September 16, 1985
Dear Editor,
In the abortion debate many pro-abortion and not-quite-anti-abortion proponents have said the humanity of the fetus is “the central question”, “the central issue”, but never define humanity or human being except as something that is sentient, the killing of which would be murder. And? By their own words sentience does not define humanity for cows are sentient and humans may feel no pain if certain nerves are severed.
In the above context, they say the case for first trimester abortions depends upon the experience of pain. Are they saying that denying life is not to be permitted if the experience is painful? For whom? Surely after the fetus is dead it will no longer feel or remember feeling pain. This reminds me of the question of whether one would rather be given a drug before an operation that would prevent pain or be given one later that would erase from the memory the pain experienced during the operation. Such questioning is secondary to the fact of the operation. What will be its result? In the case of abortion the result will be the death of the fetus whether it feels any pain or not. The experience of pain, then, is not bad in itself if its cause brings about a better state of being or prevents a worse one. To grant or deny a fetus (the term here used generically) a future life outside the womb as a sentient human being by its present ability to experience pain seems more than bizarre--"It’s okay, you know, it didn’t feel a thing because it wasn’t sentient." Yeah, which is better, to exist having felt no pain of abortion or to not exist having felt no pain of abortion? To be or not to be, that is the question, isn’t it?
Some have said “The case against abortion in the first trimester must rest entirely on metaphysics and philosophy.” I think the case for or against abortion at any time must rest entirely on metaphysics and philosophy. It appears that for many who wish to have nothing to do with metaphysics and philosophy “empirical reasons” are what they get when they pass the point at which they are no longer aware of (or have successfully forgotten) their philosophical and metaphysical reasons for selecting them.
The “empirical reason” appears to rest on cold fact, but the reason for using it rests on something entirely different. Any time one moves from the descriptive of “This is” to the prescriptive of “Do this”, one moves through the moral world of “This ought or ought not to be.” This is the world of motives and beliefs. It’s the world in which people actually live. It cannot be described in the same way that physics describes solar flares. This is central to the absurdity of “experimental” psychology’s attempts to explain human behavior by dissecting rat brains and measuring dog spit. There is that in human behavior which is man’s distinguishing characteristic which transcends the physical processes of reproduction, nourishment, and death.
When I was about five years old, I was taken to a museum and ushered through the hall enshrining Human Reproduction, The Miracle of Life. On one wall I saw encased specimens (whether potentially human or just clever reproductions, I don’t know) arranged developmentally from conception to birth. I started at birth and asked my father if the baby, dying at that stage, would go to heaven. As I approached conception asking the same question, the answers changed from “Yes” to “probably” to “I don’t know” to “Probably not” to “No”. It gets down to the question of whether being human is something you are or something that you have become. I suspect that something akin to ethnocentrism (ontogenocentrism?) is involved here--those folks running around with bones through their noses aren’t like us and we’re civilized, so they probably aren’t, yet. Some say the fetus is “much more actually human after the first 12 weeks of gestation” and that it “little resembles a human being” during the first few weeks of gestation, meaning that it does not look much like, well, a post-birth body. It doesn’t look like me and I’m human, so it probably isn’t, yet.
It’s interesting how closely the question of the origin of man as an individual resembles the controversy about the origin of man as a species. Did man come fully human from the hand of God or was there a point at which, during eons-long evolution, the genetics defining the species Sapiens appeared? Was it “fully human” or was it merely human in appearance? Did there appear at the same time or later those characteristics which could be called “spiritual”? The first view holds all men of different languages, races, and cultures to be members of a common humanity. The second view makes possible all sorts of interesting self-justification from members of master races, true humans as opposed to sub-humans, for individuals personifying the new socialist man or the master race. And just as that distinction has made possible the genocide of whole groups who fell outside the official classification, so, too, have millions of pre-birth lives been defined into oblivion.
Genetically speaking, there is a time before which an individual of a sexually reproducing species does not exist and after which it does, be it ever so humble. From that moment to the moment of its dissolution it passes through definable stages of development and degeneration. Here are some that apply to us: zygote, embryo, fetus, newborn, infant, toddler, child, pre-adolescent, young adult, mature adult, old-aged. Upon this continuum of development place an asterisk where “it” becomes “human” and perhaps another where its humanity ceases as far as the empirical world is concerned. Many would place the asterisks at conception and death (death defined as the irreversible disruption of the continuum). I do. It is this creature appearing at conception and disappearing at death that is human. Against this, talk about seeds not being trees and fertilized eggs not being chickens shows itself for the silly ontogenocentrism that it is-- the full-grown chicken is not a fertilized egg, but both are developmental stages of the same being. An acorn is not a tree, but both are equally oak.
But if “human being” is just a later stage of that individual’s existence, then what is the name for the being started at conception and ended at death? On the individual level, the first view calls it human whether conscious or not, crippled, retarded, senile, diseased, sinful, intelligent, female, or male. The second view permits “quality of life and “value to society” to define the parameters of being human and those who have the power to do so to define those terms, whether a woman and her physician, N.A.R.A.L, or Big Brother.
The bottom line is that there is a struggle between equality under law (metaphysics) and power as the law (empiricism), between doing what we ought and doing whatever we can get away with, between submitting our desires to a higher moral law or enshrining our desires as the only moral law.
One will never find the answers in the charts and tables of science. And for the modern man that’s scary.
More accurately, the question is whether it is something that you can be in the future. Indeed, that's the only question that matters. Infants are often less intelligent than adult animals when born. And it is by no means a given in human nature that killing an infant is murder, given the prevalence of infanticide throughout history though the modern day. That said, we've decide that infants are full humans and to kill one is murder. Why? I think for much the same reason why a key element in defining "clinical death" is whether the patient can ever recover. We look the the future. And must.
Indeed, murder is not wrong for the immediate pain it causes. Murder may be performed painlessly and extreme torture can be inflicted yet murder is considered the ultimate "capital" crime. Why? Because it robs a living being of its future in a way that no human can restore. And it is that awareness of a lost future that makes us grieve more, for better or worse, for a young child two dies than an elderly person in a nursing home at the twilight of their life. And it is that awareness of the absence of a future that allows us to consider the perminently brain dead that will never recover "clinically dead" and which allow some to accept that killing the terminally ill could be considered "mercy".
Science fiction is full of examples of the detachment of the present capacity of an individual from their "personhood". The original Star Trek series had an expisode where two crew members were reduced to foam blocks. One was crushed while the other was restored. The implication was clear to any who watched it. The crewmember who was crushed as a foam block was "murdered" because they could no longer be restored. Though is was fantasy, the scene would have had no emotional impact if, looking at the inert block of foam, the audience simply concluded "no brainwaves, no heartbeat, and no conscious so no murder was committed."
As to the hall of life, the key question is missing from this essay. Why does the author (or their father) wander from "yes" to "probably" and eventually to "no"? By what criteria are those transitions made? By how the fetus "looks"? The truth is that there are no non-trivial criteria that will let you declare a human fetus, or even a human infant, a "person" while denying that status to my pet cats. It is only looking at what something can become, if given time to grow or recover, that we can develop criteria consistent with how we define persons from the animals and the clinically dead in every other case.
Thank you. This is beautifully clear. Hopefully some clarity on the subject of abortion will lead someday soon to fewer tiny children suffering torture, mutilation and execution.