In the wake of the Center for Medical Progress’s first two sting videos against Planned Parenthood, pro-lifers have focused mostly on the barbarism of crushing and crunching, and on the fact that the very utility of fetal liver, hearts, lungs and heads for medical research proves the humanity of the unborn. Ross Douthat, for example, wrote in the New York Times: It’s a very specific disgust . . . a fetus’s humanity . . .
Though those points are well-taken, it seems that many of the public are inured to barbarism; and even pro-choicers who are willing to grant the humanity of the unborn offer some justifications for a right to dispatch those humans beings that, if not quite convincing, are fairly strong. And if the baby is going to die anyway, the argument goes, why not harvest from it anything useful.
But “if the baby is going to die anyway” is where the argument for a market in the body parts of those aborted babies (genteelly referred to as “fetal tissue”) hits an ethical snag, unless one considers abortion to be 100% innocuous. Because if it is permissible to market any valuable commdodity, the production of that commodity will be incentivized. Abortion will be incentivized for anyone who wants the commodity and anyone in a position to share in the profits from the sale to the person who wants the commodity. Those in a position to share in the profits from the sale might include the pregnant woman herself, her boyfriend, her abortionist, various middlemen, and even, for instance, suppliers of operating tables and sopher clamps to the abortionist.
As the most glaring example, a woman might go into business getting pregnant purely for the sake of aborting and selling the body parts. Yet if abortion is 100% innocuous, there should be no objection to such farming entrepeneurship.
Even many who believe that a woman should have a legal choice to abort consider abortion to be in some way undesirable, hence the laws that prohibit profiting from the sale of fetal tissue, and the strong support those laws have historically had. And in the wake of the videos, pro-lifers have of course not failed to reiterate such considerations. [Edit: In a 2016 Washington Post article, David Daleiden himself was quoted as saying, “The big problem, when we talk about the harvesting and sale of fetal tissue from abortion, is you’re creating a market. You’re introducing this extra new level of demand for abortion.”]
Unmentioned Issue
However, there is also a dimension of this ethical issue that I have not yet seen mentioned. For anyone who wants the commodity and anyone in a position to share in the profits from the sale, not only will individual abortions be incentivized, but abortion rights will also be incentivized. Many Americans already support abortion rights, but not many support late-term abortions. Yet the more gestated an unborn baby is, the more valuable its parts. Suppose that StemExpress is allowed to profit, and suppose they are receiving parts orders that they can’t fill. They will feel that as a loss and will have an incentive that there be more abortions, and will be more incentivized to lobby against abortion restrictions, especially restrictions on late-term abortions, which are solid gold to them. Tissue researchers as well will have an incentive that there be more abortions and will be more incentivized to lobby against late-term abortion restrictions. Abundant abortions will ensure that good-quality brains are always available at a cheap price.
If profit is permitted, I don’t see how any amount of regulation will successfully eliminate all the incentivizing of abortion and of abortion-rights lobbying. Even many pro-choicers admit that a moral issue exists, and would not want our laws on abortion to be determined by money.
And if trafficking is permitted even without profit, as under the present legal regime, there will be a black market. Even if trafficking is prohibited, there will be a black market, but the black market, and the consequent incentivizing, could at least be minimized by banning the trafficking.
So it would be misleading to say, “The fetus is dead anyway.” It is dead at that point, yes, but some of them would not have been killed in the first place.
P.S.: To try for a broader perspective, though, perhaps no one said it better than a fooball player, Ben Watson of the New Orleans Saints:
As horrific as it is, the issue isn’t really the sale of human parts. It’s the legal practice that allows this to even be a possibility. Killing children and simply discarding the leftovers is not any more acceptable than profiting off of them.
Aug. 13, 2015 update: Now the Center for Medical Progress has released its sixth video, featuring, like an earlier video, Holly O’Donnell, a former employee of StemExpress, one of the middlemen companies, or “biomedical tissue procurement companies,” who receive body parts from Planned Parenthood and sell them to researchers. In this video, O’Donnell says that some of PP’s patients at heart do not want to go through with the abortion. O’Donnell says that she would not pressure women to get abortions, and that if they did proceed, she would not pressure them to consent to the use of the child’s body parts if they were reluctant. But she says her StemExpress supervisors were unhappy with her about such lack of drive. She recalls that one time when she let a woman decide against abortion, a supervisor told her, “That was an opportunity you just missed.” O’Donnell continues, at 8:35,
Like, I’m not going to tell a girl to kill her baby so that I can get money. And that’s what this company does. Straight up, that’s what this company does.
Aug. 18, 2015 update: Another mechanism by which the incentivization of abortion can take its eventual toll: a woman named Nancy Tanner has come forward with this account of a mechanism that actually came into play and caused her to have an abortion she would not otherwise have had —
Lawmakers recognized that the option to consent for fetal tissue donation was something that should only be offered AFTER the woman had already consented to have the abortion. They recognized that to tell a woman that is still “on the fence” about having an abortion that she would be doing something good for the advancement of medicine by donating her fetal tissue, is akin to providing her with a moral incentive to terminate her pregnancy.
Nancy claims she was given that incentive.
Women with unwanted pregnancies looking for a moral excuse to abort will have their excuse.
© 2015
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Some future posts:
Life Panels
Evolution, and the Humanizing and Uplifting Effect on Society of a Commitment to the Unborn
A Trade-Off of a Sensitive Nature
Unborn Child-Protection Legislation, the Moral Health of Society, and the Role of the American Democratic Party
The Motivations of Aborting Parents
Why Remorse Comes too Late
The Kitchen-Ingredients Week-After Pill
Unwanted Babies and Overpopulation
The Woman as Slave?
Abortion and the Map of the World
