Pro-Life Judo

This is the essence of pro-life judo: don’t defend the personhood of the fetus. Instead point out that newborn infants are not persons either. Infants are not self-conscious, capable of rational thought, or able to use language, and they cannot perceive themselves in time and actively anticipate the future. The personhood defense demands legalizing infanticide. You can prevent infanticide be avoiding functional definitions of personhood; instead grant every human being has the intrinsic value and dignity that entails an unalienable right to life. But then abortion stops being a moral issue and instead becomes a scientific issue: is a fetus a human being? And the hard reality is that it is objective scientific fact that a fetus is a member of the species Home sapiens, and therefore a human being.

The fact of the matter is that most pro-choicers are reluctant to endorse a theory of ethics which holds that some human beings can be legally killed. So you will find that most of your abortion debates consist of pro-choice defenders trying to challenge scientific fact. A common method is to invoke medical procedures that declare people to be dead when their circulatory system stops, the implication being that a fetus is already dead, so there is no harm in aborting it. Needless to say, you won’t find any embryologists to agree with this position.

Personhood, or Just a Blob of Cells

The great problem with invoking the personhood defense is that it forces you to legalize the killing of babies – infanticide. Don’t defend the personhood of the fetus, attack the personhood of the infant.

It is true that a fetus is “just a blob of cells.” But at a reductive level, adult humans are also just blobs of cells. The difference is that adults are persons. Adults are capable of self-awareness, rational thought, language use, and can maintain a sense of identity through time and anticipate the future. Adults are also moral agents that can perceive the difference between right and wrong and act accordingly. Infants lack all of these mental capacities.

The lesson is simple: there is no reasonable method to distinguish between a fetus and a newborn infant based upon personhood.

The Violinist: a Rights-Based Defense of Abortion

The easiest way to avoid the problem of legalized infanticide is to simply grant all humans (whether persons or not) the right to life. Then you can defend abortion from the perspective that the mother’s right to liberty takes precedence over the fetus’s right to life. There are two big problems with this approach.

The first is that you must oppose stem cell research. Much like fetuses, embryos are members of the species Homo sapiens. In fact, once conception has successfully completed, a single fertilized egg is a member of the species Homo sapiens. Now that you have granted rights to all humans, you can’t sacrifice an embryo for medicine any more than you can sacrifice a small child. Stem cell research can only be defended with through personhood.

The second problem is that there is no way to make the case that the mother’s right to liberty trumps the fetus’s right to life. The most convincing attempt comes from famous ethical philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson, in her famous 1971 essay, “A Defense of Abortion.” Imagine that a famous violinist had a kidney disorder and you are the only person in the world with the right blood type to help him. So the Society of Music Lovers kidnaps you and hooks you up to the violinist for 9 months. Now, Thompson argues, it might be nice if you decided to help out the violinist, but you certainly don’t have to. You would be in your rights to leave even if it meant that the violinist would die.

The problem is that Thompson’s analogy breaks down. You didn’t do anything to make the violinist sick. But if you did, you would be morally obligated to provide restitution. You would be obligated to make him well again. If that means connecting yourself to the violinist for nine months, then you would be morally obligated to do so. Of course, women who get abortions did not intend to become pregnant, but we are responsible for both the intended and unintended consequences of our actions. Note that this is equally true of the father, which is why he is morally obligated to provide child support (and love, discipline, and other parental duties).

Rape and Health of the Mother

The “hard cases” of abortion take more discussion, and will be addressed in a separate article.

Pro-Choice Challenges

Here are rebuttals to two common pro-choice challenges.

• Punishment for women who get abortions (vs. fetal homicide laws). The issue of punishing women who get abortions backs pro-lifers into a corner. Either they appear extreme by wanting to punish women who get abortions, or they concede that killing a fetus is not as bad as killing an adult. This is really an issue of logical consistency. If a fetus has a right to life then killing a fetus should be as bad as killing an adult.Pro-choicers face the same dilemma. If a fetus does not have a right to life then there is nothing wrong with killing a wanted baby. Most states have fetal homicide laws, but with legalized abortion they should be repealed. A criminal who causes a happily pregnant woman to lose her baby should only be guilty of destruction of valuable property, not murder.
• The Burning IVF Clinic. This is Ellen Goodman’s famous thought experiment: an IVF clinic is burning and you can save either a Petri dish with embryos in it, or a little girl. Who do you save? This purportedly backs the pro-lifer into a corner.But suppose you had a chance to save a homeless drug addict or a small child. Does choosing the child mean that the drug addict has no right to life? Of course not. The strongest lesson you can draw is that when your back is against the law and you have to choose between two lives, then you can choose a child over a fetus. And this is exactly what pro-lifers concede when they support exceptions in abortion laws when the life (not merely health) of the mother is at stake.

Further Reading

If you really want to be able to navigate the thought experiments and analogies that come up in these philosophical debates, you must learn the machinery of how human rights systems “work.” So buy and read Moral Theory by David Oderberg.

If you run into a full blown utilitarian, then logic based upon the ethics of human rights will be categorically rejected. Instead read Why I Am Not a Utilitarian.