What we should talk about when we talk about abortion, pt. 2

In part 1 of this post, I wrote about the question of fetal personhood vis a vis abortion, and concluded since it's not at all clear when a fetus becomes a person, fetal personhood is a problematic criterion for whether or not an abortion is ethically okay. I also wrote that I don't think that fetal personhood should inform laws surrounding abortion, and in this post I'll explain my reasoning.

(I should note that women aren't the only people who can get pregnant; trans-men and other people outside conventional gender norms can as well. I wasn't sure how to write about abortion in a way that acknowledges this fact without putting long, irritating caveats on every sentence, so I opted for elegance over accuracy. Apologies to all for not finding a better solution.)

It seems conventional to discuss abortion-law in terms of fetal personhood: are they people or objects? At least that's been my experience, as a child and later as a student. But this is a particular way of framing the issue, which assumes that fetal personhood is the ethically relevant issue in abortion. Pro-life advocates speak of fetuses as "children" or "babies," waving giant pictures of adorable, thumb-sucking, 2001: A Space Odessey-esque proto-infants in utero and MURDER or PRO-LIFE in all-caps.

THE STAR CHILD IS BORN!

Of course, the question of whether and when abortion is ethical is distinct from the question, "Would you MURDER this slumbering, Muppet-like fetus?"

But both questions still focuses on fetal personhood as the ethically-relevant issue, to the exclusion of all other issues. Which tells us something important: that talking about fetal personhood is the conservative way of framing abortion.

In Don't Think of An Elephant!, George Lakoff explains how progressive and conservative worldviews derive from different family-based metaphors for thinking about larger human communities: conservatives use a strict-father worldview, in which the father must protect the family against evil in the world, provide for them, and teach his children (and wife, who's sort of like a child) to be good. Implied in this model is that it is the duty of children and wives to obey the father: disobedience amounts to evil, and the proper response by the father to disobedience is either punishment or, if that doesn't work, disowning the wayward child. (Progressives, on the other hand, use a family-model which emphasizes equality of parents, and casts responsibility and compassion as the primary virtues.)

Proof of liberal bigotry against elephantine persons.

If you accept the idea of a strict-father morality, then conservative opposition to abortion makes sense: it's less about protecting fetuses and more about control over women's sexuality. This conclusion is supported by the fact that the policies supported by "pro-life" advocates don't actually prevent abortions or save fetuses. As Libby Anne discusses here, countries with strong anti-abortion laws (e.g. in Africa and Latin America) tend to have high rates of abortion, while countries with wide access to birth control (e.g. in Europe) tend to have low abortion rates. Needless to say, the pro-life mainstream has little love for birth control. Poverty also seems to encourage abortion, and the stories about how the Pill causes 'mini-abortions' are false in several ways. In other words, pro-life policies encourage abortions, while pro-choice policies discourage them. This makes no sense if being pro-life is about saving fetuses, but is perfectly reasonable if being pro-life is about a worldview in which women who control their sexuality and reproduction are sinful sluts who deserve to be punished.

Pretty sure that the US and the EU don't have identical laws on abortion...

(Map from http://womenslawproject.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/abortionlawsmap.png.)

As Jacob Kovacs puts it,

1) That people’s morality shouldn’t be subject to government interference is a defining conservative belief.

2) That abortion should be restricted by law for moral reasons is a defining conservative belief.

This contradiction is reconciled if you define women as less than full people, less than full moral agents, on whose behalf it is downright necessary to intervene.

Being pro-life is about controlling women, not about saving babies.

I've taken our discussion a bit afield from the original topic, which was "What are the ethically relevant issues around abortion?," but I have a solid rhetorical reason for doing so. I want you to see that the pro-life position is bankrupt. Not only does it rely upon the implausible concept of ensoulment-at-birth to argue that all abortions are unethical; it actively opposes policies which discourage abortion. Seen in the most charitable light, it is nonsensical; seen in a more cynical light, it's old-fashioned chauvinism in disguise. "Save the children!" is just an excuse for controlling women.

(I'm not suggesting, by the way, that pro-lifers are consciously lying when they say that they want to protect children. I'm suggesting that their real motivation is based in a particular worldview or schema, since their purported motivation makes no sense in light of their actual behavior.)

So we shouldn't talk about fetal personhood when we talk about abortion--or in any event, we shouldn't just talk about fetal personhood, and we should stop talking about it once we notice that it's too complicated to get us anywhere.

Instead, let's talk about agency. Let's talk about who should decide whether an abortion is ethically permissible instead of what that decision should be. Let's acknowledge that there may not be a straightforward answer to "Should this person get an abortion?" in every instance, and instead talk about who's in the best position to make that difficult call.

Once we start talking about agency rather than the misnomer of "life," it becomes obvious that the person who's facing pregnancy, the person who will have to go through the expensive, invasive, difficult procedure of an abortion, the person who will deal with the consequences of pregnancy or abortion--they should be the one to decide. Not their family or church. Not society. Not the moral paragons in Congress.

The woman should decide.

George Washington explaining his own "struggle" with the ethical dilemma of abortion, to be followed by Thomas Jefferson on his "struggle" with the ethical dilemma of slavery.

This is what we should talk about when we talk about abortion: agency, not fetal personhood.

What we should talk about when we talk about abortion, pt. 1

Your correspondent has long been pro-choice, but it's mostly been because of peer-pressure rather than conviction. For years, I've had a harder time than my peers in condemning social-conservatives re: abortion, because the question of fetal personhood seems to me to be awfully complex and muddy. In this post, I'm going to talk about the complications I see in clearly delineating when personhood begins, and in a post to follow next week I'm going to talk about why I no longer think that the question of fetal personhood is the central issue in considering abortion's legal status.

Here's the problem: ultra-conservatives say that "life begins at conception," though what they mean is that personhood begins at conception; sperm and ova are indubitably alive--not to mention indubitably "potential" persons--but no one's clamoring for federal protections for semen. If you can accept the religious fiat of ensoulment-at-conception as a robust answer to the question of "What counts as a person?," then the issue is settled. Of course, that answer has problems beyond simple lack of evidence: for instance, it's not clear that "an embryo" is a reasonable way to speak about what's happening during the first two weeks of pregnancy. Ted Peters writes in the Journal of Lutheran Ethics (see section 59):

In short, within the first dozen to fourteen days after conception, the early embryo can divide and recombine in various ways. There is no established individual human being until approximately the fourteenth day after conception, and this only when the embryo has been implanted in the uterine wall.

The arithmetic of ensoulment just doesn't add up: if two embryos recombine into one, do the souls recombine as well?

If you want better criteria for personhood--if, like me, you think that a collection of a couple dozen or hundred cells sans nervous system or consciousness are decidedly not a person--then the view that personhood begins at conception is plainly untenable: there is a period during pregnancy, however short, when a fetus is not a person.

On the other hand, most of us would agree that a newborn infant is definitely a person with a right to life. And since there's no appreciable difference between that infant on the day of its birth and the fetus which it was 24 hours earlier, it would seem that there is at least a short period, at the end of the pregnancy, when the fetus is a person entitled to protections and rights.

To summarize, then, it seems that 1) since a small collection of cells which have only the potential to become a conscious human being are definitely not yet a person, it follows that there must be an early period of pregnancy when personhood does not hold. But on the other hand, it seems that 2) since a late-stage fetus is pretty much identical to a newborn infant, it follows that there must be a late period of pregnancy when personhood does hold. This brings us to the messy and unhelpful conclusion that 3) there's some point or period during pregnancy when a biological object becomes an ethically-important person (or maybe that's what pregnancy is). When the object becomes a person--which is presumably when abortion becomes unacceptable--is not at all clear.

(Side note to all those people who think that studying philosophy is a wast of time: what we're dealing with here is a situated-version of the question of identity and change, of which the Ship of Theseus and Zeno's paradoxes are well-known examples. It turns out that philosophy is not so much useless as fundamental, like conceptual architecture.)

So that's my take on the problem of fetal personhood: it seems to begin somewhere after conception but before birth. How should that translate into laws surrounding abortion? As I'll explain next week, it shouldn't. In the meantime, I encourage you to read Jacob Kovacs' thoughtful and enlightening take on abortion rights in light of the recent Senate-candidate Richard Mourdock's 'scandal' (which, as Kovacs notes, is a scandal for the stupid reason that Mourdock used an ambiguous pronoun, instead of the smart reason that women's autonomy is important).

Update 11/10/12: Apologies for the fact that part two isn't out yet; I've been busy, and didn't want to rush the writing process. I'll have it out as soon as I can.