Debate

The morality of abortion is an incredibly tough nut for me to crack. Much of the discussion typically involves things like the nature of life, what it means to be a human being and when it should be permissible to take a human life. Those are all complicated things to be sure and I shall try and illuminate each point to lay out why I believe abortion to be by and large an immoral choice.

Scott and I have decided to enter into a civil debate over the abortion issue. I don’t often willingly debate this issue because I recognize the strong emotions held by both sides and I strongly dislike emotional arguments. I have agreed to debate this issue with Scott because I respect his rational approach to Christianity and believe that both He and I will be able to (mostly) keep our emotions at bay. Also, since I do not hold any of my beliefs dogmatically, I find it quite likely that I will learn something about the issue from Scott and hope that he may learn something from me. I’d also like to thank Scott for the invitation to debate and for setting up the forum on which the debate will appear.

Sid, you defined personhood as “the extent to which a being is able to sense the world, react to it, think, and reflect on their actions” and say that as a result we can wind up with different degrees of personhood. That’s internally consistent and I see how you arrive at that. Culturally though it would seem that this definition doesn’t hold up. In our culture and indeed in most cultures that I’m aware of, children are considered precious. When you rescue them you are deemed heroic, more so than if you helped say an able bodied adult. The same can be said of the elderly, even those that can no longer care for themselves. I am encouraged to think of those beings as something to be protected. Similarly, harming animals and insects, depending on the motivation, can be considered an immoral act so I would think that the mother’s motivation for the abortion must be called into play. The amount of “personhood” something has should not be the sole measuring stick for considering the morality of the act against them.

Hello Scott,

For simplicity’s sake, may I refer to your position as the Sanctity of Life Ethic (SLE for short)? I’ll use that title in this counter-rebuttal and replace it with a title that you prefer if necessary. You may refer to my position as the Quality of Life Ethic (QLE), if you’d like. I will first critique your opening position and then move on to your first rebuttal.

I really need to come up with catchy/significant titels for these posts. Anyway, here's my response.

SLE vs. QLE is good enough shorthand. You asked what criteria I would suggest we use to determine “personhood”. For purposes of this discussion and to avoid this blowing up into a debate that involves euthanasia (though that could certainly be grist for future mills here) I would say that at the point the fetus becomes viable outside the womb is the point at which it has the rights of a person. Before then, which as best I can tell given current levels of technology is twenty-two to twenty-three weeks, I still believe that it is a person, but it becomes more difficult for me to tell someone that they are committing an immoral act in having an abortion. When a mother loses her baby naturally at a very early stage I would perfectly understand them mourning the loss. So I do believe that conception is the point at which life begins, but while they are completely dependent on the womb environment the rights of the mother take precedent. During that time it is as much a part of her body as any other. Once it is capable of independence, it should be granted that possibility.

When I talk about us being created in the image and likeness of God, I don’t necessarily mean that the more like God one is the more of a person they are. Considering I believe that God is so much more, infinitely more than we are, we can’t approach what God is. As such I don’t think that an adult is more like God than a child or if they are then it’s a matter of an infinitesimal difference. It comes back to that matter of potential, I suppose. In regards to a brain-dead individual, I would say that they are not like God of course since they don’t even have the potential to reason, emote, etc. So for me at least, one is either a person or one is not, there are no degrees per se.

So speaking of that let’s talk a little about potential. You talk about the likelihood for that argument to grant us fewer rights. After all, you say, you have the potential to be a corpse. I’ve often heard this brought up and I’d say that’s not a potential, that’s a certainty. In our culture even corpses have rights, but no one argues that you should have the same rights as a corpse, because a corpse is not a person. No one argues that they are, so this strikes me as a bit of a red herring. Now if the corpse had potential to become a person I could see an argument for giving corpses the same rights as a person, but not the other way ‘round. In my mind a fetus is a person, so the potential is not the possibility that they will become a person. It’s not a serious state change (dead to alive), but the idea that given time they will come to be someone just like you or I. It’s a matter of degrees. Even if that baby will come out with Down’s Syndrome, that doesn’t mean that they lose the chance to experience existence as best they can. When you say a” blastocyst has much lower of a chance of realizing its potential personhood”, I assume that you’re talking about statistical chances. For me that doesn’t really enter into the equation. I always try to assume what the best case scenario would be when I make a moral decision. If there is any chance that the baby can come to full development, then it should be allowed to. Of course things are never that simple and if, as in your examples of woman A and woman B, there is near certainty that it would cause a great deal of harm for a woman to carry to term, I think it would be morally permissible for her to abort so long as she did it early on. Of course, in my opinion it would be better for her to take every possible precaution not to get pregnant including, but not limited to sterilization.

I’d be interested in hearing more from you concerning the idea of suffering. What does it mean to suffer? Is it strictly speaking mental? If I were to assault someone who was unable to feel the pain physically, but was still mentally acute or vice versa is this different morally from assaulting someone who had all of their faculties? And while the mother can certainly determine her level of suffering, how certain can she be of what level her child is capable of? Should she always assume that her level would outweigh that of her child’s? I can’t help but think that this sort of reasoning could extend beyond the point of a child being born. If a two year old is causing their mother to suffer, should the mother be allowed to take extreme action to end it? And then you need to examine the mother’s ability to ascertain their own level of suffering. A fourteen year old doesn’t usually possess the tools necessary to make that assessment. Given that, would it be moral for a teenage mother to abort? So this adds another question to our discussion. It’s not just, at what point is it no longer moral to abort given the baby’s level of development, but also at what point does a mother lose or gain the ability to make that decision?

If I understand you correctly, you are claiming that personhood, in practice, is a binary variable; either one is a person or one is not. You deny meaningful degrees of personhood because your basis of comparison, God, is infinite. Since God has so much more personhood than anyone else, the minor difference in personhood between two humans is negligible.

But if we follow this reasoning a little further, I think we will reach a conclusion unacceptable to both of us. We would be forced to equate our personhood to that of a dog, for instance. After all, when we consider the difference between our personhood and a dog’s, it is nothing in comparison with God’s infinite personhood. Denying degrees of personhood between humans based on comparison with infinite personhood also denies degrees of personhood between species. A proponent of SLE would be forced to conclude that humans are not deserving of any special moral consideration based on our likeness to God. I assume that you do not agree with this conclusion thus you must accept that the premise is faulty. Therefore meaningful degrees of personhood (or God-likeness, for the religiously inclined) exist between some humans.

You do have a valid point in your rebuttal to my ‘potential corpse’ reasoning. The state-change from living to dead is (often) such a drastic difference that moral comparisons may not be applicable. Still, the argument for potential can be used to justify the restriction of rights. All of us have the potential to become senile, yet no one claims that we should have the same rights of the mentally incompetent. Again, I can see potential playing some role in moral considerations, I just don’t know exactly what it is and am hoping you can shed some light on this.

This leads me to another train of thought. I’m confident that you would agree that one who is senile is still created in the image and likeness of God (a person), yet we don’t grant them the rights of a mentally capable adult; the power of attorney, for instance. Nor do we grant equal rights to children based on their potential to become adults. If not degrees of personhood, what criteria are you using to justify the differing moral rights?

You legitimately ask me to define my use of the term ‘suffering’. Since my QLE is rooted on this concept, I should have carefully defined it at the outset. Suffering occurs when any entity cannot fulfill any of its interests. Anything that lives has an interest in not dying, anything that can feel pain has an interest in not being in pain, anything that is hungry has an interest in feeding, etc. An otherwise normal person who cannot feel pain has only one less interest than the rest of us, that individual doesn’t have an interest in avoiding pain. He/She will still have an interest in avoiding injury, scars, bruises, wasted time, the emotional impacts of being a victim, and so forth. Thus assaulting this individual would only be marginally less immoral than anyone else.

Another question you asked is how a woman can determine the level of suffering her fetus is capable of. Well, we need to take into account the varying interests at play here. As a living thing, a fetus has an interest in living and, after a certain amount of development, a fetus has a central nervous system and has an interest not experiencing pain, but that seems to be the extent of it. I know of no evidence of any other interests of a human fetus. An adult woman, by way of contrast, has both of these interest plus many more, such as an interest in avoiding the pain, expense, inconvenience, emotional hardships, and health risks of childbirth. Her multitude of interests trumps those of the fetus.

Using this version of the QLE, it is easy to see why a woman’s prerogative does not extend to after the birth of the child, at least not in our modern society. The main suffering a postpartum mother would experience result from the on-going care of the infant. Infanticide is not justifiable because our society provides an alternative that does not infringe upon the infant’s interest in survival and does not require the mother to assume additional suffering; adoption or foster care. There is no question that these options are morally superior to infanticide since they reduce the suffering experienced by the infant without significantly increasing suffering for any other person. For this reason, post-birth is the rational point to grant a human a moral right to life.

aka laziness, I think I'm ready to respond.

Regarding our personhood in relation to God, maybe an analogy will help. I create a clay sculpture in my image. Some are larger, some are smaller. I consider all of them to be in my image. I also create a wooden toy dog. This is not in my image. So it is with God. He created us "in His image and likeness". Now, I don't believe that that means God looks like us or vice versa. I believe that it means that we have certain qualities that God has. Call it a divine spark or the breath of life. It is this thing that differentiates us from the animals. It is perhaps the Ultimate Potential. It's what makes us creative beings. It's what drives us to philosophize, write poetry, examine the universe, etc. These things are unique (afaik) to humans. We all realize this potential to various degrees based on our own stage of development. Some never get the chance, but that doesn't make them less human. A dog or a chair or a rock never has that potential. Does that make sense?

So I think I'm still on sold ground for saying that in the SLE there are no meaningful degrees of personhood. All human life is sacred, even that of a murderer on death row.

You go on to say:

This leads me to another train of thought. I’m confident that you would agree that one who is senile is still created in the image and likeness of God (a person), yet we don’t grant them the rights of a mentally capable adult; the power of attorney, for instance. Nor do we grant equal rights to children based on their potential to become adults. If not degrees of personhood, what criteria are you using to justify the differing moral rights?

So given what I said above, both the senile and the young have a right to live. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are among the inalienable rights that the DoI says that we have. I suppose we have branched out from the right to simply exist as a person to other rights, which makes this more complex. For these other rights then it becomes not about someone's personhood, but about qualities that a person has, maturity, intelligence, etc. This gets to how that potential is realized. In my opinion this doesn't make someone more or less deserving of life itself. It only limits how they may express that life, or live it out. The right to power of attorney or to go buy a beer or those sorts of things isn’t inalienable in our society.

Given that, when you say "An adult woman, by way of contrast, has both of these interest plus many more, such as an interest in avoiding the pain, expense, inconvenience, emotional hardships, and health risks of childbirth. Her multitude of interests trumps those of the fetus." I rebut that this woman isn't guaranteed by anything I'm aware of to avoid certain expenses, inconveniences, hardships, etc. Naturally she may want to, but what moral law do you use to ascribe those rights to her? The above "inalienable rights" or only guaranteed insofar as we don't abridge the rights of others. And now this is getting out of moral and into legal areas I think.

Finally given your final paragraph:

Using this version of the QLE, it is easy to see why a woman’s prerogative does not extend to after the birth of the child, at least not in our modern society. The main suffering a postpartum mother would experience result from the on-going care of the infant. Infanticide is not justifiable because our society provides an alternative that does not infringe upon the infant’s interest in survival and does not require the mother to assume additional suffering; adoption or foster care. There is no question that these options are morally superior to infanticide since they reduce the suffering experienced by the infant without significantly increasing suffering for any other person. For this reason, post-birth is the rational point to grant a human a moral right to life.

would you say that given our current level of technology and ability to keep a child alive starting some time in the late second trimester that performing a C-section and letting the child have a shot to live would be morally superior to having an abortion since it actually has the same affect of removing the baby from the mother's womb and keeps the baby from losing that one thing it has? That is assuming that the mother wouldn't be liable for expenses incurred.