If you listen to, or read, the arguments for abortion (and an exemplary one from Judith Jarvis Thompson can be found here), you quickly find that the unborn baby (fetus, conceptus, fertilized human egg, or what have you) must be ignored if the argument is to have any hope of success.
In the aforelinked essay, Ms. Thompson does just that: ignores the baby. What? you say, having read the article, How can you say she ignores the baby? She spends nearly the entire essay on whether or not a fetus can reasonably and rightly be said to have a right to life. Is this not taking the baby into account?
Actually, no. It isn't.
In her essay, the fetus as such is not discussed, but rather the fetus as concept is discussed. How can the fetus have rights if it (and notice a fetus is most certainly "it") does not have interests wants and desires? And while it is not reasonable to assert that a fetus does not have rights, neither is it reasonable to assert that it does. A fetus has no more right to life than a piece of flesh from one's thumb. As Ms. Thompson puts it:
The stronger claim says that reason does not compel us to believe it more probable that an embryo is a human person than that any piece of human tissue is. If allowed to develop normally, an embryo will develop into a human person, whereas a cell in your thumb will not; it is not contrary to reason to think that that lends no weight at all to the idea that the embryo is a human person now.
But note, to accomplish her argument, she must do two things: focus on the earliest stages of fetal development (for the purposes of highlighting that opposition to abortion must include every moment of fetal life from conception and because to accept that earlier term abortions are somehow less evil than later ones forces the proponent of such a view to argue for why he makes such a distinction) and deny that this mass of cells has any intrinsic difference from any other mass of cells.
This only serves to show her hand. She knows that for an argument in favor of abortion to work, on her own terms, the fetus must be ahuman (that is, not fully human) and without legal status from the moment of conception until birth. However, just as she rightly criticizes abortion advocates who feel compelled to make a distinction in utero between what sorts of fetuses are okay to abort and what sorts not, so one must press Ms. Thompson to clarify her implication: if it is proper to deny the legitimacy of a right to life to a fetus on the grounds that a) a fetus has no interests, wants or desires and b) there is no reasonable necessity for assigning a right to life to a fetus, then on what grounds is it improper, indeed, murder, to kill a newborn infant, or, for that matter, a toddler?
Presumably, she might respond that newborns and toddlers clearly have interests, wants and desires, inarticulate though these may be. But the new technologies opening up to us also reveal behaviors in utero that similarly and clearly demonstrate interests, wants and desires that are inarticulate.
And to assert that a fetus is a mass of cells indistinguishable from any other mass of cells is just plain bad biology. It is well-known that the fetus (and I continue to use pro-abortion terminology for the sake of argument) is in no way simply another mass of cells belonging to the mother. The fetus has, from the moment of conception, a completely distinguishable DNA from its mother, frequently a different bloodtype, and so forth. Even the placental sac is technically an "organ" of the fetus' and not one belonging to the mother. Clearly the fetus is dependent upon the mother for nourishment, which it gets through the umbilical cord which attaches to the mother's uterine wall, but in all other respects, the fetus is a completely distinguishable biological entity. It is another mass of cells similar to the mass of cells of a thumb, alright, but the thumb of a completely different individual. And just as a person would reasonably object to some mother trying to sever his thumb (on the grounds that it is just another mass of cells), so it is reasonable to suppose would a fetus object to being aborted.
This is what I mean by ignoring the fetus. Abortion advocates cannot really and completely acknowledge the reality of who and what the fetus is--an unborn human child--because if they did so, their arguments for abortion would be seen to be as monstrous as they really are. Instead, who and what the fetus is must deliberately be clouded and concealed--it is a mass of cells; it has no desires, interests, or wants--so that the argument can seem to be "reasonable." But reason that ignores the reality with which it is confronted is not reason--it is madness.
One hopes that the reality of 45 million babies that have been aborted since 1973 would break through our society's insanity and bring us back to our senses.
Posted by Clifton at July 2, 2004 11:08 AM | TrackBack