On abortion
As a child I used to oppose abortion for religious reasons. Later I would have considered myself agnostic with a tendency towards pro-choice, since this seemed most in line with my utilitarian framework. But after finding myself alienated by poor pro-choice arguments, I began to rethink my position on abortion. The following are some of the thoughts and questions I believe should be raised when forming an opinion on the issue.
Deontology and abortion
The leading deontological argument in favour of abortion is that the right to bodily autonomy is of utmost importance, and thus a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy is to be defended. This must be weighed up against the baby’s right to life. There are two ways a pro-choicer may attempt to do this: (A) by denying the right to life to the baby until a later stage in development, such as viability or birth; or (B) by arguing that the right to bodily autonomy trumps the right to life.
(A) The baby does not have the right to life until…
(A.1) … birth
A substantial minority of pro-choicers argue for absolute abortion rights all the way up to birth. Some places, such as Massachusetts, have now legalised abortion until birth for any reason, with the only stipulation being that the decision must be “based on the professional judgment of the physician”, which is political jargon for “anything goes”.
This means that a woman could hypothetically get herself pregnant with the expressed purpose of torturing the baby throughout the pregnancy, for example by drinking a liquid that will cause extreme pain to the baby but not kill it, then have a last-minute abortion and repeat the process until menopause kicks in.
If one were to argue that the baby has the right to freedom from torture but not the right to life, this would clearly constitute a limitation on the mother’s right to bodily autonomy and undermine the idea of ‘my body, my choice’.
(A.2) … it develops consciousness
Some people argue that abortion is permissible until the baby has developed consciousness. This raises the question of why it would be considered wrong to kill an unconscious person if we know that he or she has no friends or family who would care and that we could conceal the killing so that nobody else would be emotionally affected. The reason it would be wrong to kill the unconscious person cannot be because he or she will experience consciousness again in the future, as the baby will also experience consciousness in the future if given a chance.
One might argue that the unconscious person would have experienced consciousness at some earlier point, and that this separates him or her from the baby. But what if, hypothetically, there was a spark of consciousness at conception that lasted for a fraction of a second, not to redevelop until several months down the line. Would anyone drop their pro-choice stance if this were the case?
(B) The right to bodily autonomy trumps the right to life
This seems to be the more common position among deontological pro-choicers. The baby’s right to life is granted, but valued beneath the mother’s right to bodily autonomy. The obvious question to challenge this position is: If you could choose between being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term or be euthanised, which one would you pick? I find it highly doubtful that anyone who didn’t previously suffer of suicidal ideation would pick the latter option.
Pro-choicers will argue, however, that our current ethics clearly put bodily autonomy over the right to life. We do not, for example, force people to donate blood or organs, and even respect the decision of a deceased person not the donate any organs if he or she stated so before dying, even if this means letting someone die.
To make the situation analagous to a pregnancy, we have to first acknowledge some asymmetries and adjust our hypothetical accordingly:
I: There are currently about 7,200 people in the UK who are in need of a kidney transplant, compared to several million potential donors. It is therefore difficult to justify forcing any one particular person to donate a kidney when many others could do so, too. Conversely, a pregnant woman is the only person in the entire universe who can sustain her baby’s life at that point in time.
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II: The reason why someone is in need of an organ or blood donation matters. There is a big difference between someone’s kidney succumbing to a rare birth disease and someone having a history of destroying kidneys through heavy drinking. We do not have the same obligation towards both people. In the case of pregnancy the baby is not responsible for relying on the mother to stay alive. In fact, it is the parents doing that brought about the ‘problem’ in the first place (with the obvious exception of rape).
III: You can only donate a kidney once, then it’s gone. It won’t grow back. A baby does not take away a woman’s womb, it makes use of it for nine months, effectively renting it. As such, a pregnancy is more analogous to a blood donation in that blood replenishes, although it should be acknowledged that a blood donation is significantly less demanding than a pregnancy. This, however, should not matter to deontologists, who would likely argue that a woman has a right to an abortion even if her pregnancy were otherwise completely painfree.
A more analogous situation could then look as follows: You get hit by a car and immediately lose consciousness. First responders arrive and stabilise your situation, but you will need a blood transfusion in the next hour or you will die. Unfortunately, you have a rare blood group and the only person who could donate his blood to save you is the driver, who refuses to give his blood without giving a reason. The police officer in charge takes the decision to extract the driver’s blood by force and thereby saves your life. Due to a loophole he manages to avoid legal repercussions. Later you wake up in hospital and are informed about what happened.
Do you think the police officer was wrong to save your life because he violated the driver’s bodily autonomy?
Utilitarianism and abortion
A utilitarian does not care about the right to life, neither does he care about bodily autonomy. The only things that matter to a utilitarian are suffering and pleasure. If you analyse abortion with this framework, you will most likely find yourself having to swallow a bitter pill of some sort.
On the face of it, matters may seem simple; a fetus has not yet developed the capacity to feel pleasure or suffering, but the mother most certainly has. Therefore, if the abortion alleviates any suffering at all for her, it would seem justified.
The problem with this idea is that the permissibility of killing your offspring wouldn’t stop at birth. A newborn baby still lacks any situational awareness and killing it painlessly while it sleeps would seem permissible under such a utilitarian framework.
One could simply bite the bullet and argue that parents should have a legal right to ask a doctor to euthanise their born child for any reason up to a certain point after birth, but I believe that most people would find this conclusion rather repulsive. Just think back at how much slack Peter Singer got for suggesting that there might be situations in which killing a born child with severe disabilities may be permissible, and then ask yourself how much more furious people would be if you suggested it might be ok to kill a newborn for any reason.
Arguing that killing a born child would be wrong because one could give it up for adoption instead also doesn’t do the trick, as one still has to demonstrate that killing the baby is somehow worse than giving it up for adoption.
The only real argument that comes to mind is that killing a healthy born baby, even if done painlessly, deprives it of all its potential future pleasure. This argument would hold that killing a baby before birth is also wrong, but, as pro-choicers will be quick to point out, it applies just as much to our hypothetical children who haven’t yet been conceived. The argument goes that a pro-life utilitarian would have to seize every opportunity to have unprotected sex with anyone who isn’t already pregnant or infertile.
The damage can be somewhat reduced by arguing that some long-term thinking is likely to create more utility: if you wait a little bit to try to find the right person and get to know him or her before laying eggs, you will likely improve your own happiness and put yourself in a better situation to care for your children. But once you are sure you have found the right partner, it would be difficult to justify not having as many children as possible.
One might qualify this by arguing that the quantity of our children will at some point affect our capacity to care for them and that this will allow us to slow down a bit, but this could be countered by arguing that we should still be making babies and give the ‘surplus’ up for adoption.
A utilitarian pro-lifer might also concede that if we ever overpopulate and can no longer sustain the earth’s population with the available resources, abortion may become temporarily permissible, as someone would be bound to die anyway (which would effectively be a trolley situation). Ideally, we should be able to anticipate and prevent this from happening, but who here trusts people to be that wise?!
TL;DR: A utilitarian pro-choicer must condone certain forms of infanticide, a utilitarian pro-lifer must keep popping out babies.
GSC and abortion
As Theodore Bolha abtly put it, ‘If it’s not this life, it’s another’. If Generic Subjective Continuity is true, one cannot escape consciousness. Subsequently, it is not possible to violate someone’s right to life, one can only force a transition of consciousness, which is usually still immoral for a whole host of reasons. One of the many reasons, which also applies to abortion, is that human lives are arguably much more privileged than those of non-human animals. Even if human lives are only less bad, depriving someone of a human existence would likely reduce the global pleasure to suffering ratio and therefore be bad. Just like with utilitarianism, a pro-lifer who accepts GSC would have to be a natalist. I go into more detail about GSC in my essay To Be Or To Be Anyway.
