Blogging for Choice...

My strong materialistic worldview informs my ethics at every level and in every issue, yet there are few issues that underline it more than abortion.  Abortion opponents have only a single official argument:

1. a fetus is a person,
2. killing a person is murder,
3. abortion kills the fetus,
4. therefore abortion is murder.

I say “official” because when you scratch the surface you find that the underlying rationale really revolves around sexuality and patriarchy.  Pregnancy is viewed as the punishment immoral (usually black) women incur for having sex, thus the popular exemptions for rape and incest in many abortion prohibitions.  The fetus is no less human because it’s the consequence of a rape, but the abortion is allowed since the women is not at fault.

But let’s stick to the official argument.  Even if it’s just a pretext it’s the argument to defeat because the real reasons are too misogynistic and implicitly racist to succeed on their own.  It’s also the argument that many people who would otherwise support abortion rights find difficult to cope with.  For the materialist it’s a piece of cake.  Clearly the second and third premise of the syllogism are not controversial; killing a person is murder (i.e. morally wrong), and abortion kills the fetus.  The first premise is the crux of the issue.

The problem is the idea of a “person.”  Is a fetus really a person?  Biologically the fetus is clearly a different organism living parasitically in the mother’s body.  But so is a tapeworm.  What makes the fetus special?  Philosophical arguments swirl around the ideas of potential and unique humanity.  The fetus is a potential person in the sense that it can eventually, under the right conditions, constitute the nucleus of a genuine human being.  No question.  But so can a sperm or an egg, and we don’t give them anything like the same deference.  For that matter cucumbers could become human if the pregnant mother craves pickles.  Potential anything, let alone personhood, is useless for determining what we should value.

Uniqueness is worse.  Yes, each fetus is unique in the same sense that snowflakes are unique, but this is more like the uniqueness of random numbers than the uniqueness of works of art.  Every encryption key issued by a web server is unique, but that does not make each one uniquely valuable.  Each one is exactly as valuable as any of the countless numbers of its equally unique brethren, whether actual or potential.  This uniqueness is only useful in that it guarantees that each one will be distinct, not in the particular combination of bits from which each is made.  We grow attached to the individuality of each child and cherish their unique attributes of course, but that is because they already are people.  It is not their uniqueness alone that makes them people in the first place.

Here’s where materialism shines.  Other philosophies implicitly require an essence, some ethereal energy or mystic mana – a soul perhaps – which serves as the signal feature of what we consider to be human.  Essentialism, inherent in non-materialistic traditions, means that there must be some specific delineation between other types of matter, even living matter, and humans.  Sperm and egg are not essentially a person; the squalling newborn clearly is.  But the squirming fetus still attached to its mother a few hours before birth was virtually the same as the newborn, and the fetus a day before was scarcely different.  As we backtrack through the many milestones in fetal development we cannot find any that marks a dramatic change of kind – a transformation of the essence from the non-human to the human.  Thus we are forced back to conception itself.  Because we cannot draw a hard line at any other point, we end up acquiescing to the absurd conclusion that a single cell is equivalent to a baby.

Materialism solves the dilemma much more easily.  Since we are nothing more than the stuff we’re made of there is no need to look for a hard dividing line.  The early embryo, although clearly biologically human, is not a person any more than any other clump of undifferentiated human tissue.  Over time a complex process, which although astonishing and remarkable is ripe with potential failure, transforms this ball of cells into something to be loved and adored.  There was no moment when the new person suddenly came into existence.  The child was assembled, slowly bit by bit.  At the start there was life (and potential) but no person, and at the end there was a living infant.  Viewed this way the question of when life begins becomes as stupid as asking at what point on the assembly line does a collection of parts become a car?  It’s a continuum.  This actually matches most people’s intuition about abortion.  Early abortion is not killing anything of consequence, and late abortion is very unfortunate but rarely necessary.

Some argue that this is a crass reduction of our ineffable qualities to mere mechanism, and, well, it is.  To some extent.  What makes us what we are, what’s to be honored and preserved, is the way that mechanism is put together.  I think it’s awfully special that we have to opportunity to pull back the curtain and see how the magic works.

- jack*

NOTE: This post was inspired by Blog for Choice Day.

Comments

[Zenji]

I think you're dodging the question of what makes a bundle of cells a human being. Obviously a newborn infant (which is a bundle of cells) is a human being. It seems equally obvious to many people that a just-fertilized zygote is not a human being. You say that the infant's humanity is assembled little by little along the way, but one is tempted to ask, at what point does it become sufficiently present as to constitute a contraindication for abortion?

Obviously, a "fetus" one day before birth is just as human as the baby one minute after. At least, that seems obvious to me. Pre-natal development is basically complete at that point, so unless you want to argue that the physical location of the baby is what gives it its Humanity (inside the mother? not human! outside the mother? human!) then you must admit that at some point, the baby is fully human even though it is inside the mother. And if you admit that, then you admit that killing it is murder.

So the question is, at what point is it human enough that you can't kill it anymore? Which begs the question of, what makes a bundle of cells a human being?

Some people argue that it is simple genetics that makes a bundle of cells a human being. Although that argument has a certain logic, i think it is unsatisfying. I think what people really are getting at is not what species the fetus is, but whether or not it has consciousness and personhood.

right?

And, as a materialist, i would assume you would posit personhood as coming along with a more-or-less completely developed brain. So, we ought to be able to determine a rough timespan within which the brain completes its pre-natal development.....

[Ma'at's Feather]

Jack*,

You are so right that the anti-choice arguments are usually insincere. Even if you believe 'it is only right for rape', who is more qualified to judge that than the woman involved?

But the anti-choice folks want to enshrine this in law. Yet they never follow the logical path of HOW would such a philosophy be implemented?

[jack*]

Zenji,

I'm not above dodging a question when necessary, but the point is that there is no hard boundary; there is no sharp cutoff. The lesson of biology is that nature doesn't adhere to our black and white distinctions and presents us only with shades of grey. Being a materialist is all about learning to love the grey.

I can't tell you exactly when a fetus becomes a person. Before and after birth they are physically the same, as I said in my post. Moreover any given day the fetus is nearly indistinguishable from how it was the previous day, so how can we draw the bright line the essensialists expect? We can't. We can only talk in generalities. To be biological is to embrace statistics.

As a conservative guess I'd say personhood may emerge as early as the 26th week. This is when the cereberal cortext starts to develop, and evidence indicates that this is the seat of the so-called higher functions we associate with awareness and consciousness. Based on what little we understand about these things. It's most likely later with the whole process happening on a graduated scale, but even this conservative estimate puts it well into the third trimester. Same as existing abortion law.

The best way to think about it might be in reverse. Imagine we destroy a little less than half of your brain cells every week so that in the course of 40 weeks, equal to the nine months of pregnancy, you go from having the 100 billion brain cells you have now to just 1. Exactly when do *you* disappear?

[Zenji]

I understand your point about development being gradual. But however gradual it may be, the fact remains that at 1 week, there is no "person" there by most people's understanding, and by, say, 26 weeks, there is a good chance that there is at least the beginnings of personhood. If we are sincerely motivated by a desire not to kill a person, then we really do need to make some decision about an arbitrary point at which we believe there is enough of a person not to be killable. Maybe it is up to the mother to make that decision. Maybe we, as a society, can come to some compromise position that says, "After point X, we're not comfortable with abortion anymore," and leave it up to the mother before that. I'm not personally comfortable with banning abortion altogether, but i'm also not personally comfortable with late-term abortion. Whether or not it is my business at all is a valid question, of course.

[jack*]

We could do such a "compromise," but it would be incredibly counterproductive. First, since all late-term abortions are already about gross developmental defects or life-threatening complications -- never "lifestyle" reasons as the pro-lifers would have you believe -- placing legal restrictions on them would have no positive effect. It would just add judicial oversight and paperwork to something that's no business of anyone but the mother and her doctor.

Second, a law that says society has a legitmate interest in controlling what goes on in a woman's body sets a horrible legal precedent. That could be dismissed as a slippery slope argument except that abortion opponents have stated explicitly how they would use this as a wedge to expand bortion restrictions.

Given that it's empirically unnecessary and it would be used to undermine women's rights, no "compromise" of this type should be contemplated.

[Zenji]

Yeah, but one thing i said that is important is:

If we are sincerely motivated by a desire not to kill a person, then we really do need to make some decision...

I know that you don't believe anyone sincerely gives a shit about the person, but i think some people do. And in fact, i kind of do too. I used to be anti-abortion for that reason, in fact, although recently i've come around to feeling like i have no right to force a woman to carry to term, no matter how much i don't like it if she kills the fetus. But we should at least admit, if only to ourselves, that at some point in the process, there is a person there to kill, and to me, that matters. It is an important principal.

I once had a girlfriend who argued to me that liberalism was interesting because it sought to increase rights, and who had them, even going so far as to endow animals and nature, trees and the like, with certain rights. Although she wasn't talking or thinking about abortion when she said it, i do think she's right, Enlightenment culture and liberalism *does* seek to extend rights in all directions...except to fetuses. Because fetal rights conflict directly with womens' rights. However, if you admit that there is a person there, at some point, it is hard to argue that they don't, at that point, deserve human rights.

For two people's rights to be in conflict is normal. Liberals believe the mother's rights supercede the child's (when liberals admit there is a child at all), and Conservatives believe the child's rights supercede the mother's, from the moment of conception. I lean towards the liberal side, although i am more anti-abortion than most liberals. However, like i said, i really don't feel comfortable telling a woman she HAS to carry the baby to term, even if she doesn't want to.