus,
including one that he was instrumental in the creation of. Note that this is
not a question of what rights, if any, are due a biological father during
pregnancy. This is a practical matter of biology. A woman is the sole natural
surrogate of any organism living inside her, ad oculos.
Harry J. Gensler tries to work around
this problem by proposing a Kantian approach in “An Appeal For Consistency.” Gensler boils his argument down to the
following analogy:
If you are
consistent and think that blinding a
fetus is normally permissible, then you will consent to the idea of your having been blinded while a fetus in
normal circumstances
You do not
consent to the idea of your having been blinded while a fetus in normal
circumstances.
Therefore,
if you are consistent then you will not think that blinding a fetus is normally
permissible.
You can see where this is going. Replace
“blinding a fetus” with “killing a fetus” and you have his argument. Setting
aside the patent ridiculousness of giving or denying retroactive consent on
behalf of your fetus-self, the analogy simply does not work. If one makes the
logical assumption that the fetus being blinded is one that will go on to be born,
what motive, other than sadistic cruelty, would bring about such a situation?
In the case of abortion, there are clearly many varying motives not involving
sadistic cruelty. Thus, the analogy fails.
Gensler goes on to make a fatally flawed
assumption about the motives of “most people.” “Your mother,” he says, “could
have killed you through such a death drug (or other means of abortion). Do you
think this would have been all right – and do you consent to (or approve of)
the idea of her having done this? Again the answer is a clear no – and an equally clear no regardless of the time if pregnancy
that we imagine the killing taking place.” Again, setting aside the
impracticable thought experiment being proposed, Gensler severely misjudges the
ideological constitution of those who favor abortion rights. I, for one, fully understand
the existential ramifications of saying “Yes, I consent to the idea of my
mother having aborted me as a fetus.” Specifically, the ramifications are
completely abstract and utterly useless in establishing any moral justification
for a prohibition against abortion. Thus, I offer a resounding “Yes!” (Gensler
seems to believe that an affirmative response might open a hole in the
space-time continuum and negate one’s existence. If this paper continues beyond
this parenthetical, you can be assured that this has not happened to me.)
So, what if a woman makes the claim that
she would not like a fetus for which she is a surrogate to be killed? Would she
then be morally justified in imposing a prohibition against abortion on society
as a whole? She would not, as she is only able to make a claim on behalf of an
organism that is inside her. Until the
organism leaves her body, any claims regarding that organism are defined by its
inextricable connection to – it’s insideness
of – her. Once a viable human organism is living outside the womb, she is
free to make the same claim that she could make of an adopted child – that she
would not like any person for whom she is a surrogate to be killed.
Only if one believes that there is
something within the fetal organism that transcends the surrogacy of the mother
can one make a plausible claim in defense of that organism. If Man A believes
in the existence of a sacred mystical spirit that is created at the moment of
conception, then perhaps he has standing, as another being in possession of a sacred
mystical spirit, to make a claim on behalf of any fellow being in possession of
a sacred mystical spirit. One cannot say precisely how the rules of logic are
altered by such a belief because the injection of supernatural phenomena
renders logic immediately impotent and irrelevant. Nonetheless, it is the only
path to an intellectually consistent position against abortion.
It is worth mentioning one last argument
that is frequently used against abortion – that of the slippery slope. I am
certainly not the first to point out the sheer casuistry of the argument, but
it bears repeating. One could just as easily assert that allowing severely
disabled fetuses to be born could lead to a culture of disability, in which we
genetically engineer disabled beings or manually disable them in the womb or at
birth. No shred of evidence has ever been offered to show that abortion
contributes to a “culture of death,” as it is often called. There is no
indication that anyone takes abortion lightly or goes about killing fetuses for
sport. More significantly, there is no indication that people think of fetuses
in the same terms as their fellow post-natal beings. While rates of violent
crime have risen and fallen under changing policies and economic conditions,
abortion has remained fairly commonplace since Roe v. Wade. It is estimated
that one in three women will have an abortion sometime before the age of 45.
This does not seem to have had any more bearing on the incidence of violent
crime than, for example, the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As is the case with many contentious
issues, the religious fanatics are the most consistent. They do not attempt to
cloak the nature of their positions with pseudo-science or faux-philosophy.
They state their beliefs honestly and we are free to move on to the question of
the place of those beliefs in setting public policy. The cloakers, on the other
hand, force a false debate that cannot be settled due to the intellectual
dishonesty that underlies their claims. They hope to advance their religious
beliefs simply by claiming that they are capable of making a secular argument.
They are not.
Works Cited
CDC.gov.
Abortion Surveillance – United States,
2006. Web. 27 Nov 2009.
Easterbrook,
Greg. 2000. 'What neither side wants you to know. Abortion and brain waves'. New
Republic, 31 January.
Gensler, Harry J. An Appeal For Consistency, from ‘A Kantian Argument Against
Abortion,’ Philosophical Studies 49
(1986).
Guttmacher.org. Facts on Induced Abortion in the United States. Web. May 2011.
Marquis, Don, Why Abortion Is Immoral, from
Journal of Philosophy 86, no. 4, April 1989.
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