NOTE: The following post, the second of two from Trent Horn, is excerpted from a new book he will publish in September defending the pro-life position. Read the first post here.

 
In Part 1 of this short series, we saw that there isn’t a way to consistently define what a “person” is that includes newborns but excludes fetuses and non-human animals. In this post I will examine “body-rights” arguments for abortion that take advantage of the difference between newborns and the unborn in terms of the use of the mother’s body during pregnancy. These arguments either admit the unborn are persons or say the question doesn’t matter and merely assume the unborn are persons for the sake of the argument.

There are really two arguments in this vein and I believe neither works.

The “Sovereign Zone” Argument

“Women have the right to have an abortion because women (and men) have the right to do whatever they want with their bodies, or at least, do whatever they want to whatever is inside of their bodies.”

The problem with this argument is that the premise (complete bodily autonomy) is more controversial than the conclusion (abortion should be legal). How do we know we have complete bodily autonomy? This argument is on par with saying, “Slavery is moral because is have the right to own anything I want.” Just as we should be skeptical of the premise “I can own anything” we should be skeptical of the premise “I have the right to do whatever I want with my body.”

The pro-choice philosopher Mary Anne Warren writes,

“The appeal to the right to control one’s body, which is generally construed as a property right, is at best a rather feeble argument for the permissibility of abortion. Mere ownership does not give me the right to kill innocent people whom I find on my property, and indeed I am apt to be held responsible if such people injure themselves while on my property. It is equally unclear that I have any moral right to expel an innocent person from my property when I know that doing so will result in his death.”¹

The U.S. Supreme Court even rejected this argument in Roe v Wade. Justice Blackmun wrote,

“In fact, it is not clear to us that the claim asserted by some amici that one has an unlimited right to do with one’s body as one pleases bears a close relationship to the right of privacy previously articulated in the Court’s decisions. The Court has refused to recognize an unlimited right of this kind in the past.”²

I can’t think of any other right that is absolute in the way that defenders of the sovereign zone argument claim the right to control one’s body is absolute. No one has an absolute right to free speech; we ban shouting “Fire!” in a crowded building when there is no fire. No one has the absolute right to engage in illegal religious activities under the guise of “freedom of religion.” Laws against illicit drug use, prostitution, selling organs, public urination, and indecent exposure show there is no absolute right to do anything we want with our bodies.

In fact, all it takes to refute this argument is one example that shows we cannot do whatever we want with our bodies. If that principle is refuted, then so is the sovereign zone argument. Here’s one thought experiment that I think shows we do not have unlimited bodily autonomy over that which lives inside of us.

If it is possible to remove a late-term fetus and keep him alive in an incubator, then, theoretically, if the technology existed, one could take a premature infant from an incubator and transfer him into a woman’s uterus. Nearly everyone agrees that it would be wrong to kill the child in the incubator. But according to the sovereign zone argument, it would not be wrong to kill that child after he was transferred back into the sovereign zone of the womb. It is ridiculous that an infant could be treated like a human being in one location (the incubator) and like disposable property in another (the uterus).

Finally, the argument admits that the fetus is a person who, by the argument’s own logic, has a right to bodily autonomy. If we would respect the bodily autonomy of a sleeping or unconscious born person by not killing him, then wouldn’t we bound to treat an unborn child in the same way because they too, as a person, have a right to “bodily autonomy?”

Regardless of the status of unlimited bodily autonomy, the sovereign zone version of the bodily rights argument fails to support legal abortion.

The “Right-to-Refuse” Argument

 
This version of the argument says that maybe you can’t do anything you want with your body, but you have the right to not let your body be used as life support in order to keep another person alive (such as the refusal to donate bone marrow to save a dying person).

The biggest problem with this kind of argument is what’s called the responsibility objection. In the case of a stranger who will die unless I donate blood or bone marrow, I am not obligated to help him, because I was not involved in how he became ill. But if I caused another person to become dependent on me, then I would owe him assistance.

Here’s an analogy that might help illustrate what I mean. Imagine a replicator machine that can create any kind of object. If I activate the replicator, there is a high chance that the machine will dispense $10,000. There is also a chance that along with the money the machine will dispense a healthy newborn infant.³ If you could find no one else to care for this child, you would become the guardian or “parent.”

Why? Because you engaged in an act that you knew could create a helpless human being, and now that human being stands in need of your assistance. Abandoning this infant to die would simply never be tolerated. Michael Tooley argues in his book defending the morality of both abortion and infanticide:

". . . the anti-abortionist can argue that although people in general may be under no moral obligation to allow the fetus the use of their bodies, even when it is necessary if the other individual is to survive, a pregnant woman is, in general, under a moral obligation to allow the fetus the use of her body, since she is morally responsible for there being a fetus that stands in need of a life support system.”⁴

While the replicator is a science fiction example, we can also use the rare though real example of women who do not know they are pregnant until they give birth. If the autonomist believes that we have no obligation to the children we create, then there is no reason a mother who unexpectedly gives birth to a child in a field could not simply leave the child there.

Suppose a woman lived in a country where abortion was illegal or she could not afford to pay for an abortion. Upon giving birth at home could she simply abandon the child or “refuse to provide life-giving bodily aid” in the form of breast milk? If this woman does have a responsibility to care for this child because she was responsible for his existence, then it follows she would be responsible for that same child when it came into existence at conception and abortion would be morally wrong.

I’ve heard arguments in response to this objection that say engaging in sex doesn’t “cause” pregnancy because not everyone who has sex becomes pregnant. The critic also says that there are many factors outside of a woman’s control that influence whether she becomes pregnant so we can’t say she “caused” a child to come into existence that needs her help when she chose to have sex.

But that is like saying that drinking large quantities of alcohol and driving doesn’t cause pedestrians to be hit by drunk drivers because some people drink and drive and no one gets hurt. Furthermore, there are also factors outside of the driver’s control that affect whether a person gets hit (like whether other people are on the road or not). Therefore, we can’t say drunk drivers cause drunk driving fatalities.

Hogwash.

Drinking alcohol impairs a person and initiates a chain of events that is likely to lead to traffic fatalities. Even if the person took measures to avoid getting into an accident (e.g. playing the music loudly, rolling the window down) he or she is still responsible for the fatality that was caused.

Finally, this response would make it futile to collect child support from deadbeat dads since they could always claim that they aren’t truly “responsible” for the children they sired since they didn’t intend to have those children when they chose to have sex. If we expect men to be responsible for children they create (intentionally or unintentionally) through intercourse, then shouldn’t women be held responsible for the children they create through intercourse as well?

The Organ Use Objection

 
“But,” says the critic, “What if the traffic victim needs your blood, or your own child needs a bone marrow transplant that you knew would be required before they were conceived? Are you obligated to donate your body in those cases?”

Here is where another important difference arises between pregnancy and these cases. In organ donation cases, I use a part of my body that was not made for the sick person in order to keep him alive. I am resorting to extraordinary means to save him, since the purpose of my kidneys, for example, is to filter my own blood and not anyone else’s. By my withholding the use of my kidneys, the sick person dies. But I am not the cause of his death; I have merely chosen not to save him. Is abortion a similar act of withholding an extraordinary use of an organ?

Even in a nonreligious framework it makes sense to say things like, “The purpose of the heart is to pump blood” or “The purpose of the lungs is to absorb oxygen.” Some people may deny that our organs have any “purpose” or are “for” anything, but I don’t think they would hold that attitude should their own organs become damaged or infected. In order to say an organ isn’t working properly would seem to imply that the organ has a proper way of functioning, or a “purpose” or “end” in its operations that is not being achieved.
 The uterus’s purpose seems clear: to support the life of an unborn child. Otherwise, why is it even inside the body at all? If the uterus is designed to sustain an unborn child’s life, don’t unborn children have a right to receive nutrition and shelter through the one organ designed to provide them with that ordinary care?⁵

Unlike in the organ donation cases, where I fail to save someone who is dying, abortion involves separating a healthy child from what it requires to live. Abortion is not an act of “failing to save” but is an act of killing that deprives a child of its right to live safely.⁶ It is on par with putting your infant out in a snowstorm that directly kills him and does not “fail to save (him) from an environment in which (he) cannot survive.”

A critic may object that pregnancy is not “ordinary care” because it causes the woman’s body to undergo extraordinary and uncomfortable transformation. But it is a transformation toward which women’s bodies are naturally ordered. Puberty also involves large-scale and uncomfortable changes to the body, but no one says puberty is an “extraordinary” event on par with organ donation (indeed, it would be extraordinary if it did not happen).

Likewise, throughout all of human history, fertility and pregnancy were considered ordinary events, and anyone reading this page was involved in such an event. Providing shelter and nutrition in the womb is simply an ordinary amount of care (even if at times it can be painful or uncomfortable) that we expect parents to provide to their unborn children.

Conclusion

 
I think I’ve shown that there are no morally relevant differences between humans before they are born or can survive outside of the womb and humans just after they are born. As one child development book puts it, “The fourth trimester [the three months after birth] has more in common with the nine months that came before than with the lifetime that follows.”⁷

We therefore should either treat newborns like fetuses and make it legal to kill them simply because they are unwanted, or we should treat fetuses like newborns and make it illegal to directly kill them because they are unwanted.
 
 
(Image credit: Tribune News)

NOTE: The following post, the first of two from Trent Horn, is excerpted from a new book he will publish in September defending the pro-life position.

 
Let's begin by noting that while not all atheists are pro-choice, a sizable majority are. In fact, a recent Gallup poll revealed that those with no religious attachment are the most likely demographic to identify as pro-choice.

With that in mind, let me present what I think is the strongest argument for the moral and legal permissibility of abortion, often made by atheists:

“Pro-life advocates say that abortion is wrong because the fetus or embryo has human DNA. However, merely possessing human DNA doesn’t make it wrong to kill something because then it would be wrong to kill gametes (sperm and egg) or tumors that also have human DNA. Instead, it is wrong to directly kill innocent persons.”

But what is a person?

“A person is any being who is capable of rational thought and/or self-reflection. Since fetuses and embryos are clearly not persons due to their inability to engage in rational thought, it follows that abortion is not immoral and should remain legal.”

Sounds like a familiar argument so far. What makes it hard to refute is if you tack this part on to it:

“Yes it’s true that newborn infants cannot engage in rational thought that surpasses higher-order animals like pigs or dogs, which are also not persons. But this only means that newborn infants are not persons. Just as it is not immoral to euthanize a pet because it is unwanted, it is simply not immoral to euthanize an infant that’s unwanted because infants aren’t persons.”

Michael Tooley famously defends this view in his 1982 book Abortion and Infanticide. Peter Singer defends a limited view of infanticide and several years ago the issue came up in the media with the publication of a journal article defending “after-birth abortion.”

What makes this argument hard to refute is that it is consistent. You have to dig deep with the argument’s metaphysical assumptions about persons to show what’s wrong with it instead of just pointing to a repugnant conclusion of the argument.

But what about the pro-choice atheist who thinks infanticide is wrong? Can he consistently defend legal abortion without opening the door to infanticide? I don’t think so and here’s why.

The Worst Pro-Choice Arguments

 
The following arguments that defend abortion without allowing for infanticide are very bad and pro-choice philosophers know it. Even still, they are common so I’d like to get them out of the way right now.

Abortion should be legal because women have a right to choose.

If by “right to choose” you mean “right to have an abortion,” then you’re using circular reasoning. You’re saying, “Abortion should be legal because women have the right to have an abortion.” The conclusion is being used to support the premise and the argument is now invalid. However, if by “right to choose” you mean something like “right to control one’s body” then see my comments on bodily rights arguments at the end of this post.

Abortion should be legal to help alleviate overpopulation, poverty, and child abuse.

Should we also kill the homeless and the disabled in order to alleviate those problems as well? Unless the pro-choice advocate can show the unborn are not persons while born people are persons who can’t be killed to ease social problems, then this argument just assumes it’s permissible to kill fetuses and not permissible to kill infants (and other born people). It’s missing a reason that justifies killing fetuses because the world is overpopulated, but not born people.

Don’t like abortion, don’t have one!

If you don’t like firing someone because they identify as being gay then don’t fire them, but don’t take away another person’s right to choose to discriminate against these people. See what I did there? If we don’t have the right to discriminate against, harm, and especially kill, born persons, then we don’t have the right to do the same to the unborn unless one can show they are not persons.

The unborn are not human like an infant. They’re just embryos/fetuses or a clump of cells.

If by “human” you mean “person” I’ll get to that in a moment. If by “human” you mean “an individual member of the species homo sapiens,” then this is just patently false. David Boonin, in his book A Defense of Abortion writes,

“Perhaps the most straightforward relation between you and me on the one hand and every human fetus on the other is this: All are living members of the same species, homo sapiens. A human fetus after all is simply a human being at a very early stage in his or her development.”¹

Peter Singer also holds this view and writes,

“It is possible to give ‘human being’ a precise meaning. We can use it as equivalent to ‘member of the species Homo sapiens’. Whether a being is a member of a given species is something that can be determined scientifically, by an examination of the nature of the chromosomes in the cells of living organisms. In this sense there is no doubt that from the first moments of its existence an embryo conceived from human sperm and eggs is a human being . . .”²

Finally, embryo and fetus refer to the stages of development in a human being’s life, so they don’t disprove an entity is not a human organism. Likewise, the unborn are not “clumps of cells” but complex cooperating cellular units that develop for the good of the whole organism. If the unborn are clumps of cells, then so are we.

Abortion should be legal otherwise women will die in back alley abortions.

How does the danger involved in a bigger person killing a smaller person justify making legal for the bigger person to kill the smaller person? The pro-choice philosopher Mary Anne Warren says of this argument, “The fact that restricting access to abortion has tragic side effects does not, in itself, show that restrictions are unjustified since murder is wrong regardless of the consequences of prohibiting it.”³

You’re a man.

So men can’t have an opinion on this issue? (No, they just can’t have an opinion that takes away women’s rights!) Oh . . . so they just can’t have a pro-life opinion since you would not be upset at a man speaking out in defense of abortion (like the nine male justices who decided Roe v. Wade). In any case, just pretend I’m a woman making the same arguments.

The main issue: What is a person?

Now, for a lot of these arguments a pro-choice reader might be screaming, “But killing toddlers, the homeless, and the disabled is different than killing fetuses!” This is because many pro-choice advocates believe the former are persons but the latter are not. But do they have an argument to justify that belief? More importantly, can they consistently show the unborn are not persons without showing that newborns are not persons either?

Let’s try out some sample definitions of what a person is and see if they work:

Before I get started I want to point out a bad way of defining “personhood” that I often see among pro-choice advocates. Instead of offering a definition for personhood they will just offer a disqualification. They might say, “A person can’t be the size of a grain rice”; “A person can’t be an immobile unthinking blob of cells”; or “It’s just obvious embryos aren’t persons!”

Okay, but don’t tell me what’s not a person; tell me what is!

In order to say fetuses and embryos are not persons you already have to know what a person is in order to disqualify them from being considered persons. For example, we can say a snake is not a mammal because it lacks the traits a mammal must possess (like being warm-blooded). We only know snakes aren’t mammals because we already know what mammals are.

Likewise, we have to know what a person is in order to say embryos and fetuses are not persons. So are there any definitions of what a person is that excludes embryos and fetuses without excluding infants?

A person is any being that can engage in rational thought.

This definition excludes the unborn along with the newborn (and the long-ago born) who can’t engage in rational thought.

A person is any being that has the potential to engage in rational thought.

This definition includes the newborn as well as the unborn so it can’t be used to defend abortion. You might counter that newborns have primitive brains while embryos do not have ay kind of brain at all (fetuses have a small, primitive brain). According to Nature magazine, a newborn’s brain increases from 56 trillion synaptic connections to 1,000 trillion at nine months after birth. If we grant newborns are persons even though their brains still have a lot of developing to do, then why not grant the same status to the unborn that also just have more of the same kind of developing to do?

How could the amount of time it takes to grow a fully functioning brain affect one’s moral status? Why does the newborn’s undeveloped non-rational brain grant it special rights but the fetus’ undeveloped non-rational brain, or even the embryo's genetic code to make a rational brain, not grant those beings the same rights? Why does the stage of an undeveloped organ’s growth change a being’s moral worth?

A person is any being that can feel pain.

This definition excludes most embryos and fetuses, as well as adults suffering from congenital insensitivity to pain. Also, it includes non-human animals like rats. It makes running over a chipmunk and fleeing the scene a felony.

A person is any being that is born.

Cats and dogs are born. Are they persons?

A person is any being that can survive outside of the womb.

This definition has the same problem as the previous two definitions.

A person is any human organism that can survive outside of the womb.

This is just circular reasoning at its finest. “A human organism that can survive outside of the womb” is the same thing as “not a fetus” (this also applies to the definition of personhood being “any human organism that is born” as well). This argument just says, “A person is not a fetus because a fetus is not a person.” But that’s like saying women aren’t people because a person is any human that has a Y-chromosome.

In the absence of any supplemental reasons to justify the claim that birth or Y-chromosomes matter, these arguments are simply fallacious.

A person is any human organism that does not depend on the body of another human organism in order to survive.

Why should we believe this criterion is correct? How does the way a person survives change their moral status?

In the year 2000, a British court had to decide what should be done with two conjoined newborns named “Jodie” and “Mary.” Mary could not survive without being connected to Jodie’s heart and lungs while Jodie could survive without being connected to Mary. Unfortunately, Jodie’s organs were expected to fail after a few weeks due to the strain of supporting both herself and Mary. The court decided that the most ethical decision was to separate Mary from Jodie so that at least Jodie would survive. But the court emphatically stated that Mary, in spite of her complete dependence on Jodie, was still a person with a right to live. The court said,

“All parties took for granted in the court below that Mary is a live person and a separate person from Jodie . . . in the face of that evidence it would be contrary to common sense and to everyone’s sensibilities to say that Mary is not alive or that there are not two separate persons.”⁴

A human organism gradually becomes a person over time.

This critic says that there is no precise moment when a human becomes a person, but by the time a fetus is born it obviously is a person. But this just assumes newborns are persons without giving a reason why they are persons. Once again, we need a definition of what a person is besides, “A person is who I think a person is.”

Alternative Responses

 
So I think I’ve shown that any defense of the claim that unborn humans are not persons will either entail that newborns are not persons, or include non-human animals as persons as well. It seems that there is no consistent way to deny the personhood of embryos and fetuses and affirm the personhood of newborn infants. As Peter Singer says,

“[P]ro-life groups are right about one thing: the location of the baby inside or outside the womb cannot make such a crucial moral difference. We cannot coherently hold that it is all right to kill a fetus a week before birth, but as soon as the baby is born everything must be done to keep it alive.”⁵

But maybe there is another way pro-choice advocates could defend abortion without defending infanticide. One way would be to concede that newborns are not persons but claim that there are other reasons that make infanticide immoral.

I’ll confess though that I haven’t found those reasons to be very persuasive (e.g. our species couldn’t survive if we killed too many babies, infanticide might make us heartless, etc.). They seem to be very “ad-hoc,” or cited just to support people’s emotional revulsion to infanticide. Due to space issues I will probably comment on them in a future post if the discussion warrants it.

The other way would be to use what are called bodily rights arguments in defense of abortion. While infants live outside of a woman’s body, fetuses live inside of it—which could be a morally relevant difference between the two cases. Even if the fetus is a person, perhaps abortion can still be justified based on the woman’s right to control her body.

I’ll take a look at those arguments on Wednesday in Part 2 of this series.
 
 
(Image credit: Fast News Release)