Tumbling through Wonderland

In which I unadvisably write about abortion…

squashed:

Adam Quinn writes, “I never hear pro-life advocates go into depth about why conception is so critical to ethics (and not religious or societal morals).” It’s a bit late in the evening for me to launch into an Internet Argument—but apparently I have no impulse control. Here’s a few hasty thoughts on why conception an important date in the abortion discussion.

There’s no real question that after conception, you have a unique, living human. It’s unique in that it has a full and distinct genetic code. It’s living in that it meets all the scientific criteria for life. And, as a genetic test would reveal, it is in fact human. None of this is controversial. And, as I see it, it’s enough to shift the burden to the other side.

Adam, of course, offers a few other arguments.

[A] fetus is just as conscious and capable of suffering as my sperm cells.

So, suffering is a pretty odd word to choose. It comes with all sorts of philosophical baggage. It implies not only pain or fear—but pain or fear with a particular moral relevance. A cockroach can doubtlessly experience pain. But is it sufficiently complex to “suffer’? It’s a philosophical quagmire. A fetus can, at some point, feel pain. A newborn can obviously feel pain—and the primary thing separating the newborn from the fetus is distance.

But why is suffering relevant? While we certainly don’t want anybody to suffer before he dies—we also don’t want him to die, regardless of suffering. Improvements in anesthesiology don’t really make capital punishment more or less morally acceptable. If somebody is killed in their sleep, we say they didn’t suffer. Does that make their killing more or less acceptable?

It is actually much less capable of suffering than any animal you’ve consumed.

Again, we have that word suffering. Do animals suffer? How much? Can we know? In my case, I’m willing to grant that there is a sufficiently high probability that animals suffer in a morally relevant way that I no longer eat meat. Are you sufficiently confident in your fetus-related claim?

[more stuff about suffering which, notably, neither mentions why suffering should be determinative or why we should believe suffering is something that mysteriously starts once the umbilical cord is cut.]

An important question in the abortion debate is whether or not a fetus is a human being. When speaking of species, of course it is, but it is just as human as an anencephalic baby (one born without a brain). The wrongness of killing can’t depend on the being’s species because the biological facts of our species don’t have ethical significance.

Put quite simply, a fetus is not a person because it is not capable of rationality or self-consciousness.

Now we’re into more interesting territory. Of course, we don’t use the term fetus until after the embryo stage—so we’re talking about the nine-weeks to nine-months phase. Brain pathways start developing at the beginning of the fetal stage. So there actually has been a lot of differentiation. But Adam asked about the relevance of conceptions—so presumably he was talking about the pre-fetal stages as well.

I don’t think the stance that a 9-month fetus is the equivalent of an anencephalic baby is particularly defensible. Nor should anybody argue that an undifferentiated ball of cells has a brain. And that’s where we get into the category of things we don’t know. Where do we draw that line? Is brain activity the relevant thing? How much brain activity do you need? Should we carve out a margin of error?

To give preference to the life of a being simply because that being is a member of our species is just like racists who give preference to those who are members of their race.

Actually, no, it isn’t. I’m going to claim this point by consensus—and if we really want to have the argument over whether guinea-pigs or tropical fish or shrubbery are people too, we can do that another day.

I somehow had this magical ability of rationalization ….

I believe the word you were looking for was “rationality” or maybe just “reason.” Rationalization means something else—and while capping your argument by proclaiming your ability to rationalize anything is kind of awesome, it might be awesome in a bad way.

I don’t actually think that “life begins at conception” works particularly well on policy grounds. But I do think it’s a morally relevant point.

squashed is my hero.