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]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] ABORTION [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[
(8/26/1989)
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC]
[Yes, this is by THE Michael Levin (see Rathole, fl. 23-24).]
[From Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Press, 1987), pp. 287-291; 295-296.]
The pivotal question about abortion is whether the fetus is a
human life; most other issues are distractions. If the fetus is
human, killing it is murder. It is irrelevant whether abortion
reduces welfare and crime, since murder is an impermissible means
of social control. Abortion may guarantee that every child is
wanted, but murder is impermissible even when everybody,
including the prospective victim, would be better of with him
dead.(65) Rape and incest do not justify abortion if the fetus is
human, since the avoidance of shame and heavy financial
obligations do not justify murder. Abortion might be safer if it
were legal, but, if the fetus is human, this is only to say that
certain kinds of murder would be safer if they were legal. Mafia
killings would be safer for triggermen if gang wars were legal,
but that is no reason to decriminalize gang wars. If the fetus
is human it need not be a ``person,'' in the sense of having
neural organization sufficient for its being a continuing
self-conscious being, to have a right against abortion. Neonates
are not persons in this sense either, but few people recognize a
right to commit infanticide.(66)
There are two arguments for abortion that grant that the fetus
is a human life. The first is that abortion is permissible
self-defense on the part of a [288] pregnant woman or her medical
surrogate if her pregnancy threatens her life. Many jurists have
recognized a ``right of necessity,'' but it is by no means
clearly applicable to the case of life-threatening pregnancy.
The right to kill innocents in self-defense justifies the killing
of innocents in warfare as a means of preventing further attacks
by a noninnocent aggressor. The right of self-defense likewise
justifies attacks against hostages of terrorists (or attacks
against terrorists in the certain knowledge that they will kill
their hostages) as a means of preventing further attacks by
noninnocent aggressors. The fetus, on the other hand, is an
innocent nonaggressor who did not initiate the life-threatening
situation. He did not ask to be conceived. Attacks against him
cannot be justified in the way that attacks against the innocent
in warfare can be justified.
Francis Bacon took the ``right of necessity'' to justify a
drowning man's pushing another man off a floating plank at sea,
even if the original possessor of the plank was not responsible
for the drowning man's plight. This wide reading of the right of
necessity would indeed justify medically necessary abortions, but
it conflicts with the even more fundamental Kantian rule against
initiating aggression. If you find yourself adrift with only a
nearby plank in someone else's possession to save you, you are
obliged to let yourself drown. I claim no certainty for my own
moral intuitions in these difficult cases, but from a practical
point of view the wide Baconian right has little bearing on the
abortion controversy. Fewer than 1 percent of the 1.5 million
abortions performed annually in the United States are done to
save the life of the mother, and advocates of decriminalizing
abortions do not regard the right to abortion as ending when
threats to the life of the mother do.
A second defense of abortion consistent with the humanity of
the fetus maintains that abortion is not murder because it is not
killing.(67) A woman who aborts a fetus is simply REFUSING TO
CONTINUE TO HELP KEEP IT ALIVE, just as a host who ejects an
unwanted guest into a blizzard is simply refusing to extend his
hospitality, and just as a woman who awakens one morning to find
herself attached to a violinist dependent on the use of her
kidneys (Judith Thompson's example) is simply refusing to let him
use her body if she rips out the tubes. Proper discussion of
this argument requires a digression into metaphysics,(68) but the
essential disanalogy between abortion and the other host cases is
that in these other cases the person who withdraws his assistance
is not completely responsible for the dependency on him of the
person who is about to die, while the mother is completely
responsible for the dependency of the fetus on her. When one is
completely responsible for dependence, refusal to continue aid is
indeed killing. If a woman brings a newborn home from the
hospital, puts it in its crib and refuses to feed it until it has
starved to death, it would be absurd to say that she had [289]
simply refused to assist it and had done nothing for which she
should be criminally liable.
So the question returns to the humanity of the fetus, and what
else can the fetus be, if not human? If fetuses are not human,
dog embryos are not canine, and cow embryos are not bovine, the
entire taxonomy of nature would have to be duplicated
pointlessly. There is a universally recognized continuity to
fetal development which requires that a fetus be thought of as an
early stage of a human being conceived as a four-dimensional
entity, in much the way a thirty-year old man is a later stage of
that same four-dimensional entity.
We must tread carefully here, since many advocates of legal
abortion appeal to this same continuity of fetal development. In
reconstructing their argument, it is important to distinguish the
METAPHYSICAL claim that there IS no line to be drawn between
fetus, neonate, and adult, from the EPISTEMOLOGICAL claim that
NOBODY (NOW) KNOWS HOW TO DRAW THE LINE. The metaphysical claim
cannot be used to defend the decriminalization of abortion and in
fact undercuts it, by blurring the distinction between fetus and
neonate which might be cited to justify radically different
treatment of the two. Take, for instance, viability outside the
womb as a trait fetuses lack but neonates and adults possess. In
fact, viability is relative to the environment: Adults are
unviable at the bottom of the sea without proper life support
equipment, while with proper life support equipment a late-term
fetus can survive. But the point of development at which the
fetus can survive in the intensive-care ward. Newborns are
somewhere in between. Perhaps then a newborn deserves special
protection and an insufficiently developed fetus does not because
there is SOME extrauterine environment in which the undeveloped
fetus can survive. But the point at which a fetus can survive in
some extrauterine environment is retreating before technology.
Within a century there may be artificial wombs capable of
receiving embryos from the moment of conception. At that point
the distinction in viability between fetus and neonate will have
vanished, and the ONLY difference between a fetus unviable NOW
and an equally undeveloped fetus THEN is that nobody has actually
gotten around to inventing an artificial womb. Surely, however,
a distinction in moral status as profound as that between beings
that it is permissible to kill and beings that it should be
legally impermissible to kill cannot depend on circumstances
completely external to those beings, such as what happens to have
been perfected in a medical laboratory thousands of miles (or
dozens of years) away.
So the appeal of abortion advocates to the continuity of fetal
development must be epistemological. It is not best formulated
as the claim that it is in principle impossible for anyone ever
to draw the necessary line, for that [290] would be to bet
against science, which in the past has proven able to mark
principled distinctions amid seeming flux. (Think of the
classification of minerals.)(69) The argument, rather, must be
that since no one can NOW tell when human life begins, the matter
should (now) be left to private conscience. Proponents of this
argument are often unclear as to whether they are making a claim
about what is possible relative to our present knowledge or a
claim about what is possible relative to all possible states of
knowledge, but a great many defenders of decriminalized abortion
clearly have such argument in mind:
As the Supreme Court recognized in Roe v. Wade ... the
concept of ``fetal personhood'' raises moral and
philosophical problems that go beyond the capacity of
legislative or judicial mechanisms to solve.(70)
I am confident that those who propose this argument would not
apply it elsewhere. They would not approve of leaving the
killing of Eskimos to private conscience on the grounds that no
one can say when human life begins. But there is a deeper
problem that has nothing to do with epistemology, and that is the
IMPOSSIBILITY of government neutrality about the status of the
fetus. A fundamental function of government is to protect its
citizens from aggression. Essential to this function is a
decision as to which beings within its territory are to count as
the citizens it will protect. Since a government monopolizes the
legitimate use of force within its territory, it must also forbid
the forcible protection by private parties of any being it itself
does not actively protect. You are allowed to attack somebody
attacking an adult human being, but you are not allowed to attack
somebody stepping on an ant, since at the moment ants have no
legal rights. The government protects attacks on anything it
does not positively protect. In choosing not to decide whether
to protect some vulnerable being, therefore, the government
chooses not to protect it. Its function forces the state to
decide about every human being. In urging government to ``stay
out of'' decisions about the fetus, abortion advocates are asking
the government to decide not to protect fetuses.
In strictness, ``government neutrality'' is very far from the
standard feminist position. Probably the majority of feminists
hold that abortion should be publicly funded, which would not
leave the matter to private conscience at all, since it would
force taxpayers who do not approve of abortion to support it.
Public subsidies are not necessary to secure a ``woman's right to
her body,'' even if it could be shown to be an adequate
justification for legalizing abortion, since a right to the use
of one's body is a right against the invasion of one's body by
other people, not a right to the means to do with one's body what
one wants to. My ``right to my body'' [291] does not create a
right to public funds for an airline ticket with which to fly my
body to the Caribbean for a vacation.
But forgetting this breach of neutrality, one is again struck
by the selectivity of feminist bafflement. The difficulties in
determining the status of the fetus are supposed to place action
based upon its status in the realm of private conscience. Yet
the difficulties in detecting discrimination are said to require
hiring quotas. The difficulties -- impossibilities, really -- of
determining comparable worth are said to require state
cancellation of ``residues.'' Proper pedagogy, so notoriously a
matter of dispute, is said to require the censorship of texts and
the enforced sex integration of small children. The danger that
landlords, bankers, insurers, teachers, and male coworkers will
discriminate is said to be too great, and the harm of
discrimination too great, for the government to tolerate
conscientious error. The only matter feminists are willing to
entrust to private conscience -- a matter in which, one assumes,
they find the harm done by conscientious error tolerable -- is
the killing of fetuses.
[The following notes are on pp. 295-296]
65. Betty Friedan generously extends to the unwanted child the
right to be aborted: ``The value is life ... the life of the
women and the right of the child to be wanted in life.''
``Twenty Years After the Feminine Mystique,'' New York Times
Magazine (February 22, 1983): 42-54. Not wanting a child
before it is born is unrelated to postnatal bonding, see T.
Berry Brazelton, ``Effect of Maternal Expectation on Early
Infant Development,'' Early Child Development Care 2 (1973):
250-73. For evidence that abortion facilitates rage against
dependents, disinhibits aggressing the defenseless, and
impairs the ability to mother future children, see A.D. and
L.L. Colman, Pregnancy: The Psychological Experience (New
York: Herder & Herder, 1971); R. Kuman and Kay Robson,
``Previous Induced Abortion and Ante-Natal Depression in
Primipare: A Preliminary Report of a Survey of Mental Health
in Pregnancy,'' Psychological Medicine 8 (1978): 711-15; W.G.
Whittlestone, ``The Physiology of Bonding,,'' Child and
Family 5 (1976): 36-42; M.H. Liebman and J.S. Zimmer,
``Abortion Sequelae: Fact and Fallacy,'' in Psychological
Aspects of Abortion, ed. D. Mall and W.F. Watts (Chattanooga,
Tex.: University Publications of America, 1979); S. Lipper
and W.M. Feigenbaum, ``Obsessive-Compulsive Neurosis after
Viewing the Fetus during Therapeutic Abortion,'' American
Journal of Psychotherapy 30 (1977): 666-74; Phillip Ney,
``Relationship between Abortion and Child Abuse,'' Canadian
Journal of Psychiatry 24 (1979): 610-20.
66. Michael Tooley defends both abortion and infanticide in
``Abortion and Infanticide,'' Philosophy and Public Affairs
2(1972): 37-65. He argues that a person can only have a
right to something he wants; since children and babies do not
realize they have futures they cannot want to have futures
and thus have no right to have them. Tooley's premise
implies, implausibly, that a person has no rights to
undiscovered minerals on his property.
67. See Judith Thomson, ``A Defense of Abortion,'' in Pearsall,
pp. 368-79; Walt Block ``Woman and Fetus: Rights in
Conflict?'' Reason (April 1978): 18-25; Robert N. Wennberg,
Life in the Balance (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1985).
68. See Michael Levin, review of Robert N. Wennberg, Life in the
Balance: Constitutional Commentary (forthcoming).
69. But do we not know now what we mean by ``human,'' or at least
what criteria we use for determining humanness? Not
necessarily; people used water for a long time before
discovering that water is hydrogen and oxygen, before being
able to distinguish water from extremely diluted wine, and so
on.
70. [Rosalind] Petchesky [Abortion and Woman's Choice (New York:
Longmans, 1984)], p. 331.
* * *
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