Central questions
My long essay below is the real content here. But let me start by highlighting one main conclusion that's relevant to discussions of these issues in the context of abortion. In that debate, I see two central questions behind almost every disagreement:
- What entities deserve full moral rights? This is often phrased as "At what stage in development does a developing child merit human rights?", but a complete answer must also address how to decide whether (e.g.) Lieutenant Worf or Commander Data from Star Trek, or the HeLa cell line derived from Henrietta Lacks, would deserve those rights.
- When and to what degree is one person obligated to risk their own comfort, health, or life to protect the life of another? Giving of oneself to save someone else is always morally admirable, but in many cases it is recognized as voluntary: nobody is forced to be a bone marrow donor, even if they're a unique match for a life-saving surgery. How should this line be drawn?
If you're debating abortion with someone and you have not yet addressed these two questions, I suspect your debate is probably not going to be productive. I also suspect that the fundamental answers to these questions depend primarily on each person's ethical postulates, which are not provable in any universal way. (This doesn't bode well for any eventual resolution to the debate. But I hope putting the focus on these questions where it belongs might at least reduce name-calling and misunderstandings along the way.)
There's an additional wrinkle when you move beyond the underlying question of ethics to start discussing public policy. I won't really address it in my essay below, but it's another central question in the abortion debate:
- When people disagree on the basic premises involved in the questions above, to what degree should one person or group seek to impose policies based on their answers on society as a whole? This is a tremendously difficult question, given the tension between deeply held values on this issue. It is obviously a moral obligation to defend the lives of human beings who aren't being treated as such (e.g. Jews in the Holocaust). And it is obviously a moral obligation to defend the freedom and autonomy of human beings who are being denied it (e.g. slavery in the US).
It can be very, very hard to find morally acceptable compromises when you disagree on the foundations of the discussion. But I'd like to think that seeking compromise is easier if everyone has at least understood each other's starting points. At a minimum, there might be fewer accusations that those who disagree with you are monsters.
Full discussion
I've been thinking about ethics lately, and (partly inspired by Supreme Court vacancy discussions) about aspects of my ethics that relate to the moral value of human life, and to abortion. Not surprisingly, this ties into a whole lot of very fundamental ideas. I'm not going to try to formally argue any of this: what I'm writing here is primarily meant to be descriptive of how I approach the world, not really to convince anyone else that they should see things my way or to make the strongest possible case. My hope is to contribute to mutual understanding, whether or not that leads to agreement. (I'd do better at that if this were substantially shorter, I know...) By the same token, I don't want to pin down right now the precise degree to which I view these as moral absolutes rather than merely a statement of my own feelings, but I do feel pretty strongly about the first set of them: if they aren't absolutes, then a lot of them at least feel awfully close to that. I think would be pretty uncomfortable interacting with someone who didn't more or less agree on the vast majority of this as at least a minimum standard.
Beginning exceedingly broadly, my moral philosophy tends to value unique, complex, low-entropy entities over generic, unstructured, high-entropy ones: Chimney Rock has greater value than an equally massive pile of rubble, a field of flowers has greater value than a field of dust, that sort of thing. A related (but separate) principle is that I place a clear moral value on living things: life is something deeply wonderful and precious in this universe, individually for every organism and more broadly for entire species and ecosystems and especially for life as a whole. I certainly value individual bacteria less than individual blades of grass, and those less than individual squirrels (which I suspect largely boils down to my feelings about the value of complexity), but those are variations in degree: all living things deserve our respect.
Beyond even that principle, I additionally place extremely high value on what I'll refer to as sapience (or self-awareness, or sentience, or consciousness: some sort of intelligent mind that can seek to understand itself and its environment). This is again correlated with complexity, and it's linked to life as well (perhaps broadly defined), but I consider it to be its own qualitatively new category. There might be gradations within it of one sort or another (degrees of intelligence, perhaps, or other distinctions), but my belief is that regardless of those gradations, simply being in this category at all immediately conveys tremendous moral weight (much more so than any potential gradations in degree). For me personally, the moral value of human beings and the foundation of human rights are very closely connected to this principle (but more on that later).
I recognize that sapience is an uncomfortably fuzzy category to pin down! But "fuzzy" doesn't mean "completely undefined": my students clearly do qualify, and my lawn clearly doesn't. Deer? Very unlikely. Dolphins? That starts to get interesting: as a complete non-expert, I suspect we're edging into the fuzzy realm in that case. My usual perspective on the fuzzy edge cases in ethics is that the safe option is to err on the side of greater respect: more on that later. [Also, as an aside, putting such high value on sapience doesn't mean that non-sapient life no longer deserves respect, or that we sapients can suddenly treat living things with the same disregard as non-living matter. And by the same token if there turned out to be some even higher moral category possible (divine beings? superintelligent AI? planetary ecosystems??) that would not at all diminish the set of human rights implicit in sapience: the moral value conveyed by each successive category is additive.]
Finally, as a secondary corollary principle to the value of sapience, I recognize that sapient beings sometimes form powerful bonds of love and devotion toward other entities that may not be sapient themselves. Pets are a clear example, and sometimes even inanimate objects: precious works of art or holy relics, for instance. When those bonds exist, they tend to convey an additional level of moral value: not enough to raise the non-sapient target to the moral status of sapience, but still potentially very meaningful. That is particularly true when the bond is intense and personal (e.g. don't hurt my cat), but it may still be worthy of consideration when applied to broad populations (e.g. don't hurt any cats). (This may ultimately boil down to the respect due to the feelings of sapient beings, but on a practical level I think it's helpful to consider things like pets as having enhanced moral value of their own.)
One more general principle of behavior may be worth mentioning, though I think of it less as a moral imperative than as a way of addressing uncertainty. I believe that every ethical system will include many grey areas, where the moral course of action in a given circumstance is unclear. My preferred approach when confronted with one of those is to first do my best to narrow the grey area as best I can by careful thought, and then to hold myself to a strict standard and others to a looser one. That is, I do my best to behave as if the grey area is morally wrong and to avoid morally ambiguous choices, but I also strive to judge others as if the grey area is morally acceptable and to treat their choices within it with respect. (Their judgement of the boundaries of the grey area may be different than mine, and my own uncertainty means that their choice might well be fine.) One benefit of this approach is that two people who follow it will always respect each other's choices as long as their judgements of the morally grey areas overlap at all.
That's a big chunk of my basic ethical framework, and as I've said, I hope that most people would feel that it is for the most part compatible with their own principles. In particular, I expect that there is substantial overlap between my notion of beings who have a privileged moral status due to sapience and religious notions of beings who have such status because they possess a soul. But "substantial overlap" is not "perfect consistency", and I'll discuss later how that contributes to one of the major sources of disagreement on topics like euthanasia and abortion.
When I apply my sapience-based ethics to the question of abortion, I need to somehow address that fuzzy question of when sapience arises during fetal development. It's clearly not present before the nervous system has formed, and it's pretty clearly there or well on its way by the time the baby reaches full term (some aspects of self-awareness don't develop until 12-24 months after birth, but it seems awfully likely that some plausible threshold has been crossed in most newborns). My own sense is that quite a lot of neural development needs to happen before the fetus could possibly exceed the self-awareness of a chicken or a cow (and those are animals whose non-sapience is clear enough to me that I'm willing to eat them). I've read that the central nervous system isn't even myelinated until week 23 or so, and that rapid synapse growth begins in week 28: those milestones would seem to represent the earliest that the fetus could approach chicken-level cognition. Beyond that, the whole concept is fuzzy to begin with, and I personally don't know enough of the biology to have a clear answer, but at a minimum my sense today is that I wouldn't worry about being in that fuzzy "could be sapient" realm until at least, say, week 27, and that feels pretty cautious.
Now, my ethical system still gives plenty of reason to care deeply about a growing fetus even before the fuzzy emergence of sapience is reached! It's a living thing, which immediately grants it meaningful moral status, and a great deal of the uniqueness and complexity of a human being is already implicit in its genetic code: that complexity and its potential to achieve sapience are worth a great deal. Moreover, in most cases the mother (and often others) have already begun to form the loving bonds that enrich the moral status of non-sapient (or pre-sapient) things. And all of these factors become increasingly meaningful over time. In my ethical framework, even though there's still a world of difference between that and the moral status of a fully sapient being, it's hard to think of any non-sapient entities more deserving of our respect and care.
And that finally brings me to the ethics of abortion. Based on the moral framework that I've described, abortion should never be taken lightly: a human fetus has very, very high moral value. Any personal decisions or public policies that could serve to make abortion less common are commendable. But that said, ultimately in my view the rights of a sapient person trump those of even a very precious non-sapient living thing. If a woman makes a careful assessment and concludes that the costs or harms of carrying a child to term (to say nothing of whatever comes next) are greater than that precious spark of life, I believe that she has the right to choose to end its life for the benefit of her own. Such a choice could never be without an element of sorrow and regret, but it can absolutely work out to be a clear net positive overall.
Within my moral philosophy, that argument seems entirely sufficient until the point where the fetus approaches the fuzzy boundary of sapience. When that time comes, the decisions become more difficult. To borrow a phrase from a pamphlet I saw in a cathedral many years ago, we are faced at times with tragic conflicts of life with life, and (in my context) of sapience with sapience (or potential sapience). There are times when a problem in pregnancy threatens the lives of both the mother and the child, and the decision is whether to let them both die or to perform an abortion to save the mother. I do recognize that acting to take a life is morally distinct from choosing to passively allow that same death along with another, and I can understand that different people might disagree on the moral course of action under those circumstances. But even so, I see the value of saving a sapient life as great enough to justify at least a level of moral ambiguity about not doing so: I would hope that even someone who would not favor an abortion themselves under those circumstances would respect the choice of someone who would. Thus, I see a strongly compelling argument that abortion should always be an option when the mother's life is at stake, and a reasonably convincing position that it is in fact the necessary moral choice.
There are also cases in which serious birth defects are identified that would lead the newborn infant with a very short life filled with misery. My own view is that it is a morally good act to prevent the emergence of a sapient being who is doomed to such an existence: if an abortion can be performed before that fetus develops sapience, that is a great mercy. For that reason, the edges of the uncertain period of the appearance of sapience become very important in this situation: I myself feel willing to risk some chance of prematurely ending a sapient life to prevent the future emergence of sapience under such awful circumstances. (There's a related but even more difficult ethical question about the acceptability of euthanasia to prevent suffering leading to a rapid death even for a fully sapient being.) But the decision on exactly how to draw that line is an immensely difficult one. How likely is a fetus to be sapient at any given point? How quickly will their condition lead to their death: a day? a week? six months? How miserable will their life be in the meantime? How do all of those factors and more combine to give rise to a final choice? For me, this is a vast grey area: I am grateful that I have never been forced to make such a choice, but there is a very broad range of situations like this where I am absolutely willing to leave the decision in the hands of the parents. Again, for me, this is a category where I think the argument for allowing individuals to follow their own conscience on abortion is extremely strong, and that in some of these situations choosing to abort may be very much the best ethical choice.
Even beyond that point, I believe that there is a good case to be made for abortion being an ethically defensible choice. I don't believe that one sapient being has a moral duty to use their body to support the life of another: bodily autonomy is an essential moral right that comes with sapience. It is a more delicate question when that bodily autonomy is in conflict with another sapient person's survival, but even then those rights are important: nobody should be forced to be a bone marrow or kidney donor against their will just because they're a match, for instance. Giving up your bodily autonomy for the sake of someone else can be a profoundly good and moral act, but in general I do not consider it to be ethically required of anyone. So by the same standard, while there is enormous moral value in someone using their body to nourish and grow a baby to term (especially once it reaches the nebulous point of sapience), I believe that ethically it must be a voluntary choice at every stage. Any decision to abort past the point where sapience begins to seem possible should be a very grave and serious one, and never ever taken lightly: the reasons need to be absolutely compelling for the mother, and if the baby can be safely delivered rather than aborted that is likely a better option. But life and death consequences are not required to make such choices valid, and ultimately the mother's judgement must govern her own body.
Let me take a moment to discuss a couple of other perspectives that I have encountered, as best I understand them. I hope that I have not misunderstood these too badly, and I know that there is a very wide range of beliefs and arguments surrounding this topic: even if my comments here manage to reflect some people's views with reasonable accuracy, they will undoubtedly be entirely foreign to others and may even feel like unfair distortions to folks whose views don't quite match. I do want to know about those mismatches if you spot them; I promise that I'm trying to speak in good faith, and if you have the interest and energy to educate me I'll do my best to understand better.
First, related to my last and broadest argument above, some people make the case that if a woman chose to take the actions that led to her pregnancy, then it is her responsibility to live with the consequences of those actions. If they're being morally consistent about this argument, they generally accept abortion in cases of rape or incest where the woman did not consent to the sex that got her pregnant. There is a degree to which this argument is valid: it is a moral negative to negligently bring life (especially sapient life) into the world in circumstances that would lead you to destroy it, and that risk should certainly be a factor in the moral calculus before having sex. But I claim that this should not be a factor in the debate about abortion. Formulated this way, the argument against abortion essentially casts an unwanted baby as a punishment for allegedly improper sexual choices (possibly compounded with bad luck). I find everything about such an argument distasteful, but most importantly I see it as trivializing the major moral questions surrounding abortion. These are questions of the life and death of a living and possibly sapient being, and questions of the most fundamental levels of bodily autonomy and consent. Arguments about sexual propriety pale in comparison, and in any case no life or death decision (particularly for sapient life) should ever rely on a moral judgement about someone else's prior conduct.
And second, I want to take a moment to acknowledge what I think is the biggest and most common point at which many people would disagree with my premises. Religious beliefs vary widely, but one common belief is that an egg cell is granted a soul at the moment of fertilization, and that it is the soul (rather than some fuzzy criterion of sapience) that gives a person their essential moral value and is the source of human rights. This is different than my view, but I believe it is a self-consistent premise for people from faiths that endorse it. (Mind you, I've always had questions about how that works in cases like identical twins, but I expect that theologians have long since answered them.) For people with this belief, there is no point before which the fetus lacks human rights, so most of the cases that I would classify as morally straightforward (if still painful) are entirely absent for them, and rightly so. Despite that, I still feel that most or all of the arguments that I have made that can justify abortion beyond the point of sapience should still apply throughout pregnancy. Those are much more serious and ethically difficult decisions, but I still believe that they must be decisions, for all of the reasons I have articulated before.
My sense is that failing to recognize and respect this difference in assumptions about when an embryo or fetus is first entitled to full human rights derails a great many debates about this topic. Too many conversations end with people on both sides speaking right past each other because one or both participants simply ignore the other person's underlying beliefs. I believe that you can politely discuss this underlying point (as I've tried to here), but if you do it needs to be the primary focus of the conversation (rather than an unstated assumption behind some other argument) and you should recognize from the start that you're unlikely to change anyone's mind on such a fundamental belief. When discussing any other argument about the ethics of abortion and related questions, it's essential to recognize that all discussion will be useless unless it can be framed in a way that is compatible with everyone's underlying assumptions. I have tried, above, to clearly identify arguments that are based on a non-sapient fetus's lack of full human rights and distinguish them from arguments that I believe carry weight even in the absence of that assumption. In general, I believe that a pro-choice person bringing up the former in a debate with someone who firmly believes that human rights begin at conception is not just useless but ignorant and disrespectful. By the same token, a pro-life person who makes arguments that rely on the assumption that non-sapient embryos merit full human rights should not expect that to be useful in conversation with someone whose beliefs are similar to mine.
Related to this, I want to say a few words about birth control. First, exactly as described above, those of us who favor abortion rights must understand the premises of those who don't when we discuss these issues. As one specific example, we must understand that anyone who believes that human rights begin at conception will legitimately conclude that birth control methods that prevent implantation are equivalent to abortion. Our premises (and related medical definitions) may lead us to disagree, but I've seen pro-choice people insisting that pro-life advocates are factually wrong about whether hormonal birth control can ever cause abortion by virtue of preventing implantation, "because pregnancy isn't even defined to have started until implantation". That argument is missing the point entirely, and as I've said before, it demonstrates ignorance or disrespect or both for the people on the other side of the debate. (Mind you, there seems to be strong evidence that hormonal birth control like the Plan B morning-after pill only operates by preventing ovulation and has no observable effect if taken when ovulation has already happened, but that's a different conversation.)
On the other hand, if one's opposition to abortion is based on the immense moral value of a human life at conception, anything that reduces the abortion rate should be worth supporting. A great deal of evidence now shows that easy and affordable access to contraception (especially long-lasting contraception) can lead to excellent progress on this. (And even methods of contraception that could on rare occasions cause a failure to implant ought to be balanced against the medically induced abortions that they would be likely to avoid.) I very much hope that ethical concerns about sexual purity still rank well below the sacredness of human life.
That's the last of my main commentary, but here's a related question that I've wondered about, for those who believe that human rights begin at conception. Research indicates that 30-50% of all fertilized eggs miscarry, and the rate is 10-20% even after women have confirmed that they are pregnant. If these are all truly morally equal to human lives after birth, then this is the greatest medical tragedy in the world, dwarfing every other cause of death. Should our medical community refocus the vast majority of its resources on prevention of miscarriage? Also, miscarriage rates go up substantially as the mother gets older, and even the father's age can matter: fertilization by a father over 40 evidently leads to a doubling of that probability. Should we as a society prohibit attempts at conception by middle-aged and older people as frightfully inhumane? Should people with a history of miscarriage be prohibited from further attempts, because their odds of future miscarriage are higher? (My sapience-based moral system would obviously not place a very high priority on this sort of thing, but it's difficult for me to see why a system based on human rights beginning at conception would not.)
One final issue that I sometimes wonder about is in vitro fertilization (IVF), which typically produces a substantial excess of fertilized embryos along with a relatively low success rate per embryo: I've seen stats claiming only 7% of IVF embryos ever come to term. Why isn't this treated as an even greater horror than abortion? I understand (thanks to some pointers from a friend) that there are sometimes protests against IVF clinics, but they seem far less common and less talked about than protests against abortion clinics (even though the numbers of each are comparable: around 440 IVF clinics vs. around 730 abortion clinics in the USA). Shouldn't banning the practice of deliberately creating numerous human lives that will later be discarded be at least as high a priority as banning what is typically an unintended creation of one? Why isn't every campaign against abortion framed instead as a campaign against "abortion and IVF"? (Again, none of this is a concern within my own sapience-based ethics, but I cannot understand why human-rights-at-conception believers don't consider IVF to be even worse than abortion, and a higher priority to oppose.) I know that there are people out there who adamantly oppose abortion but are IVF supporters or even participants themselves, and I have always wondered what they do to make those beliefs consistent.
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