It turns out the average advocate for abortion choice holds beliefs which implicitly make then pro-life, even though they might not recognize it. The following argument is easy to articulate to others in a conversational setting. All you need to do is ask questions. The advantage of this argument is that it avoids the extended discussions about the humanity of the unborn and the nature of personhood which are typical in pro-life apologetics (I do believe, however, that those approaches are much stronger than the one I’m about to articulate — so there is a trade-off of sorts).
Let’s say that we had a photo album which chronicled your development from infant to adult (If you’re not an adult, then substitute your current age). It’s sensible to say that throughout those developmental stages, it was you who developed — the very idea was implicitly assumed when I said the photo album was of your development. Each photo, therefore, is of you at various stages in life. Say we turn to the front page, and we see a sonogram image of a fetus. Are you the fetus present in that sonogram image? Evidently so, as there seems to be no essential difference between the fully grown you and the unborn fetus. After all, every other image in the album is of you, so why wouldn’t you be the individual depicted by the sonogram image? Just as you were once a teenager, a preteen, a toddler, and an infant, you were once a fetus.
If the point isn’t obvious enough, look at your mother. Is she not your mother who gave birth to you? Weren’t you the individual that she was pregnant with X years ago? She didn’t give birth to your body, she gave birth to you. The same point is true of your father. He is your father, not merely just the father of your body. They’re both your parents, not the parents of your body.
Moving on, is it wrong to murder you now? Obviously! But why? Well, because you are a human person, and human persons have a right to life. This point is relatively uncontroversial, one that most proponents of abortion choice would grant. Now would it have been wrong if I murdered you a year ago or a year from now? Yes, because you are still a human person with a right to life. Consequently, if you are a human person, and if you are the same individual that was depicted in the sonogram image, then it follows that the fetus is a human person with a right to life. Therefore, if it is wrong to kill you now, it would have been wrong to kill you then. Abortion, therefore, is prima facie morally wrong. We can state the argument as follows:
- Human persons have a right to life
- The grown counterpart of a fetus is a human person
- Fetuses are identical to their grown counterparts
- Therefore, fetuses are human persons (from 2, 3)
- Therefore, fetuses have a right to life (from 1-4)
The first two premises are uncontroversial, and are granted by nearly all pro-choice advocates. The third premise, as we have seen, is also an obvious truth. To deny that premise would be to deny that you have parents! They wouldn’t be your parents, they would be your body’s parents. But it is obviously true that the individual whom you call “your mother” gave birth to you and that the individual whom you call “your father” fathered you. Finally, the fourth and fifth premises follow logically from the first three.
Most people, be them pro-choice or not, will tend to affirm that they were once a fetus. Yet they are unaware of the logical entailments of this belief. Sometimes, they will attempt to bite the bullet and deny that they were ever a fetus. But the chances are, if this point had nothing to do with abortion, then they would have no difficulty in asserting that they were once a fetus. So it seems to me to be rather ad hoc and contrived.
For further reading, see this paper by Patrick Lee and this paper by Alexander Pruss. Also worth reading is Francis Beckwith’s Defending Life (Cambridge University Press) and Scott Klusendorf’s The Case for Life (Crossway).
Tags: Abortion, Identity, personhood
third premise IS controversial because by your logic, a tumor has a right to life. Joe
How does the third premise imply that a tumor has a right to life? Tim H
I’m not sure I see how this works, either in the sense of being a good argument to a reflective opponent or, as you suggest, being persuasive to not-necessarily-very-reflective opponents.
For reflective opponents, the ‘same person as you’ just collapses into ‘is this a person’, and thus the arguments and analogies you offer aren’t going to budge anyone’s beliefs. If (for example) you say feti are persons only when they develop mental capacity to feel pain (which is around 14 weeks at the most generous estimates), then it makes perfect sense to say that later ultrasounds were pictures of me, and that my mum was pregnant with me whilst denying a continuity of personal identity between me and my zygote. Eliding the distinctions between all stages of fetal development moves too quickly, and I suspect the intuitions being traded off (look at the ultrasound, surely that was you) don’t work so well when ‘you’ look like a blob of cells.
So whilst I was a fetus, the earliest fetal stages were not me – much like a picture of the sperm and egg that would form me ‘isn’t me’. This is before any sort of discussion on whether the ‘was me’ ideas the argument trades on really should be taken to imply personal identity.
I don’t see any persuasive power here. The formal argument (such as it is) is either obviously false or obviously question-begging depending on whether ‘identical’ in P3 means anything else or personal identity respectively.
I suspect real people don’t have any good idea about personhood though. Once the fetus looks baby-shaped enough, I suspect they’ll say it is a person without any regard to concerns over mental capacity, potential futures or anything else.
But the problem is that your conclusions are far too unambitious to change anyone’s mind. Almost everyone, reflective or not is going to think abortion is a bad thing – they might even be willing to say that it is prima facie wrong. So what? It hasn’t been shown that this appearance is indefeasible or even difficult to defeat, and reflective opponents will offer reasons that it is (either feti ain’t people or they are but give a violinist-esque analogy as to why it is okay to kill them) and non-reflective people will have some intuition about a ‘womans right to choose’ or similar. What needs to be done is show that killing ‘you’ as a fetus is similarly bad and hard to defend as killing you as a child or adult. Yet I don’t see how anyone, reflective or otherwise, will be persuaded by this on your argument.
Importantly, showing that feti are people isn’t enough to show abortion is wrong – they certainly don’t logically entail, and lots of work has been done (after J. J. Thomson) suggesting that it’s entirely reasonable to believe one but deny the other. Ironically, given how much personhood stuff occupies abortion discussions, I suspect most ‘unreflective’ pro-choicers think that although the fetus is a person, its particular situation makes it acceptable (if not desirable) for the mother to kill it. It is this impression that needs to be engaged with. Gregory
Gregory,
You’re right in saying that for reflective opponents, this argument would be substantially weaker. It would be stronger if presented in conjunction with other arguments (SLED, for example).
But why couldn’t this argument serve as at least a prima facie defense of the substance view of persons or as at least something to shift the burden of proof? Why couldn’t this argument, because it shows that we intuitionally affirm a substance view of persons, be used as an argument for the substance view itself in that it’s more plausible that the substance view is true over the functionalist view? Of course, the functionalist could appeal to his own intuitional examples (I’m not aware of any), so this has a limited application.
Even if we do assume that this argument only works insofar as the fetus looks like a human, it’s enough to at least be effective against late-term or partial birth abortion.
Notwithstanding, I think that if the person at whom this argument is directed affirms that he was once a fetus, he would probably also be forced to affirm that he was also an embryo because there is no significant distinction between the two (Just appearance, which he implicitly acknowledged wasn’t a valid criteria in determining personhood when he granted that he was a fetus).
Of course, there’s still the violinist-type objections of Thomson and others to deal with, but most people who recognize that the unborn have the right to life will tend to also affirm that abortion is immoral. I say this because intuitionally, I doubt most people would recognize that it’s permissible to choose to kill a rights-bearing person should the fetus be proven one. Tim H
How is a fetus identical to their grown counterparts? Joe
Perhaps there are other arguments to offer (although I can’t imagine any vaguely reflective pro-choicer finding SLED complaints hard to deal with). But I don’t see what evidential draw your argument can effect on these sorts of people: my intuitions for personhood coincide neatly with functionalist approaches (even better with potentialist ones), so denying the week old zygote of myself is morally apt (or saying it is barely morally apt) is no bullet to bite at all. Ditto that my mother wasn’t pregnant with *me* until part way through her pregnancy. Looming large already here is the issue of whether when we’re referring to ourselves we really are affirming personal identity, or even if personal identity and moral aptness coincide (although that leads to somewhat strange things like non-transitive identity). So given these worries, and the fairly innocuous intuitive bite, I don’t think pro-choicers have much to worry about.
Of course, pro-choicers who haven’t thought this through might not be in the same boat. But I suspect this isn’t true either. My guess is that they have a not-very-well-plotted out idea of personhood, so they’d either say that 38 week feti are persons but 1 hour concepti aren’t, or that both are, but some difference in relevant relations makes killing the former easier to permit. So having arguments against late-term or partial birth abortions isn’t all that helpful – I think most people think those things appear intuitively wrong (and, of course, they tend to be both very rare and often done for ‘emergency’ reasons beyond what we might term standard ‘elective’ abortions) what they don’t think are intuitively wrong are abortions after rape, or early stage abortions, or the morning after pill. Yet it is this ground upon which the culture-war is waged.
I’m surprised how you think being persuaded by your argument entails denial of appearances – because, as far as I can tell, your argument directly hinges upon appearances and intuitions (“look at the ultrasound, doesn’t it look like a human person to you?”) Yet obviously these people are susceptible to functionalist counter-offers (look at this fertilized ova, doesn’t look like a person, does it?) So appearances play into functionalists hands here: non-reflective pro-choicer realizes her intuitions drive her to say that late term feti on ultrasound are persons, yet concepti are not – that she was a fetus, yet she wasn’t a zygote. The ground is ripe for a functionalist offer to synthesize the intuitions between the cases.
I’m unsure whether ‘naive’ pro-choicers think that feti aren’t people or think they are but it’s okay to kill them. I suspect they have a mix: that Feti are ‘somewhat-people’, that they gradually evolve their right-bearing capacity or moral worth throughout development, so killing them/removing them requires progressively higher ethical standards of proof. If so, then these are great grist for a gradualist/potentialist mill, and highly toxic to substance views. If I’m right, pro-lifers can’t afford to trade on common intuition. It needs to be attacked and shown to be mistaken. Gregory
a personhood requires sentience, consciousness, thoughts. Something a week-old zygote doesn’t have. Joe