Bodily Rights – a Better Pro-Life Response

Posted on November 27, 2020 by Facilitator

A pro-choice argument that first used an analogy with a violinist, and has since seen a number of variations, goes like this: If a born person is dying of some disease, another born person should not be legally obliged to donate blood or bone marrow or a body part, even if that would save the life of the dying person. Most pro-lifers will agree with this. Therefore, since pregnancy involves the use by an unborn child, who would otherwise die, of a woman’s blood and body parts – the argument goes – pro-lifers should also agree that the woman should not be legally obliged to remain pregnant, even though that would save the life of the unborn. Thus pro-lifers should abandon the legal demands that are usually part of their position.

This is known as the bodily-rights argument, or more precisely the “right to refuse” version of the bodily-rights argument.

Especially in the last couple of years, pro-lifers have attacked this analogy by pointing out that when it is proposed that one’s body be used by a fellow born person, there are three possible responses (by the person whose body is proposed to be used), whereas in the case of pregnancy, where one’s body is being used by an unborn person, there are only two possible responses.

If one’s body is to be used by a born person:

one may help the person
one may passively let the person die
one may actively kill the person.

If one’s body is to be used by an unborn person (pregnancy):

one may help the person (i.e., one may carry the pregnancy to term)
one may actively kill the person.

The born-person scenario elicits the moral intuition of pro-lifers and pro-choicers alike that it should not be legally permissible to actively kill that needy person. Utilizing that moral intuition, this pro-life response to the right-to-refuse argument concludes by saying that it should not be legally permissible for a woman to actively kill her unborn child either – which is what abortion consists of.

But these pro-life arguments often overlook another disanalogy (besides active versus passive) between pregnancy and the born-person scenario, and it is a disanalogy that goes in the direction of justifying active killing: in the born-person scenario above, the person whose body is proposed to be used is in fact NOT being used (the person does not really have any problem), so there is no justification, even arguably, for active killing, whereas in the unborn-person scenario, the pregnant woman’s body is in fact already being used, so if that use is without permission, then there is a justification for killing that is at least arguable and that many pro-choicers do argue for.

Relevant to the possible justification are the additional facts that the pregnancy is a kind of burden and involves a degree of risk, but the core of the bodily-rights argument is simply a principle of consistency and fairness: if Shimp in the McFall v. Shimp case, for instance, should not have to give his bone marrow to save McFall’s life, why should a woman have to give her blood and lend her uterus to save the unborn’s life? While pointing out disanalogies between the two scenarios such as that of passively letting die versus actively killing, pro-lifers should not overlook the fact that a woman with an unwanted pregnancy arguably has a justification for active killing that Shimp has not at all. Pro-lifers cannot avoid a confrontation with that arguable justification by pointing out that someone like Shimp, who is in quite a different position, would have no justification.

When a person is asked to donate bone marrow, for instance, and refuses, perhaps the person whose body is proposed to be used found it emotionally stressful to be asked for that bone marrow, but other than that, that person has no arguable justification or even explicable motivation whatsoever to kill. The use of a pregnant woman’s body, on the other hand, goes beyond a request; as mentioned; her body is already being used. She may additionally feel that use to entail a burden or a risk, but in any case, if there is a principle that no one’s body should be used without permission (which is a principle that pro-lifers generally agree with), and she has not given permission, then that principle is being violated.

During a recent one-and-a-half-year period, pro-lifers used that passively-letting-die-versus-actively-killing argument and, it seems to me, overlooked that “arguable justification” disanalogy, here (search for “he didn’t actively kill his cousin”), here (at 10:11), here (at 6:20), and here. Those are all wonderful presentations overall that I highly recommend, by the way. But to take an example that will illustrate the problem, one author says:

there are three separate courses of action people can take with blood donation. First, they could donate blood and help save the person’s life. Second, they could choose to not donate their blood or organs. Third, they could directly kill them. . . . It seems obvious the third option should not be available. It is wrong to directly and intentionally kill an innocent human being.

Of course that is wrong, as the author says. She expects everyone’s moral intuitions to say it is wrong, and indeed they will say that. But it is wrong not merely because it is direct/active killing, though that is what she wishes to show. It is wrong because in the scenario she has outlined, there is no arguable justification or explicable motivation whatsoever to kill. It is wrong because in that situation, only a psychopath would kill. So when she hopes that the reader’s moral intuitions about such a situation will carry over to the situation of pregnancy (such carrying over of moral intuitions being what a moral-philosophy analogy necessarily aims for), she appears to have overlooked the disanalogy that we have mentioned. At all the above links, the scenarios set out are supposed to be analogous to pregnancy, but they are not sufficiently so, because in pregnancy the woman’s body is being used.

The violinist analogy that the pro-choice side likes is a much closer analogy in that way, at least, because the “donor’s” body is indeed already being used without permission. But suppose we adapt the violinist analogy such that the “donor” cannot disconnect from the violinist without first actively killing. So now we have an analogy that is like pregnancy in that the “donor’s” body is being used without permission (as in the original “violinist”), and moreover now the “donor” has only the two options of 1) helping the person (like a woman who carries a pregnancy to term), or 2) actively killing the person. Now we have corrected the analogical problem that we found at the four links above (as well as correcting the absence of direct killing that we find in the original violinist scenario). In this new situation, should it nevertheless be illegal to actively kill? It is not as obvious that it should be as it is in the above blood-donation scenario (or in the McFall scenario), because in that blood-donation scenario there is no use of the proposed donor’s body without permisson, whereas in this modified violinist scenario, there is, as mentioned, a use without permission. The pro-life author at the first link above has to admit (in a video, at 15:55) that a prohibition on active killing in such an adapted violinist scenario would be “ethically murky.” David Boonin, usually considered the most persuasive pro-choice philosopher, flatly bites the bullet (at 1:13:51 in this video) and says that actively killing the violinist (with an ice pick, no less, since he is asked the question in that way!) would be justified providing the violinist is unconscious (which some unborn babies are at the stage when they are killed).

I am not saying that we should fail to make the distinction between passively letting die, and active killing. It is a point worth making. But if we make it in the context of an analogy, we should make it in the context of an analogy that does not overlook the fact that a pregnant woman’s body is being used, and we should make it remembering that in that context, that distinction alone won’t reliably do adequate work of convincing people that abortion should be illegal. Fortunately, there are other disanalogies as well between the prevention of proposed abortions on the one hand, and compelled organ donations on the other. I don’t think any single one of the disanalogies can defeat the right-to-refuse argument at least in the case of rape, but I think a cocktail of disanalogies/arguments, taken together, can defeat it even in that case. (See also this resource, also linked to previously.)

McFall v. Shimp: More Analogous to Legal Abortion Than We Usually Think

Posted on July 4, 2019 by Facilitator

In 1971 Judith Jarvis Thomson analogized the legal prevention of abortion (i.e., anti-abortion laws), in the case of a rape pregnancy at least, to legal compulsion to endure the use of one’s kidney by a stranger for nine months. She expected readers to agree that such a compulsion would be “outrageous,” and even most pro-lifers agreed that indeed, our society should not institutionalize such compulsion. Almost all pro-lifers defend, legally if not morally, a passive right to refuse such that the needy person dies of their own disease – unless perhaps there are special circumstances * and the demand on one’s body is almost trivial, such as the donation of one pint of blood. Thomson’s paper pioneered a genre of similar arguments for abortion rights, known as “bodily-rights arguments” (or more specifically “right to refuse” bodily-rights arguments).

Soon enough after 1971, in a Pennsylvania court in 1978, Judge John Flaherty ruled that Robert McFall did not have a right to any of the bone marrow of David Shimp, even though McFall’s life might be saved by it and he might otherwise die. There was no known public disagreement with the ruling. This bore out the contention that a legal compulsion to endure the use of one’s internal organs, at least if the one being compelled was not responsible for the condition that had created another born person’s need to use them, would be unacceptable if not outrageous.

So the legal prevention of abortion, i.e., anti-abortion laws, compelling a woman to endure the use of her internal organs (at least if she was not responsible for the condition that had created another person’s need to use them, that is, a pregnancy), is clearly unacceptable – if such legal prevention of abortion is really analogous to the legal backing that McFall sought in trying to use some of the bone marrow of Shimp.

In fact, legal prevention of abortion is disanalogous in a number of ways to the legal backing that McFall sought in trying to use some of the bone marrow of Shimp; but the pro-life side has focused more than anything else on one disanalogy: the fact that McFall was left passively to die of his own disease, whereas in an abortion, the pregnant woman actively kills or hires someone to kill her unborn child.

I would like to argue here that that distinction, while worth making, is not sufficient in itself to justify the legal prevention of abortion, and that such legal prevention can only be justified by the cumulative import of a number of disanalogies.

The problem with simply pointing out that McFall was left passively to die of his own disease, whereas a pregnant woman actively kills or hires someone to kill her unborn child, is that, once Judge Flaherty ruled against him, McFall “took no for an answer.” He did not proceed to start taking Shimp’s bone marrow.

But an unborn child does not take no for an answer. An unborn child is tiny, it is innocent, it is unconscious, but nevertheless it is capable of refusing to take no for an answer and proceeding, without going through the courts, to start using its mother’s uterus and consuming its mother’s blood.

So in order to make the McFall v. Shimp situation more analogous with an unwanted pregnancy and a proposed abortion, let’s see how that case could hypothetically have played out instead of how it actually played out. This may get a little fanciful, but we already knew that any hypothetical that is really analogous to pregnancy will be fanciful.

Let’s say Judge Flaherty delivers his 1978 verdict, including his well-known comment “For a law to compel the defendant to submit to an intrusion of his body would change every concept and principle upon which our society is founded.”

At this point something understandably snaps in McFall, and he develops a psychotic delusion that Shimp is a bone-marrow-dispensing robot. (So that whatever he may do to Shimp, he will be innocent by reason of insanity, just as an unborn child is innocent.)

He follows Shimp home, and before Shimp knows what is happening, McFall has tied him to his own kitchen table and is proceeding to take some bone marrow.

There is no lethal threat to Shimp, and he knows it, but nevertheless he manages to get a concealed handgun out of his pocket. His only possible target is McFall’s head. He fires and kills McFall.

Now he has committed an active killing, as when a woman aborts. But how much less justified is he than if he had passively let Shimp die, which pro-lifers say should legally be okay? He has not killed gratuitously. As when a woman aborts, he has done it under circumstances where he had said no, but the person needing to use his body had refused to take no for answer.

So soon Shimp is back in Flaherty’s court. The prosecution has charged Shimp with criminal homicide, because he actively killed McFall. There is no dispute about the facts of the case.

Shall Judge Flaherty say to Shimp, “I said earlier that a law cannot compel a defendant to submit to an intrusion of his body. But I take that back. Under your circumstances with McFall, the law did require you to submit, because your only alternative was active killing and the law does not permit active killing. True, there is no law worded ‘if your only alternative is active killing, you must submit,’ but our homicide laws, since I interpret them as applying even in your situation, have the same effect” – ?

I don’t know how Flaherty or any judge might rule, but since we are using this scenario only as an analogy for abortion, the point is what the law should be rather than what it presently is. I once debated with an intelligent pro-choicer who thought that acquittal of someone in Shimp’s position would be “uncontroversial.” I responded with my moral intuition that, as long as any harm likely to be done to Shimp were no greater than is done to a woman in an average pregnancy in a developed country, Shimp should not be legally permitted to use lethal force. But I found the pro-choicer’s view extremely understandable. Hence I do not consider that making the distinction between actively killing, and passively letting someone die of their own disease, is, alone, a knockdown response to the right-to-refuse argument. In ethical debate, if an analogy is to have its desired effect, it works by analogizing the situation containing the debatable issue to a situation where the right and wrong are not in debate. But if the McFall-Shimp story had played out in the way I have suggested, a way really analogous to abortion, it would have been a situation where the right and wrong are in debate.

If it is a fact that no law or precedent can compel a person to do X (for instance, “submit to an intrusion of his body”), that does not mean that there is an automatic corollary “the law allows lethal force to save oneself from X.” In many situations of “cannot compel a person to do X,” there would be no such corollary. However, when Flaherty said that a law cannot compel a person to submit to an intrusion of his body, he went on to say that for a law to do so “would change every concept and principle upon which our society is founded. To do so would defeat the sanctity of the individual and would impose a rule which would know no limits, and one could not imagine where the line would be drawn.”

To be consistent with those ponderous words he used on the first occasion, Judge Flaherty would either have to find active killing under the circumstances that Shimp faced to be permissible, or would have to be very sympathetic to such a finding. He would not find active killing to be as obviously impermissible as pro-lifers would like it to be in a situation analogous to abortion.

If Flaherty’s strong words are true without exception for any circumstance, and if our homicide laws would operate in the above hypothetical circumstance such that Shimp would have to submit, then those homicide laws “would change every concept and principle upon which our society is founded. . .,” so seemingly such laws could not stand – meaning that in that circumstance the law would allow lethal force. Flaherty’s words, with which no one seems much to disagree when we are talking about born persons, describe a non-negotiable right to refuse, meaning a right that can be defended by almost any means necessary.

Remember that in the hypothetical scenario, McFall is proposing not merely to injure Shimp’s body, but to use it. This distinction is at the heart of the concept of bodily rights, and the effect, I think, is to bolster Shimp’s right to defend himself.

When we point out that abortion is not just the withholding or withdrawing of help, but active killing, the right-to-refuse argument loses a lot of the sizzle it might otherwise have, so we should definitely point that out. It is a point worth making. But any motivation for a pregnant woman to actively kill stems from the absence of a passive option for freeing herself – unlike the passive options open to Shimp (the way his case actually played out) and to Thomson’s kidnap victim (that person could simply disconnect without actively killing) – and the absence of a passive option means by the same token that the woman is in a trap and that therefore the taboo on active killing also loses its sizzle. Active killing is the minimum level of force necessary for her to free herself. The more reason of a self-defense nature you have for killing someone, the less the moral difference between actively killing them and passively failing to help them becomes. Under some circumstances, actively killing someone for self-defense reasons might even be more moral than failing to help. So the point about active killing does not do the desired work of showing that a woman procuring an abortion is disanalogous to Shimp. Let’s make the point about active killing, but not expect it to completely defeat the right-to-refuse argument.

Fortunately, there are, as I said earlier, other disanalogies between the prevention of proposed abortions on the one hand, and compelled organ donations on the other. I don’t think any single one of the disanalogies can defeat the right-to-refuse argument in the case of rape, but I think a cocktail of disanalogies/arguments, taken together, can defeat it even in that case.

* Listen at 5:23.

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The Cocktail That Defeats Bodily-Rights Arguments

Posted on September 19, 2018 by Facilitator

In September 2021, Human Defense Initiative kindly reprinted this article. However, the “I would not question” disanalogy below is a later addition that does not appear on their blog.

The most convincing bodily-rights arguments for abortion rights say that everyone should be legally permitted to refuse to let their internal organs be used, even if such refusal will result in the death of an innocent person. Such arguments analogize legal prevention of abortion with compelled organ donation/use among born people. I feel that such arguments cannot be defeated by pointing to any single disanalogy or by any other single argument, but feel that they are defeated by a “cocktail” of disanalogies/arguments. My moral intuitions say that the cumulative force of the following set of disanalogies/arguments does clearly defeat such bodily-rights arguments:

• 99% of unborn children result from a voluntary act by two people who know that a child thus created will be dependent on the mother’s body. By that voluntary act, the two people incur an obligation toward that dependent child. It may be that neither any similar act in and of itself, nor any circumstance in and of itself, would be sufficient for anyone to incur an obligation to let one’s internal organs be used by a needy born person, but such an act would at least contribute toward such an obligation; and thus the voluntary act that results in an unborn child adds its weight on top of all the arguments that, taken together, I feel, disallow abortion even if there was no voluntary act –

• See “Bodily Rights and a Better Idea: the Short and Easy Version”

• Abortion is active killing of a child that would likely otherwise have lived, whereas when someone passively refuses to let their body be used by a sick person, the person dies of their own disease. I feel there has been a tendency in recent years for pro-life groups to over-rely on this one disanalogy, but nevertheless, the disanalogy should be identified.

• A person whose organ is demanded had rarely benefited from an organ transplant prior to the demand on themselves, so in a requirement to give blood or bone marrow or a kidney, there would be a lack of reciprocity. But in a country where abortion is legally prevented, all women who might think about aborting had themselves benefited from the protection of those laws when they were small and had perhaps survived only because of those laws, so there is reciprocity. (The benefit that women had received when small is a fact that women should reasonably remember, also, but it is a fact whether they remember it or not. And by the way, it cannot be claimed that under pro-life laws anyone has any special rights. “Under pro-life laws, everyone before they are born will have the right to use someone else’s body without consent, and everyone once they are born will lose that right.”)

• While it is true that a woman who gives birth to a child who needs her blood or bone marrow or kidney (hers and only hers) in order to live is not legally obliged to give it to the child, such cases are very rare, and the woman never knows that that will occur. If she knew that (given conception and birth) that would always occur and if the sexual act was consensual, the situation would be different. [Edit: She then likely would be legally obliged to give a kidney. (If pro-life laws were in effect, the likelihood might actually be less, because then society would consider the fact that she had by that time already been legally obligated to carry the pregnancy to term, and that giving a kidney would be piling one obligation on top of another. But the point would still stand that if a born child’s need for a bodily donation were as inevitable as an embryo’s need for a uterus – if such situations were more like pregnancy – the parents’ legal obligations would be greater than they actually are.)] Even presently, I would support legally obliging parents to give bone marrow to their born children in some cases, and would support legally obliging even unrelated persons to give blood in many cases, perhaps on a lottery basis.

• The younger and more defenseless a person is, the more protection they deserve, and taking advantage of another person’s helplessness is particularly ignoble.

• If the government forcibly seizes someone’s body part, it is the government who will initiate the use of force/violence, whereas if the government applies force against an abortionist or pill vendor (or even a pregnant woman, though pro-lifers do not propose that) to prevent an abortion, it is the woman (or someone coercing her) who proposed to initiate the violence.

• I would not question that a person whose body contains two kidneys is the sole owner of those kidneys. But a uterus is unlike a kidney in that a uterus is housing, and housing is a human right. Human rights are something that society as a whole has an interest in protecting, so housing is something that society as a whole has an interest in providing. And a uterus is in fact the only housing that will be adequate for any member of human society at one particular stage in their development.

Finally, a counter-analogy:

• If we ask whether one conjoined twin should be able to force a surgical separation that would kill their twin – even though waiting 6-9 months would ensure the survival of both – nobody will say the one twin’s right to bodily autonomy supersedes the other’s right to life. (Thanks to @DrSteveJacobs for this particular articulation. This counter-analogy too is not free from disanalogy. Between woman and unborn there is an asymmetry not present between the twins. The woman is clearly the host of the unborn, and had an existence prior to the unborn, and hence, through the conception, has lost something that she had once had. But how much importance should our moral intuitions give to that disanalogy?)

Our moral intuitions come out of our unconsciouses in some way we cannot understand, so ultimately no one knows why they hold the moral intuitions that they do. But I think that the above disanalogies/arguments are probably the reasons that I feel that abortions should normally be illegal, while I do not feel that organ donation/use should be legally compulsory.

The contribution that I hope this article will make to the defeat of bodily-rights arguments is to provide a foundation that can endure. It should have the power to endure, because there is flexibility for the specifics that rest on the foundation. The specific points can be added to or subtracted from or improved, while the understanding of the necessity of a cocktail remains.

You may leave a reply, if you wish, without giving your name or email address. If you do give your email address, it will not be published. Back up your work as you type, in case of accidents.

Some future posts:

Life Panels

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

Bodily Rights and a Better Idea: the Short and Easy Version

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Posted on August 22, 2018 by Facilitator

Four years after writing the first version of what I would later call
“Bodily Rights and a Better Idea” (12,000 words), I have finally found a way to write a short and easy version:

1. The pursuit of happiness, whether it is earthly happiness or another kind of happiness, really explains everything that people intentionally do. I think that society grants rights based on the idea that an unfettered pursuit of happiness ought to be allowed unless there is some reason to fetter it. Society feels it ought to grant people the rights that people desire to have, unless those rights come in conflict with the rights that others desire to have, or unless they should seemingly be limited for some other reason.

Those “ought to’s” stem from society’s members’ moral intuitions and perhaps also from an implicit social contract. (In the case of bodily rights, which we will get to below, the moral intuitions stem in turn from empathy with people’s psychological sense of body ownership, since everyone shares that sense.)

2. Setting aside all the other variables that might arise, the strength of a right that society grants will vary according to the strength/intensity of people’s desire for that right.

3. People have a strong psychological sense of individual body ownership. There is no scientific or necessary philosophical reason to think that each of us own our own bodies, but we have that strong psychological sense. (Philosophically, it would be equally coherent to say that there should be collective ownership of the body parts of everyone in society. If ants had the skills for organ transplants, presumably an ant colony would operate with collective ownership. I am not recommending this, but I’m making the point that bodily rights stem from an inborn psychological sense.)

4. Because of that strong psychological sense in everyone, our moral
intuitions tell us that we (society) should grant strong bodily rights.

5. That psychological sense is not a fixture but an occurrence. It occurs particularly when our bodily ownership is challenged or when we imagine it being challenged. Moreover, there is no reason that it should be equally strong in the face of every type of challenge. As mentioned, the strength of a right that society grants will vary according to the strength/intensity of people’s desire for that right.

6. There are reasons to think (see section 7 of “Bodily Rights and a Better
Idea”) that an attempt to prevent abortion does not normally and on average elicit in pregnant women as strong a sense of bodily ownership (there is not as strong an occurrence of that sense) as an attempt to forcibly remove or use a body organ elicits in people in general. For instance, a woman might well feel at some level of consciousness that the unborn shares with her ownership of “their” uterus.

At least, we should not assume that a woman whose abortion it is proposed to thwart will necessarily feel an equally strong offense to her sense of body ownership as will a person whose kidney it is proposed to seize. It is an open question. If I am correct about how rights originate in society, then analogical right-to-refuse arguments do implicitly make that assumption, but the burden of proof is on them. Neuroscience may answer the question in the future. For now we have to research the question in less technological ways, and society has to use its intuitions.

7. If we (society) consciously recognized, which we have not as yet, that the strength of the psychological sense of bodily ownership varies from situation to situation, and if we confirmed that it is not as strong in pregnant women when prevention of abortion is proposed as in people in general when forcible removal or use of a body organ is proposed, our moral intuitions would not tell us to grant as strong bodily rights to a pregnant woman faced with prevention of abortion as to people in general faced with forcible removal or use of a body organ. Again, the burden of proof is on those who use analogical right-to-refuse arguments.

8. Once the role of the psychological sense of body ownership in society’s granting of bodily rights is understood, we can find a better ethics recognizing that role than the present concept of bodily rights. We can find a better idea.

The most convincing bodily-rights arguments for abortion rights say that everyone should be legally permitted to refuse to let their internal organs be used, even if such refusal will result in the death of an innocent person. Such arguments analogize legal prevention of abortion with compelled organ donation/use among born people. I feel that such arguments cannot be defeated by pointing to any single disanalogy or by any other single argument, but feel that they are defeated by a “cocktail” of disanalogies/arguments. My moral intuitions say that the cumulative force of several disanalogies/arguments does clearly defeat such bodily-rights arguments, and that the above-mentioned possible lesser strength of the sense of bodily ownership in pregnant women may qualify as one of them.

Appendix, July 2022:

If identity arguments and bodily-rights arguments can be defeated (if in the case of bodily rights, they exist and count for something, but they don’t outweigh the right to life), then killing an unborn is sufficiently like killing a three-year-old to make it impermissible Strong bodily-rights arguments depend on kidney-type analogies, so if such analogies can be defeated, abortion becomes a human-rights violation. There is no one disanalogy (not the above, in 7., “our moral intuitions would not tell us to grant as strong bodily rights to a pregnant woman faced with prevention of abortion as to people in general faced with forcible removal or use of a body organ” or any other single disanalogy) that can defeat the analogies, but a constellation or “cocktail” of disanalogies can defeat them. Even if “not . . . grant as strong bodily rights to a pregnant woman faced with prevention of abortion as to people in general faced with forcible removal or use of a body organ” fails, the rest of the cocktail is enough to defeat them. Please see the above link to a cocktail of disanalogies/arguments.

You may leave a reply, if you wish, without giving your name or email address. If you do give your email address, it will not be published. Back up your work as you type, in case of accidents.

Some future posts:

Life Panels

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

Why Focus on Abortion?

Posted on April 20, 2017 by Facilitator

This essay was first published, with illustrations, in Life Matters Journal Volume 5 Issue 5 — April 2017.

I think I’m not alone among pro-life advocates, in that people sometimes ask me, “Why only abortion? Why do you advocate on this issue only?” When pro-choicers ask me that question, it often takes the form of “Why don’t you talk about the problems of women?”

My first reply might be that I do not in fact ignore other issues. I have done a lot of pondering about the miserable treatment of women throughout most of history, in most of the world, and I have even ventured to write about a pro-life feminist approach toward rectifying all of that. I volunteer for an organization that works to lift people out of poverty.

Most of the pro-lifers I know actually do approach abortion with a holistic view of the world. But it is true that some of us, including me, do also spend a disproportionate amount of our advocacy time focused on the abortion issue specifically.

For me, this is because I feel that the pro-life cause, much more than any other cause, can be a vehicle for a higher human consciousness that will uplift us morally in how we respond to all issues, not only the abortion issue.

As Javier Cuadros wrote:

Science is a process of knowledge in which we penetrate ever deeper. . . . As the observations multiply . . . it is typical that the original appearances . . . are shown to be incorrect. The reality is different. . . . This is why I have always been puzzled about the reluctance of scientists to apply the same program of investigation to the nature of the human embryo. Are human embryos men and women and thus entitled to the inalienable right to life and respect for their dignity and physical integrity, or are they not? Here, many scientists . . . are for applying the simple criterion of appearances. No, [embryos] are not men and women, they say, because they do not look like a person. Agreed, they do not look like a developed human being. But the earth looks like it is stationary. . . . shape does not make a human being. It has been shown that the most fundamental element of the presence and identity of a human being is the existence of [complete human genetic information] . . .

Most people in the world, if we may indulge in broad strokes, have one of these two perceptions of the early unborn: 1) either they feel that the early unborn is not possessed of the moral value of other human beings because it doesn’t look like most of the human beings we know (or doesn’t seem quite as bright as most of the human beings we know, or some such criterion); or 2) they feel that the early unborn does have the same moral value as the other human beings we know because the genetic information it possesses has set it on an inexorable path – a path such that it will soon enough be a human being similar to others we know (if only somebody doesn’t kill it first).

And I think that among those who hold the second category of perception, there are also some who got there without an understanding of DNA and chromosomes. They got there simply by pondering deeply over some such thought as this: “A human life is one seamless process that has to start somewhere, and how can it be expected that it won’t start extremely small?”

Now, can we call either of the two perceptions better than the other? Well, the first perception is like a still picture. It is a perception of the organism as if it were frozen in time. The second perception is of a process. If you kill a small clump of cells lacking, perhaps, even a beating heart, it is correct to say that you are killing an organism whose life presently has little value; and that therefore the organism itself would – if no future lay ahead of it – have little value. But it is also correct to say that you are depriving that organism of the complete human life which has started in it as a process. We cannot deem that either perception is more scientific than the other. But obviously the perception of the process is a more complete perception.

The perception of the process is not necessarily more scientific, but it is more complete. It is richer. I think that perception helps explain the joy that we see on the faces of “the pro-life generation” at the March for Life and on almost every campus in the country. So for me, it reflects the higher consciousness that I spoke of above, a more evolved consciousness. It reflects a forward evolution in a person’s inner world. It reflects an expansion.

When Barack Obama announced his support for gay marriage in 2012, after sixteen years in politics, he famously described that pivot of his as “an evolution.” Well, Mr. Obama, that’s great! Evolution is a liberating experience. Any one person’s moral evolution surely has wonderful consequences for us all. And now, Mr. Obama – and Hillary Clinton, and Cecile Richards, and Gloria Steinem – you have a chance to go on evolving, to evolve still more. Wouldn’t it be great to do so? The path is before you. We’ll all be cheering you on.

Though not wishing to minimize how big an evolutionary step it was for straight people to come to perceive gays as fully human, I think that coming to perceive embryos as fully human will be an even bigger step. It will also be a bigger step than coming to perceive other races as fully human, or other genders as fully human, or the differently abled as fully human. Why? Because – to get back to Cuadros above – gay people, and people of other races and genders, and the differently abled, look like persons. We can “apply the simple criterion of appearances.” Urgent though it is to advocate the causes of refugees and earthquake victims, at least society may be able to see them as human beings without our help – not so, it seems, for the unborn.

Moreover, let us remember Martin Luther King’s observation that “freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” Unlike other groups that have won society’s respect, the preborn do not themselves strike the least fear in the hearts of those who would mistreat them. If rights are to be secured for them, it will be the first time in history that rights have been secured for a human group who could not fight back somewhat, or at least clamor shrilly. So coming to truly perceive the unborn as fully human, though completely in accord with science, will be a grander mental achievement than in the case of other groups. This last frontier of civil rights will be the most difficult. But by the same token it will represent a more significant expansion of consciousness.

A pro-life position taken on this basis will mean a greater connectedness with our origins and hence a greater connectedness with the universe. This connectedness will certainly spill over into all our activities and all our decisions. It will be a big evolutionary step, a step to what I called above “a higher human consciousness that will uplift us morally in how we respond to all issues, not only the abortion issue.”

I also said, however, that “the pro-life cause, much more than any other cause, can be a vehicle for a higher human consciousness.” The cause may seem clearly to be a way in which that higher consciousness gets expressed when one already has that consciousness, but is the cause also a vehicle for creating such a consciousness in those who don’t yet have it?

It is natural for the mind to try to confine one’s human family to a small circle. We fear having to care for people, or kinds of people, outside that circle. Our mental walls constructed around that circle, however, get smashed when confronted by facts that are incompatible with such encirclement, or confronted by incompatible, yet persuasive, viewpoints coming from people who command our respect. The smashing of our mental walls is an uncomfortable experience, a disturbing experience, but once one manages to grasp the idea that a human life is one seamless process, and hence equally valuable at all points in time, it is an idea that becomes very persuasive. It is a more complete view than to perceive the organism as if it were frozen in time. Moreover, once we include within the circle of our family people we had formerly excluded, we emerge with fewer fears than we had before. In this way also our minds expand. Thus the pro-life cause can be a vehicle for a higher human consciousness, and thus this, to me, is the issue to focus on.

People whom we do not respect, however, are unlikely to persuade us. Among other things, pro-life advocates who are to be persuasive must be people who truly have that expanded vision – which cannot be said of all pro-life advocates. I think that many religious people who are originally pro-life by virtue of rote religious doctrine later become prompted by their doctrines, or by other forces, to do some deep thinking of their own, and develop that expanded vision. But those who came to a pro-life position out of rote religious doctrine alone (without further reflection), not to mention those who came to it out of political opportunism, will not have that vision. Only those who genuinely have it will be able to articulate it in a way that touches non-believers; others may even create a big backlash among skeptics.

A few years back John Koenig coined the word “sonder,” a noun whose definition begins, “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own . . .” It is the ultimate sense of human connectedness, and as the founder of Life Matters Journal has pointed out, it is a state of mind out of which consistent pro-life behavior in all one’s actions must inevitably flow. I think that activism on behalf of the unborn can do more than anything else to further this outlook in the human race.

Now I have said a lot about establishing in people’s minds the perception that the unborn is a full-fledged member of our human family. But by now some will be asking, in order for the pro-life cause to prevail, will such convincing alone be sufficient? What about the bodily-rights position, which concedes for the sake of argument that the unborn is indeed fully human, yet claims a right to kill it nonetheless? But I think that the understanding that the preborn is a full-fledged member of our human family is, in fact, virtually sufficient. It seems to me almost always that those who concede for the sake of argument that the unborn is truly a human being, yet claim a right to kill, make that concession only for the sake of argument. Very few of them – perhaps only Naomi Wolf and Camille Paglia – have made that concession in their hearts. I think that almost anyone who really sees the unborn as our little sisters and brothers, will quickly dig a little deeper and discover the weaknesses in the bodily-rights argument.

July 4, 2022 Update

A tweet thread:

1/ To me the issue of unborn life is an issue of a different order from any other, because my main concern is the moral evolution of the human race, and the most deeply thought-out kind of pro-lifeism represents a breakthrough in that evolution. That kind of pro-lifeism, simply

— No Termination w R (@NoTerminationWR) July 4, 2022

To me the issue of unborn life is an issue of a different order from any other, because my main concern is the moral evolution of the human race, and the most deeply thought-out kind of pro-lifeism represents a breakthrough in that evolution. That kind of pro-lifeism, simply through an intellectual and contemplative quest for truth, through thought and meditation based on some elementary scientific understanding, without reliance on any religious doctrine, has come to perceive the unborn as a full-fledged member of our human family. That perception involves a bigger evolutionary step than coming to perceive different races or different genders or people of different sexual orientations as fully human, because the members of those groups LOOK human. And along the way, that perception will translate into policy as a crossing of the last and most daunting frontier of civil rights.

You may leave a reply, if you wish, without giving your name or email address. If you do give your email address, it will not be published. Back up your work as you type, in case of accidents.

Some future posts:

Life Panels

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

Why It’s Not Murder

Posted on February 28, 2017 by Facilitator

An Exception for Serious Injury

At Wayne State University last November 16, Scott Klusendorf, perhaps the dean of pro-life apologists, ably debated abortion with Nadine Strossen, a former president of the ACLU. Klusendorf based his pro-life argument on the humanity of the unborn and the wrongness of intentionally killing an innocent human being.

At 1:08:57 Klusendorf indicates a possible openness to health exceptions to his anti-abortion position. Strossen insists on more specifics – what kind of health condition would be serious enough to reach the threshold at which Klusendorf would agree to make an exception? Klusendorf replies:

Sure, I’ll answer that. Let me make an observation, though. Even if my answer were inconsistent, it wouldn’t eradicate the syllogism I put forward. . . . So even if I answered this question in a way that seemed inconsistent with my view, it would only show I’m inconsistent. It wouldn’t rule out the evidence I presented.

Then he brings up Doe v. Bolton’s overly-broad standard of “health,” and the empirical rarity of cases that would raise a real ethical question; but Strossen insists on a specific example even if “hypothetically,” and offers “Let’s say she will not lose her life, but she will be rendered infertile . . . ?” Klusendorf replies, “In that case the mother stands to lose one good, the child stands to lose an ultimate good” – meaning that impending infertility would not be a sufficient reason to abort. Strossen then moves on to other topics.

So Klusendorf laid the groundwork for a defense in case he might say something “inconsistent.” In the event, he was not forced to say anything inconsistent, but to my mind Strossen let him off the hook. Suppose instead of the infertility example, she had framed the hypothetical as “Let’s say she will not lose her life, but most likely her brain will be damaged, seriously affecting her motor skills and memory for the rest of her life.”

I don’t know whether Klusendorf would have agreed to an exception in such a case – which would have “seemed inconsistent with [his] view” that only a life-threatening situation might justify taking the innocent life of another a little earlier than its end would have come anyway (as in his ectopic pregnancy example) – but I, and I think many pro-lifers, would say, “In that case, no, she should be allowed to abort if she so decides. I will admire her if she doesn’t, but in terms of legal obligation, society should not compel her to carry the pregnancy.”

Yet it remains generally true for my brand of pro-lifers (just as for virtually all pro-lifers) that “It is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being,” and it remains true for us that the unborn is an innocent human being – so that it would seem impermissible to kill it. Moreover, if in an otherwise analogous situation a mother could avoid serious brain damage only by killing her innocent born child, it would almost certainly be illegal for her to do so. Suppose that in an earthquake a mother and her 4-year-old become trapped in a small space beneath the rubble. They can hear the voices of rescuers a few yards above them, but the air is running out and the mother’s brain will become damaged by oxygen deprivation if the 4-year-old keeps breathing also. If she were to put her hand over the toddler’s mouth and nose, thus killing it, that would certainly be illegal. Thus since the unborn is a human being like the toddler, allowing the woman to abort, as I and many pro-lifers would do, would seem inconsistent both with existing legal protections for born human beings, and with a syllogism that we basically support.

How to explain this? Do many pro-lifers not really believe that the unborn is an innocent human being? Well, clearly it is innocent, so the question becomes, do we not really believe that it is a human being? (Many pro-choicers, of course, like to push the idea that we do not really believe that.)

The answer is: we do believe that the unborn is an innocent human being, but we feel that society has no right to legally prevent a woman from saving herself, even if it is by use of lethal force against an innocent human being, from a very serious developing threat which would not exist without the participation of her own body.

What, morally, is the difference between the grievously health-threatening pregnancy situation and the “competing for oxygen” situation? The difference seems to be the difference between legally preventing a woman from using lethal force to save herself from a developing threat that is coming from outside her own body, and legally preventing a woman from using lethal force to save herself from a developing threat that is living within her own body and in whose development her own body will participate. The latter woman’s body is helping, as the days wear on, to augment more and more the threat against herself, and thus obliging her to continue doing that obliges her to seal her own terrible fate – an obligation which has a kind of moral repugnance all its own. (Even to prevent abortion in the case of a normal pregnancy is to oblige a woman to seal her own fate, but if it is a normal pregnancy, then by definition it is not a terrible fate.)*

Virtually all pro-lifers, like anyone else, respect the mental sense of body ownership that underlies the concept of bodily rights. The importance accorded to that sense rests on a kind of intuition, and hence the importance varies somewhat from person to person, but I don’t think there is a night-and-day difference in that regard between pro-lifers as a group and pro-choicers as a group. To put it more simply, pro-lifers as well as pro-choicers believe in “bodily rights.” So pro-lifers feel that as a moral starting point, or as a default moral principle, everyone should have a legal right to refuse to let their body be used unless they give permission. Certainly one’s body cannot be used for just any purpose under the sun. Where pro-lifers differ from pro-choicers is that pro-lifers are likely to feel that a woman should not have that legal right when her body is the only hope for survival of a new human being – a situation that they feel confers some degree of responsibility on her. (I have discussed elsewhere how I, as one pro-lifer, come to that conclusion.)

Yet the tipping of the scales on the side of the child’s life is not a completely day-and-night proposition. The belief in a default principle of bodily rights, on one side of the balance, never disappears even when a child’s life is at stake on the other side, with the consequence that for some pro-lifers (including me), if the woman’s pregnancy is expected to be exceptionally dangerous, then, in this conflict of rights, her bodily rights will again prevail as they did when no other life was at stake. It is not that the unborn is not what Klusendorf calls a “distinct, living and whole human being;” it is indeed that human being; but society has no right to legally prevent a woman from saving herself, even if it is by use of lethal force against an innocent human being, from a developing threat which would not exist without the participation of her own body.

This explains and resolves the seeming inconsistency. If in a situation analogous to pregnancy a mother could avoid lifetime brain damage only by killing her innocent born child, it would almost certainly be illegal for her to do so, whereas if a pregnant woman could avoid lifetime brain damage only by killing her innocent unborn child, many of us would allow that. The difference is bodily rights that operate when a person’s body stands to be used in a particular way, but otherwise do not operate.

Broader Implications of the Exception

This example of how bodily rights work when there is a likelihood of a grievous permanent injury has implications about the meaning of bodily rights in the cases of more normal pregnancies, also. One corollary of the example is this: For pro-lifers such as us who would make a grievous-injury exception, society’s right to outlaw abortion in the case of a normal pregnancy is based, as mentioned, on a balance that is not entirely one-sided. On one side of the balance is the value of a human life, on the other side, the burdens of a normal pregnancy coupled with the woman’s bodily rights. The human life wins out. But the woman’s bodily rights that are there by default never disappear; and therefore if a normally pregnant woman violates the law and claims those default bodily rights, it is not fully the same as killing a born child who is not infringing on her bodily rights. It is, though a defiance of the law, something less than murder.

Almost all pro-lifers think of the unborn at any stage as full-fledged persons, as members of our human family. And I think it is safe to say that very few pro-choicers think of them that way. Pro-choicers who use bodily-rights arguments think that they can justify abortion regardless of unborn personhood (as mentioned, I find that bodily-rights approach strong but not strong enough in normal pregnancies). So those who use such an approach normally concede for the sake of argument that the unborn are persons; but I think that almost always, they make that concession only for the sake of argument. As pro-choicers who genuinely think of the unborn as persons, I can only think of Naomi Wolf, who said, “Sometimes the mother must be able to decide that the foetus, in its full humanity, must die. But it is never right or necessary to minimise the value of the lives involved,” and Camille Paglia, who said, “A liberal credo that is variously anti-war, anti-fur, vegan, and committed to environmental protection of endangered species like the sage grouse or spotted owl should not be so stridently withholding its imagination and compassion from the unborn.” I don’t know how far those two base the pro-choice position they hold on bodily rights, but any pro-choicers who do rely on bodily rights, and genuinely see the unborn as persons, could make statements just like theirs.

So how should we frame a face-off over a normal pregnancy, between pro-lifers such as me, and those few bodily-rights pro-choicers who genuinely see the unborn as persons? It would be like the pro-choice side declaring, “There is a debatable contest between bodily rights and the right to life of a full-fledged person, in which bodily rights prevail,” and the pro-life side declaring, “There is a debatable contest between bodily rights and the right to life of a full-fledged person, in which bodily rights don’t manage to prevail.” For me personally, though it is clear that the outcome of the contest is on the pro-life side, I wouldn’t call the margin of the outcome (in terms of what should or shouldn’t be legal) a very pronounced one.

One may wonder why there should be so much polarization on the abortion issue, even among people who agree about the statistics, scientific facts, etc. Understanding those few conversations (such as the imagined one above) that are free from polarization helps illuminate the sources of the polarization that more typically occurs. Apart from some very important psychological dysfunctions that are involved, polarization stems mainly from widely disparate perceptions of the unborn, so a conversation such as the above is bound to be free from polarization. Therefore there is another corollary of the “somewhat debatable balance” view of the abortion issue: those few pro-choicers who really see the unborn as our little sisters and brothers will share that “somewhat debatable” view with the pro-lifers who hold it, and those two groups will not be each other’s hated enemies. Both groups will agree that the issue involves a balance that could understandably tip the other way in the other person’s mind. There will not be the acrimony that is usual between pro-choicers and pro-lifers. They will be able to talk. (If the pro-choicers deprecate the unborn, on the other hand, there will be a big fight.)

A key part of my presentation, remember, has been, “we [pro-lifers who share my view] do believe that the unborn is an innocent human being, but we feel that society has no right to legally prevent a woman from saving herself, even if it is by use of lethal force against an innocent human being, from a developing threat which would not exist without the participation of her own body.” Most of us feel that in the case of the big majority of pregnancies, those that result from a voluntary action by both the mother and the father, society should be ready to demand more risk than in the case of a rape pregnancy, but the above statement holds for us, even in that big majority of pregnancies in which the responsibility consideration is factored in.

* This note anticipates a certain objection and tries to respond to the objection. Readers who have not felt any objection so far to my argument involving the “rubble” example can skip this note.

I’m trying to show that there are some things about the fact that an unborn child who is a threat to a woman is inside the woman’s body, that should make it more legally justifiable to kill it than to kill a born child if that born child is equally a threat but also equally passive and innocent. And I’m arguing that one of those things, and sometimes a pivotal thing, is the fact that to legally prevent the woman from killing is to oblige her to participate in the development of a threat against herself. But some pro-choicers claim to intuit that anyone should have a right to kill a born assailant, innocent (by reason of insanity or whatever) or not, who threatens even a moderate degree of injury. Based on that intuition, they then cast the unborn as an assailant whom one has a right to kill. Moreover, they intuit that a woman’s bodily rights entitle her not only to passively refuse to let her body be used, but also to actively kill if necessary to save her body from being used.

Thus those pro-choicers might report that their moral intuitions agree with mine in that a pregnant woman threatened with permanent serious injury would have more right to use lethal force than would the woman in the rubble, yet interpret those moral intuitions as deriving from 1) their intuition that anyone should have a right to kill a born assailant, innocent or not, who threatens even a moderate degree of injury, 2) their intuition that a woman should have a right to actively kill if necessary, and 3) their view that the unborn is an assailant – more of an assailant than is the 4-year-old. So their moral intuitions might agree with mine about the “rubble” situation, but they might say that they agree partly because I have stacked the deck and cast as the counterfoil to the unborn a 4-year-old who is less of an aggressor than is an unborn child. They might disagree with my conclusion that what is necessarily pivotal is the fact that to legally prevent the woman from killing is to oblige her to participate in the development of a threat against herself.

But I am trying to show only why it is that many pro-lifers think that a woman in real danger of suffering permanent serious injury should be allowed to abort (and show that the reason is not that pro-lifers assign less moral value to the unborn than to her). I do think that many pro-lifers would permit a woman to use lethal force in order to avoid a level of injury that would not warrant killing a born person. But would pro-lifers agree 1) that anyone should have a right to kill a born assailant, innocent or not, who threatens even a moderate degree of injury, 2) that a woman should have a right to actively kill if necessary, and 3) that the unborn is an assailant?

Even if pro-choicers sometimes argue insincerely, their arguments are possible to make, so anyone who agrees with my moral intuition that a pregnant woman threatened with permanent serious injury would have more right to use lethal force than would the woman in the rubble, has optionally open to them the interpretation that that moral intuition comes only from agreement with 1, 2, and 3; that is, they could theoretically say that their intuition does not necessarily have anything to do with the fact that to legally prevent the woman from killing is oblige her to participate in the development of a threat against herself. But I think that pro-lifers are 1) unlikely to agree with pro-choicers about the degree of expected injury that would give anyone a right to kill an innocent born assailant, and I think they are 2) unlikely to agree with pro-choicers about the justifiability of active killing (as opposed to passively refusing to let one’s body be used, and 3) very unlikely to agree that an unborn child can be considered an assailant. So I think that pro-lifers who agree with me that it is more justifiable to use force against an unborn who is a threat, than against the child in the rubble, will not only agree with me that “there are some things about the fact that an unborn child who is a threat to a woman is inside the woman’s body, that should make it more legally justifiable to kill it than to kill a born child if that born child is equally a threat but also equally passive and innocent,” but also agree that the pivotal consideration is that to legally prevent the woman from killing is to oblige her to participate in the development of a threat against herself.

Appendix

I originally wrote the following version of the first few paragraphs, but replaced it with the above version for the sake of brevity. Some readers might be interested in further details of what led up to Klusendorf’s Even if my answer were inconsistent . . .:

At Wayne State University last November 16, Scott Klusendorf, perhaps the dean of pro-life apologists, ably debated abortion with Nadine Strossen, a former president of the ACLU. Early on, Klusendorf based his pro-life position on this simple syllogism:

Premise 1: It is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being.
Premise 2: Abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being.
Conclusion: Therefore abortion is wrong.

At 1:07:01 Strossen asks Klusendorf about exceptions: “when it’s necessary to save a woman’s life, when it’s necessary for her health, when she is the victim of rape or incest . . .” Klusendorf gives the example of an ectopic pregnancy threatening the life of a woman and affirms that this would be an exception and that any pro-life physician would agree. Strossen then asks about health exceptions: “if it’s not a matter of literally saving a pregnant woman’s life, but . . . serious adverse health impact . . .” Klusendorf replies in terms of the rarity of such serious cases (serious cases other than ectopic pregnancies). He also points out that Doe v. Bolton had allowed an overly broad health exception; but his answer implies that if Doe had not made things so broad, he would agree to a health exception. Strossen then asks, “What do you define as health [that is, a health condition whose seriousness would reach the threshold at which he would agree to make an exception]?”

At 1:12:01 Klusendorf says, Sure, I’ll answer that. Let me make an observation, though. Even if my answer were inconsistent, it wouldn’t eradicate the syllogism I put forward. . . . So even if I answered this question in a way that seemed inconsistent with my view, it would only show I’m inconsistent. It wouldn’t rule out the evidence I presented.

At that point he again brings up the overly-broad standards and the empirical rarity of serious cases, but Strossen insists on a specific example even if “hypothetically,” and offers “Let’s say she will not lose her life, but she will be rendered infertile. . . . Would that be a situation where you would say the pregnancy could be terminated?” He replies, “In that case the mother stands to lose one good, the child stands to lose an ultimate good” – meaning that impending infertility would not be a sufficient reason to abort. Strossen then moves on to other topics.

You may leave a reply, if you wish, without giving your name or email address. If you do give your email address, it will not be published. Back up your work as you type, in case of accidents.

Some future posts:

Life Panels

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

“Pro-Lifers Don’t Really Believe That Zygotes Are Persons”

Posted on May 14, 2016 by Facilitator

A New Yorker review, summarizing a key argument of Katha Pollitt’s 2014 Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, proclaimed that “No person actually imagines that a zygote is a person.” (Meaning that certainly the pro-lifers who say that it is don’t actually imagine that.) The 2015 Newsweek article “America’s Abortion Wars (and How to End Them)” came to the same conclusion. A 2007 article by a law professor focused on pro-lifers who make an exception for rape; the logic offered in the article leads to the conclusion that some such pro-lifers (though not all) “take the position that abortion kills an entity that is something less than a full person. The earlier in pregnancy an abortion occurs, the greater the appeal of this position for many.” Under a Huffington Post article, the commenter CourtDecisions once told me that according to his legal knowledge, “. . . the advocates of fetal personhood don’t really believe in fetal personhood.”

While there is another segment of pro-choicers who go to the opposite extreme and claim that pro-lifers are a religious cult who worship fetuses, the above voices represent probably the bigger and more serious group, and advance a sometimes thought-provoking case. They usually adduce two kinds of evidence for their claim (but occasionally a third kind):

1. They say that pro-lifers’ actual public-policy recommendations, and pro-lifers’ claims about personhood, are deeply inconsistent.

After “No person actually imagines that a zygote is a person,” the New Yorker review goes on:

If they did, they would actually equate murder and abortion, and their conduct – only the tiniest fringe is willing to advertise comparable penalties for both – shows that they know perfectly well that they aren’t the same. . . . One would have to oppose capital punishment. . . . One would find it difficult to support any war or military action at all.

Meanwhile, the law professor opens her reasoning with the observation that pro-lifers who would allow the abortion of an unborn child of rape, would not allow the infanticide of a born child of rape. She then proceeds to eliminate some of what might appear to be explanations for this distinction, and at the end we find that out of all the possibilities of explanation she has provided, the explanation in the case of some such pro-lifers must be the view that the unborn is less than a full person. CourtDecisions wrote that “even the advocates of fetal personhood believe that abortion should be legal for rape, incest and fetal abnormalities. Consequently, the advocates of fetal personhood don’t really believe in fetal personhood.”

(The New Yorker and the law professor then proceed to think up reasons why pro-lifers may actually oppose abortion: “religious dogma,” “misogyny,” “intercourse as a sin.”)

I would agree that pro-lifers who would allow abortion for incest or fetal abnormalities, unless they would also allow euthanasia or eugenic killing of born children, don’t really believe that the unborn are persons. But the argument against those pro-lifers fails against pro-lifers who do not support those exceptions, and the arguments about capital punishment and war also fail against a particular group of those who don’t: they fail against the group of pro-lifers who support a consistent life ethic.

The argument about a rape exception, however, seems more challenging, at first sight, for those pro-lifers who happen to advocate that exception, and the “comparable penalties” argument is challenging for most pro-lifers.

At this point let me mention that I am only personally acquainted with a small number of active pro-lifers and not with hundreds or thousands, and I would not be surprised if there are some pro-lifers who genuinely do not perceive zygotes as equivalent in moral value to born persons. And I would not be surprised if out of those who do not, there are a few who claim that they do. But that is not the point. I don’t think that moral truth is always determined democratically. What I will aim to do here is to represent the views of very thoughtful pro-lifers, as I understand them.

I think that most such pro-lifers do not want to give prison sentences to women who abort – if they would even award such sentences to all abortionists without exception – comparable to the sentences they would give in cases of homicide of a born person. Let’s look now at that “inconsistency” (as compared to cases of homicide of born persons) in awarding penalties. I think there are five factors at work, any one of which explains that “inconsistency” better than does the idea that pro-lifers secretly devalue the unborn:

First, I think that many pro-lifers, particularly those who have arrived at their own pro-life thinking only through a process of study and reflection over a period of years, can understand that the humanity of the unborn may not be immediately obvious to all; moreover, they give due credit to the efficacious campaign of dehumanization of the unborn that has gone on, in the US and some other cultures, for the last fifty years. Author and abortion-rights advocate Naomi Wolf admitted 20 years ago that “Many pro-choice advocates developed a language to assert that the fetus isn’t a person, and this, over the years has developed into a lexicon of dehumanization. . . . service staffers referred to the fetus . . . as ‘material’ (as in ‘the amount of material that had to be removed…’)” Unmentioned by Wolf, but perhaps still more effective in dehumanizing or simply erasing the unborn, were cunning bits of verbal engineering that assured women that only one “body,” theirs, was involved in any abortion. I think that often pro-lifers feel that many pregnant women simply do not know, or have been misled not to know, what it is that they are aborting. Pro-lifers do not demand harsh treatment for that reason. (This obviousness-of-humanity factor is also discussed, along with some possible factors that I will not touch on here, by Christopher Kaczor in his article “Equal Rights, Unequal Wrongs,” and was the subject of a Secular Pro-Life blog post some time back.)

Second, it may more often be hard to determine that an abortion was not medically necessary than to determine that the killing of a born person was not self-defense. Abortion cases may more often be foggy in an evidentiary way, resulting in a cautious approach toward the prosecution of all abortion cases in general.

Third, when a crime of any kind is very common, prosecuting all cases might overwhelm the courts. An alternative might be to make examples by prosecuting only the “big fish” – in this case the abortionists (and abortion-pill vendors).

Fourth: In order to outlaw abortion in any country or state of the world in the first place, a sizeable part of the political jurisdiction’s population will have to feel that abortion is wrong; and I think outlawing abortion will contribute further to the perception that it is wrong, just as outlawing slavery must have contributed to the unanimous perception we now have that slavery is wrong. But it may take time for a consensus to develop that stiff penalties are in order even for abortionists, or that penalties of any kind are warranted for the women involved. Though in many US states the general public would now be willing to prosecute abortionists, they won’t so quickly feel the wrongness to the extent that they will be willing to prosecute women – even apart from the extra complexities of abortion cases mentioned in my first and second points above.

Fifth and perhaps most importantly, pro-lifers, like anyone else, respect the mental sense of body ownership that underlies the concept of bodily rights. The importance accorded to that sense rests on a kind of intuition, and hence the importance varies somewhat from person to person, but I don’t think there is a night-and-day difference in that regard between pro-lifers as a group and pro-choicers as a group. To put it simply, pro-lifers as well as pro-choicers believe in “bodily rights.” So pro-lifers feel that as a moral starting point, or as a default moral principle, everyone has a right to refuse to let their body be used unless they give permission. Certainly one’s body cannot be used for just any purpose under the sun. Where pro-lifers differ from pro-choicers is that pro-lifers are likely to feel that a woman does not have that right when her body is the only hope for survival of a new human being – a situation that they feel confers some degree of responsibility on her – and when her pregnancy is not expected to be unusually rough or dangerous. And the responsibility is all the greater if she became pregnant through consensual sex.

But the belief in a default principle of bodily rights has two important consequences:

a. Many pro-lifers, given that default belief, may feel that a woman does retain the right to refuse the use of her body if serious health consequences are expected for her – even though her situation is not life-threatening. Most pro-lifers might say that even in such a situation she should not abort, but many would feel that she has the right to do so. So many may be ready to permit abortion for the sake of the woman’s health, even at the cost of the baby’s life.

Does this mean that they deem the unborn to be less human than the woman? Not at all. Remember that the default principle is simply: anyone has a right to refuse to let their body be used. That one can lose that right under any circumstances at all (such as a pregnancy that is expected to be relatively smooth) testifies to the fact that the unborn is considered fully human. But even though the unborn is fully human, the woman’s bodily rights mean that she retains a right to refuse to let her body undergo truly dire kinds of suffering.

b. It is similar regarding the prosecution of abortion cases as something less than murder. Abortion is less than murder not because the victim is not fully human, but because everyone has bodily rights such that in many circumstances, one would have a right to kill in order to defend their body. We could almost say that by default, one does have a right to kill to prevent the unconsented use of one’s body. I have written elsewhere, and others also have written elsewhere, on why there should be no such right in the case of a normal pregnancy, but the point here is that there almost is such a right. Abortion is not extremely far removed from such self-defense. For a woman, the offense of abortion, once abortion is illegal, will be the offense of not letting her default right to kill be offset by other considerations present in a pregnancy. That offense may not even be defined as a crime; and if it is so defined, it will not be murder. Even what the abortionist (or pill vendor) himself does may or may not be murder, because the abortionist can be seen as simply assisting the woman in an excessive assertion of her bodily rights.

According to the moral intuitions of many pro-lifers, in the case of pregnancy the value of a human life (the child’s) does override what would normally be the woman’s bodily rights, and therefore abortion should be illegal. But if a pregnant woman violates the law and claims what would normally be her bodily rights, it is, though a defiance of the law, something less than murder.

(And the more so if the pregnancy resulted from rape. The law professor I have quoted actually mooted bodily rights as a possible explanation for why a pro-lifer might make a rape exception in spite of considering the unborn as a person, but rejected that explanation – too hastily, I think.)

And if a woman is sorely tempted to ease the anxieties of her own brain with alcohol at a time when she happens to have a child inside her, that is not morally the same as plying her newborn with alcohol without any similar temptation – though the results for the child may be the same.

Few pro-lifers would say that the validity of the pro-life position is an open-and-shut case. I think most feel that it involves a balancing of different legitimate values, in which the balance does not fall overwhelmingly on the pro-life side, though it falls clearly enough.

2. They claim that thought experiments reveal that pro-lifers do not highly value the early unborn.

The Newsweek article, which contained numerous bad arguments, also contained this thought experiment:

A building is on fire. On one floor, five healthy babies are in cribs. On another, 10,000 embryos are in petri dishes, being grown for 10,000 women who want them implanted (new scientific advances guarantee that all the embryos will survive until birth). Because of the rapidly advancing flames, you have time to evacuate only one floor: Either five babies will die or 10,000 future humans will be destroyed. Which do you choose?

Hopefully, the answer is obvious – anyone who decides to rescue globs of cells over living, breathing babies is a monster. But this hypothetical exposes the absurdity of the claim that women who choose abortion are “murdering” babies or that a human being pops into existence at conception, even though a zygote or embryo is no more sentient than a sperm.

The author clearly does “hope” that the answer is obvious, but also clearly understands that there may be those to whom it might not be obvious, and thinks he’d better ensure the obviousness. He proceeds to pull out the stops with pejoratives for the poor embryos, and hyperbolic insults for the poor reader who might see things differently than he does. Should all that fail, at the end he reminds us of the old sentience argument.

One reason the author is right to brace himself for disagreement is that his thought experiment has stacked the deck: despite the concession that all the embryos would survive until birth, he has selected a means of death that will be painful to the born babies and not to the embryos; and we are likely to imagine that some adults have already bonded with the born babies, unlike with the embryos.

But what if we leveled the playing field, so that the born babies as well as the embryos would die in some painless way, and so that none of the sadness that we might feel in either case comes from any personal bonds that have become strong over time?

First let me say that for myself, I would then definitely save the embryos – and the number of them would not have to be 10,000. For me the ratio could be very close to 1:1. And I would not hesitate. But I should explain that I have been exposed to this thought experiment for some years now, and I have had time to think about it. Had I found myself in that situation without such mental preparation, some emotions and instinctively-programmed protective impulses would have operated one-sidedly on behalf of the born babies, and might have determined the outcome.

It seems that we are biologically programmed to see babies and small children as cute and to feel protective toward them, and to feel emotional when they are threatened. I would guess we are also biologically programmed to feel protective toward a woman who is obviously pregnant – to feel protective, that is, toward anyone who seems to need protection, but more so toward a pregnant woman. Maybe we do not automatically feel equally protective when a woman shows us the results of a very recent pregnancy test, but then how could we be programmed in such a way? Our biological programming took place on the savannahs of Africa at a time when we lacked pregnancy tests, microscopes, and ultrasounds. Such programming would require cues (such as the cuteness of a born baby or the obvious bump of a developed unborn baby), while for embryos and zygotes there simply would not in those days have been any cues. Moreover, nature may have seen less need for such programming than in the case of the born, because for the unborn, the mother’s body was present as the first line of defense – unlike for born babies whom the mother or father might not tend at every moment.

But as Javier Cuadros has written:

Science is a process of knowledge in which we penetrate ever deeper. . . . As the observations multiply . . . it is typical that the original appearances . . . are shown to be incorrect. The reality is different. . . . many scientists . . . are for applying the simple criterion of appearances. No, [embryos] are not men and women, they say, because they do not look like a person. Agreed, they do not look like a developed human being. But the earth looks like it is stationary . . .

The Newsweek author wrote that “anyone who decides to rescue [embryos] is a monster.” If he had written, before 1492, “anyone who decides to go east by sailing west is an idiot,” it would have struck a chord with the people of that time. But in a century of frequent flyers, not only does it seems to us truthful that we can do exactly that, it seems to us so in a way that is reflexive and completely natural.

Some of us pro-lifers have been thinking about embryos and embryology for a long time, and I suspect that the Newsweek author had not. Though it did not happen in my thinking overnight, to me a human life seems like one seamless process that has to start somewhere. I no longer feel surprised to think that it may have to start small. If we set aside the possibility of feeling pain or fear, and set aside the memories about a child that may have formed in the minds of others who have bonded with it, then from my perspective, anyone who can see a big difference between the death of a 4-year-old and the death of someone who will be a 4-year-old soon enough, simply hasn’t thought about it or otherwise lacks vision in the matter. (Or applies a cerebral kind of identity argument that I find weak but will set aside here.)

(With some effort, I can see how someone could develop the idea that if there has never been any sense of self, then nothing can be lost to any individual. But neuroscience tells us that the self is an illusion anyway. So what actually counts is a bundle of independent pains and pleasures, fears and hopes, that has an illusion of self seemingly tying it all together. What counts is whether such a bundle that would have existed is lost. Whether or not a particular illusion has occurred is not something that can count.)

Above I have responded to the two main arguments that I have seen for the claim “Pro-lifers don’t really believe . . .” But there is another argument as well that deserves to be looked at.

3. Some point out that pro-lifers are not doing all that they could do to save zygotes from natural death.

In a blog post called “No 5k for the biggest killer – so does anyone really believe it’s a killer?,” Fred Clark quotes from a book called Broken Words –

. . . between 50 percent and 75 percent of embryos fail to implant in the uterus. . . . Surely, a moral response to a pandemic of this magnitude would be to rally the scientific community to devote the vast majority of its efforts to better understanding why this happens and trying to stop it. Yet the same pro-life leaders who declare that every embryo is morally equivalent to a fully developed child have done nothing to advocate such research. … One could say that this massive loss of human life is natural, and therefore, humans are under no obligation to end it. But it is not clear why the same argument could not be used to justify complacency in the face of AIDS, cancer, heart disease, and other natural causes of human death

– and then comments:

That suggests one of two things. Either these pro-life advocates are complacent monsters every bit as callously unconcerned with saving unborn babies as those they oppose. Or else, just like those they oppose, these folks do not really believe that “every embryo is morally equivalent to a fully developed child.” [Emphasis mine.]

I think that Clark has a point, and I think that consistent pro-lifers should be much more alarmed about those deaths than they presently are. But I think that again, bodily rights is at work, and the rest is a partially pardonable lack of awareness; and triage; and an understandable, if not completely pardonable, tendency to shrink from what could be a monumental sacrifice. I do not think that pro-lifers “do not really believe.”

Unlike with any kind of cure for AIDS, cancer, etc., saving those zygotes and embryos would require treating not the body of the victim, but the body of another person – the victim’s mother. When abortion is proposed, pro-lifers feel that the life of the embryo should normally override the bodily rights of the woman, and therefore that a justified infringement of her bodily rights is appropriate. But that infringement by society takes the form of preventing a pro-active act of violence on the part of the woman – it is not society pro-actively obliging a woman (a woman who plans no conscious and pro-active act) to ingest some (yet-to-be-developed) chemical or undergo some treatment that would trick her uterus into being more receptive to an embryo. Such an act by society would be a more intrusive infringement on her rights. And even before that infringement, society would have to pro-actively oblige her to submit to tests for the presence of an embryo whose presence would not otherwise be known – probably not even known to her.

I think that we should R&D some treatment that many women might wish to undergo voluntarily. But this lack, on society’s part, of a right to make sure, once the treatment is developed, that it would ever be used and would ever save lives, would be one reason that we do not passionately pursue its development.

I mentioned a “partially pardonable lack of awareness.” There must be many pro-lifers who do not know enough embryology to be aware of these deaths at all. But the pro-life leadership must certainly be aware, and does nothing to educate people. They must certainly be aware; but I feel it may all remain somewhat abstract even for thinking people, because the knowledge is purely statistical. When a sidewalk counselor sees a woman walking into an abortion clinic, that counselor sees a specific case of a life that (seemingly, at least) need not be lost; but we would not even know that the “between 50 percent and 75 percent figure” (assuming that is correct) is a reality, had not technologically-enabled investigations been made, followed by extrapolation from the findings.

“Triage”: I think that we should respond to those little one-celled or 800-celled sisters and brothers of ours exactly as we would respond to our born little sisters and brothers if they were under any threat. But we can expect most of those children whom we will save to be born sickly, and if a billion of our born little sisters and brothers each required the most costly, resource-intensive, and personnel-intensive kind of medical support during their lifetimes of whatever length, our moral obligation to save them by depriving everyone else would have some limit. The pro-choice argument about quality of life is not wrong; their mistake is to apply it discriminatorily, saying that it is particularly one group who must die to free up resources for others.

And finally, I mentioned “an understandable, if not completely pardonable, tendency to shrink from what could be a huge sacrifice” (a mild version of Clark’s “callously unconcerned”). Triage would only justify inaction about those deaths up to a certain point. I think that consistent pro-lifers should be ready to minimize their own expenditure and recreation to do something about those unborn children and everyone else in the world who is seriously suffering, and I don’t know if we’re all ready to do that yet.

I think that consistent pro-lifers should be much more alarmed about the natural deaths of zygotes than they presently are. But I think that if we look for the reasons they are not alarmed, a failure to “really believe” that they are persons is not among those reasons.

Bodily Rights and a Better Idea

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Posted on April 10, 2016 by Facilitator

A positive review of the original version of “Bodily Rights and a Better Idea”, written by LMJ Deputy Editor C.J. Williams, appeared in Life Matters Journal Volume 5 Issue 1 — April 2016

I hope that this essay has only become clearer since 2016. It was last updated 30 December 2023.

You might first want to read “Bodily Rights and a Better Idea: the Short and Easy Version.”

See also the Ownership of the Body section of “The Body, the Uterus, and the Question of Ownership”

Robert McFall clearly needed some of David Shimp’s bone marrow more than Shimp needed it. When Shimp – McFall’s first cousin – refused to give it, McFall took him to court.

The judge’s gavel came down. He wasn’t enthralled with Shimp as a person, but every speck of the bone marrow in Shimp’s body was, in the eyes of society, private property – Shimp’s private property. McFall’s eyes closed on the world, for the last time, before his 40^th birthday.

A caring society views both such persons as equally valuable. Such a society has an interest in seeing both thrive and not come to harm. It would seem completely logical for society to have instructed Shimp to hand over some bone marrow, and if he did not do so peacefully, to have taken it forcibly. Why doesn’t society do that? Is society wrong not to do that?

Society sometimes grants to its citizens surprisingly strong body-related rights – body-related rights that are out of proportion to what a rational fairness would seem to demand. In a moral framework, our bodies have a certain mystique. I don’t think that that is necessarily wrong. People are psychologically constructed with a strong sense of ownership of their bodies. Ownership of any kind has no foundation in science, and a strong principle of individual body ownership would be very debatable philosophically, but the psychological sense is a reality. And due to sharing that sense, which is to say, due to belief in the validity of that sense – or due at least to a pragmatic recognition of the strength of that sense – society sometimes grants to its citizens surprising rights such as those of Shimp that we have just seen. A belief in the validity of that sense could also be termed a moral intuition (whether or not it is a correct moral intuition) that near-inviolable body ownership ought to be respected.

I cannot think of a more likely explanation than this for the origin of that particular moral intuition. And I basically support such rights, at least in this part of this century. Perhaps Shimp should have been sentenced to a lot of community service for refusing to help McFall. But I say that I basically support such rights because I do not think he should have been tied down and his bone marrow removed forcibly.

It is important that the laws and conventions of society should give that psychological sense of ownership, and the actual ownership that society tends to think underlies it, its due. But is the current concept of bodily rights the most logical and coherent way to accomplish that? The value of the current concept of bodily rights is one of the first things we will examine.

The bodily-rights argument for legal abortion is usually advanced through thought experiments that create analogies with pregnancy – analogies in which our sympathies will be on the side of a right to refuse to let one’s body be used. And those arguments are usually contested by showing the disanalogies between the situations of the thought experiments, and the situation of actual pregnancy. This essay hopes to reveal that one’s bodily rights may not be as strong in the first place when abortion is being prevented as they are when organ donation is being compelled (which is in itself a disanalogy), but the main effort here will be to analyze the concept of bodily rights. I think that the resultant demystification of bodily rights will cause “bodily rights” to lose its power as a mantra and retain only a more rational kind of power – power in situations where that power serves justice, but not in situations where it doesn’t – and that that in itself will weaken bodily-rights arguments for abortion rights.

SYNOPSIS

Negative and even positive rights of different kinds can all be conceptualized in this way: they are rights not to be caused harm of different kinds. So what kind of harm can bodily rights, usefully conceived, protect us against? In order for the term “bodily rights” to be useful, such rights should not redundantly protect us in ways already covered by older and more obvious ethical notions (such as the right not to be punched in the face).

I find in this essay that the term “bodily rights” is useful only if it is confined to rights that aim to protect us against a certain kind of mental harm – offense to our psychological sense of body ownership. That form of mental harm is a real harm (a real mental harm), and it is caused by the trespass per se.

(Rather than a “sense of body ownership”, the sense may often be a sense more of identification with the body, and we also have a sense of dignity or indignity associated with the treatment of our body by others. For convenience, I will use “psychological sense of body ownership” to mean any balance among these different senses that an individual may have at any moment. In any case, they are all psychological senses that are susceptible to being offended.)

Current concepts of bodily rights do reflect some awareness of the sense of body ownership and of offenses to that sense, and they do aim to protect us against the harm of those offenses, but they also aim, redundantly, to protect us in other ways. Moreover, logically the strength of the right that protects us from that mental harm should vary in proportion to the degree of that mental harm. People advocating on the basis of the current concept of bodily rights may not (though they sometimes do) claim that bodily rights are absolute, but they do claim, at least implicitly, that the right is less than absolute only in that the strength of the right varies with the degree of trespass on the body, that is, on how deep in the body the proposed use of the body is to be. (They suggest that society may possibly require a person to use their arms and legs in some way, but it may not require them to surrender bone marrow, or to lend their uterus.) However, we find that in reality, the degree of that mental harm (consisting of offense to one’s psychological sense of body ownership) varies only partially and unpredictably in relation to the degree of trespass, so that really the degree of the harm can be ascertained only situation by situation.

This raises the possibility that a proposed use of the body, even if deep within the body, may not involve a high degree of the mental harm, and therefore may not justify a strong right to protect against it.

In relation to the abortion debate, it raises the possibility that a proposed use of the uterus may not involve an extremely high degree of the mental harm, and therefore may not justify a strong right to protect against that use. In the essay I discuss that possibility at some length. Bodily-rights arguments against abortion restrictions show us that denial of abortion is a degree of trespass on one’s bodily boundaries similar to the degree of trespass involved in other situations (such as the forcible appropriation of a body part) which nearly everyone’s moral intuitions agree are wrong. Bone marrow or a kidney is located deep within the body, and the uterus is located deep within the body. The arguments thus try to persuade us that denial of abortion is also wrong. However, they overlook the unpredictability of the mental harm, mentioned above.

I do not think that establishing the correctness of the pro-life position depends entirely on the possibility I mentioned about the degree of mental harm involved in a proposed use of the uterus. That possibility is the possibility of a big disanalogy between use of bone marrow or a kidney, on the one hand, and use of a uterus for gestation, on the other hand, but even without that disanalogy, I think that a “cocktail” of other, often better-known, disanalogies defeats bodily-rights arguments.

The moral intuition that body ownership ought to be respected seems to stem, as mentioned earlier, from the wish to spare our fellow human beings the mental harm of offense to their strong psychological sense of body ownership (which sense is an undeniable reality). So to answer the question whether there should be a right to refuse the use of one’s uterus – a right comparable in strength to the right to refuse to donate one’s bone marrow – one question that we in society have to answer is whether the mental harm to a woman when abortion is denied is really comparable to the mental harm that would occur if one’s bone marrow or kidney were taken forcibly. Since I think I will show that real mental harm is somewhat independent of the degree of trespass of one’s bodily boundaries, it is not enough, as mentioned, to show that the uterus is deep within one’s body. Rather, the degree of real mental harm when abortion is denied could be approximately determined only by psychological study focusing on the psychological phenomenon of harm in that specific class of situation, not by possible biological similarities with other classes of situation (normally I will just say “situations” rather than “classes of situation”). In the present undeveloped state of psychology and neuroscience, we in society will have to rely a lot on our intuitions, which will be discussed. To understand it in this way is to liberate our minds by demystifying bodily rights, as we seek our most correct moral intuitions about abortion.

I hope that producing a better understanding of what bodily rights really consist of and don’t consist of will in itself help in a general way to convince readers that in invoking bodily rights we have to approach different social situations in different ways. But beyond that, I hope to show that in the specific situation of a typical proposed abortion, the possibility I mentioned, that the harm caused by offending the pregnant woman’s sense of body ownership may be less than the harm caused by offending the pregnant woman’s sense of body ownership in some other situations, is likely a reality. In this essay alone I will not prove that abortion should be illegal, but I think that I can at least help show that there is no strong bodily-rights argument against making many abortions illegal.

(The entire argument of my essay can be outlined in ten points – see below. The foregoing nine paragraphs can be broken down into points 1-8 of the outline.)

Moreover, if society holds and sustains a “right not to be unjustly harmed physically or mentally,” and the idea of “harm” incorporates an understanding of the psychology of ownership, including body ownership, that will serve all purposes, and society can dispense with the off-target and therefore sometimes misleading idea of bodily rights. (This sentence can be broken down into points 9 and 10, i.e., the last points, of my outline.)

I would like to proceed now according to the following outline:

1. Rights are only meaningful and useful in terms of protection against wrongs, that is, against unjust harm, so the concept of bodily rights – “bodily” and “rights” – can be meaningful and useful only in situations where there is a potential for unjust harm to be done that is defined solely by trespass of one’s bodily boundaries; and only if protection by more obvious ethical notions is lacking.

2. Harm can be only harm to the body or harm to the mind, or both.

3. In terms of a right to freedom from harm to the body, the concept of bodily rights doesn’t realistically add anything to older and more obvious ethical notions. So though the current concept of bodily rights aims to protect against both physical and mental harm caused by trespass of bodily boundaries, in relation to bodily harm, the concept is superfluous and therefore not particularly useful.

4. In terms of a right to freedom from mental harm, the concept of bodily rights could be meaningful as one possible way of framing that right. (Even if it is not the best way – see 10.) People have a sense of ownership of their bodies, such that trespass on their bodily boundaries can be a source of mental harm, and “bodily rights” would be one way to protect from that mental harm.

5. Because of the sense of body ownership (and the assumption that actual ownership underlies it), in a situation of opposing interests between two innocent people that involves one person needing to use the body of the other, society does not make a simple decision in favor of the person who is likely to suffer the greater total harm of obvious kinds – that is, of kinds other than offense to the sense of ownership. It counts that kind of mental harm as harm, which weights its decision in the direction of the person whose body stands to be used by the other. (The total harm that can possibly be caused to any person by any action consists of the physical harm, the tangible mental harm, and that or some other intangible mental harm.)

6. Society weights its decision in this way so strongly, that in many cases it decrees that a particular offense against one person’s sense of body ownership is not justified even if the other person will die.

7. Although the concept of bodily rights is often expressed as a very simple principle, and sometimes as an absolute principle, when people actually apply it to different real-life situations, we see a patchwork of different attitudes, each depending on the situation. This renders the concept vague and confusing as a yardstick in any situation that has not yet been resolved, such as a proposal to abort. It turns out that the degree of mental harm caused by offense to one’s sense of ownership, which society believes to be morally relevant, is inconsistently related to the degree of trespass on the body – the degree of trespass being morally irrelevant apart from harm. Since it is inconsistently related to the degree of trespass, the degree of the mental harm when abortion is denied could be approximately determined only by psychological study focusing on the psychological phenomenon of harm in that specific situation – not simply by knowing the degree of trespass.We could speak of the situational nature of the strength of bodily rights.

8. Some actions that trespass a person’s bodily boundaries without the person’s consent are countenanced or supported by society in general (meaning that society in general does not take very seriously any offense to the sense of ownership in such cases). In my personal view, still more such actions should be countenanced or supported.

9. What matters, in terms of the rights that society should choose to sustain in this area of law and ethics, is that those rights should reflect a recognition of the sense of body ownership and its nuances – and of the possibilities of mental harm based on that sense of ownership and its nuances.

10. If society holds and sustains a “right not to be unjustly harmed physically or mentally,” and the idea of “harm” incorporates an understanding of the psychology of ownership, including body ownership, that will serve all purposes in this area of law and ethics, and society can dispense with the idea of bodily rights.

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The Psychological Morass of the Abortion Issue

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Facilitator

This essay was first published, with illustrations, in Life Matters Journal Volume 4 Issue 3 — February 2016.

morass: 2. a complicated or confused situation

Think of all the array of views related to abortion that you have ever encountered. It’s a lot, isn’t it? And now let’s try to imagine all the array of those contradictory views related to abortion as they have inhabited all the minds of all people through all of history. That array must be staggering. How could such a plethora of mutually exclusive ideas have originated? I think it is largely explained by the psychological morass on moral issues in general, and this issue in particular, that the human race somehow goes on living with. What we are up against is more about psychology than it is about dispassionate philosophy. Recognizing and trying to escape this psychological morass can allow us to find the truth about the morality of abortion.

In making this assertion, I am assuming that there are indeed moral truths to be found about abortion and other moral questions. Certain answers to the question of whether abortion is right or wrong, just or unjust, can be identified as truer or better than others. Further, I would argue that the answers to moral questions—the moral truths—must ultimately be found through our intuition rather than through intricate arguments or philosophies (although these are certainly a useful part of the process).

Psychology professor Paul Bloom, author of the recent Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, has offered some justification for an intuitive basis of morality. In an interview, he commented that while some moral values “are the product of culture and society” and “not in the genes,” “there also exist hardwired moral universals – moral principles that we all possess. And even those aspects of morality . . . that vary across cultures are ultimately grounded in these moral foundations.”[i] With this kind of psychological understanding as a basis, I will make one further assumption to start with: that not only are there indeed moral truths to be found, but that identical truths are to be found deep within all of us. (I discussed this in “Moral Intuition, Logic, and the Abortion Debate.”[ii]) In a similar vein, the journalist Christopher Hitchens described his understanding of human moral intuition in his work God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything:

Like murder and theft, this [incest] is usually found to be abhorrent to humans without any further explanation. . . . [the Golden Rule is] a sober and rational precept, which one can teach to any child with its innate sense of fairness . . . . [The Rule] is gradually learned, as part of the painfully slow evolution of the species, and once grasped is never forgotten. Ordinary conscience will do, without any heavenly wrath behind it. . . . [C]onscience is innate. . . . Everybody but the psychopath has this feeling to a greater or lesser extent. . . .[iii]

Despite this conscience, or intuitive moral sense, that humans possess, an array of psychological factors obstruct our intuitive grasp of moral truths. This is a vast topic, but in this article I have selected twelve psychological factors that might work against our finding moral truth on any issue, as well as three factors that are specific to the abortion issue. I think of this article as sketching the broad outlines of how psychological factors interfere with moral intuition. My aim is to provide a basic framework to be filled out by further research.

The psychological factors are as follows:

1. The mental longing for simplicity. No elaboration is needed here. (I can keep it simple!)

2. Upbringing. In the long-standing nature-nurture debate, I would take the following position: we are born with intuitions of certain moral truths already within us in latent form, but various actions or inactions by parents and teachers can undermine the development of those moral intuitions, or create an overlay of false values, or both. Even a casual look is enough to show us the importance, in the development of our attitudes, of background and upbringing.

3. Tribalism. Even someone who switches, for example, from pro-choice to pro-life or vice-versa may immediately start demonizing the side they had just been on.

4. Projection. We expect others to view some things and value some things just as we do.

5. Neurotic emotional needs. Such needs can affect one’s moral and political views in a number of ways. One way – certainly not the only way – is when the needs result in commitments, sometimes fanatic commitments, to groups or ideologies.

6. Denial. We see only what we want to see. Or sometimes we see something, but compartmentalize it away from the part of our mind that would reject it.

7. Lack of introspection. If it is true that intuitions of moral truths exist within us and that they began to form in us before we were capable of rational analysis, then it should be clear that to find them we must look within and that this search within will not be a process of thinking up new ideas, but of rummaging through what is already there. We may need to make such efforts frequently, and with patience, over a period of time.

8. An excessive faith in the efficacy of logical argumentation to resolve moral issues. This faith seems to be borne out of a psychological need for an orderly understanding of our environment, perhaps borne in turn out of an illusion that such conceptual order gives us some kind of control over our environment.

(This is certainly not to say that there is no place in moral investigations for logic. I think that all the thought experiments and probing for inconsistency and arguments that go on are indispensable, but they are indispensable because they nudge us toward more accurate moral intuitions, which are not essentially based on logic.[iv])

9. The manufacture of perceptions. As just one example, if you hear “My body, my choice” enough times, and are not presented with alternative views, after a while you will come to really believe that there is only one body involved in an abortion.

10. Doctrinal baggage that comes along with the valuable elements of a religion. Atheism advocate Sam Harris has described a transcendent experience that he once underwent sitting by the Sea of Galilee. He writes:

If I were a Christian, I would undoubtedly have interpreted this experience in Christian terms. . . . If I were a Hindu, I might think in terms of Brahman. . . . If I were a Buddhist, I might talk about the “dharmakaya of emptiness.” [v]

The meditative and devotional techniques of various religions can bring about in us these transcendent states, arguably the most wonderful states we have ever experienced. Although Harris and others strive for totally non-religious forms of meditation, it must be admitted that religions are, today, still ahead of conventional science in the knowledge of such techniques. As a result, when someone experiments with such “religious” practices and discovers that they constitute a certain specialized wisdom that science seems to be lacking and that most directly leads to happiness, they are likely not only to adopt that valuable meditative practice, but also to buy the whole religious package, including whatever that religion teaches about astronomy and evolution—and the ensoulment of a newly-conceived baby. If the religion teaches that ensoulment does not take place for the first three months, for example, and that abortion before that point is permissible, then even if that teaching happens not to be correct, they will believe it.

This psychological factor is different from factor 5 above, in that I think it can occur even in a psychologically very healthy person.

11. Limited human intelligence.

12. Unlimited human ego. A big percentage of discussions about moral issues comes down to a garden-variety contest of egos. Discussions become more about winning, belittling, and mocking than about trying to understand clearly. People write on any topic partly because they want attention. It has been said, “More people write poetry than read it.” Similarly, it may be that more people talk than listen.

Most of the 12 factors listed above can contribute to different forms of cognitive dissonance: we sense a contradiction or incompatibility between the beliefs psychological factors move us toward and the beliefs our moral intuitions move us toward. We cope with cognitive dissonance by adopting ideas that violate our natural intuitions, and then shoring those ideas up with techniques such as confirmation bias.

Among the psychological factors that work against intuitively finding the moral truths within, there are also some differences of perception that do not come into play in relation to most moral issues, but do come into play in relation to the abortion issue:

13. Incorrect intuitions about the unborn. Some people see the unborn, especially the early unborn, as a snapshot, and some see it as part of a process. If a small embryo were to remain just as it is, frozen in time (a snapshot) we would have to say quite fairly that its life would not have much value.

Both ways of looking at the unborn are scientifically useful for different purposes. It is not science, but only pre-logical intuition, that identifies the unborn as an organism with little moral value or an organism with great moral value. If there are indeed moral truths to be found, however, one of these two intuitions must be less correct than the other.

14. Incorrect intuitions about the importance of bodily rights. One important source of variations in intuitions about the importance of bodily rights is different cultural senses of the relative weights to be given to the individual and to the collective. Almost the greatest relinquishing of bodily right imaginable is when a person submits to being conscripted into an army, where he or she will risk all his body organs being blown to bits. Different cultures vary greatly in their acceptance of military conscription. Yet if there are indeed moral truths to be found, one particular moral truth about bodily rights must be correct—not all of the diverse intuitions about bodily rights can reflect that truth. (I have written elsewhere about bodily rights.[vi])

15. Incorrect intuitions about what’s wrong with killing. Among all who get involved in discussions about moral issues, killing and violence seem to have, in general, a bad name. One would think that that would give us some common ground. But it turns out that although killing is universally disreputable, it’s disreputable in a nebulous way. We disagree on exactly what is wrong with killing.

My moral intuition is that what is most wrong with killing is that it deprives an organism of its future life. But in discussions about abortion, I have often encountered expressions such as this one: “I can’t imagine caring one way or the other being aborted if I didn’t possess a fully functional nervous system.” Here any harm to be done by killing seems to depend on the organism’s caring, at the time of the killing, about its future life (this view does not, after all, contest the fact that a currently unconscious embryo will have a fully functional nervous system soon and will eventually care about its future life). This view seems to exclude the possibility that any harm can be caused by depriving an organism of its future life, whether the organism deprived of life cares about it at this moment or not. Thus the only real harm that this view is willing to consider is the harm of frustrating a desire, on the part of the organism, to live.[vii]

This is one example of how there are different intuitions about what is wrong with killing. Yet if there are real moral truths to be found, then not all the intuitions can be correct.

By identifying 15 different psychological factors that interfere with moral intuition, I have tried to develop a kind of checklist. I think that if anyone can go through the checklist and neutralize in themselves each of the above-mentioned psychological factors, their thinking will become clear. Their minds will become cleared of endless clutter. And when other people encounter a clear mind like that, they in turn become forced to clear their own minds.

This clarification process (along with scientific progress) will decide the abortion issue. The grip of all the psychological factors enumerated above will be loosened. Arguments, thought experiments, and other philosophical approaches will play a part in breaking their grip; I think that the part that they will play will be a significant one, but not, alone, a decisive one.

Personally I expect that the truth that we will find through moral intuition will be mostly a pro-life truth. I expect that the issue will be decided to an important extent by the fuller recognition of the humanity of a previously dehumanized group. (The importance of psychological factor 13 above cannot be overestimated.) Do I expect all this due to some psychological blinders of my own? Time will tell.

[i] Sam Harris, “The Roots of Good and Evil: An Interview with Paul Bloom,” Sam Harris (blog), November 12, 2013, http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-roots-of-good-and-evil

[ii] Life Matters Journal 4 Issue 1 (June 2015): 24-29, also available at http://www.NoTerminationWithoutRepresentation.org/moral-intuition-logic-and-the-abortion-debate/

[iii] Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2008), 53, 213-214, 256.

[iv] “Moral Intuition, Logic, and the Abortion Debate” in Life Matters Journal, Volume 4 Issue 1 (June 2015): 24-29, and http://www.NoTerminationWithoutRepresentation.org/moral-intuition-logic-and-the-abortion-debate/

[v] Sam Harris, Waking Up (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 81-82.

[vi] “Dismantling the Bodily-Rights Argument without Using the Responsibility Argument,” July 8, 2014, http://www.NoTerminationWithoutRepresentation.org/dismantling-the-bodily-rights-argument-without-using-the-responsibility-argument/

[vii] For a discussion of this issue, see Kelsey Hazzard and Acyutananda, “What Babies Don’t Know Can’t Hurt Them, Right?,” Secular ProLife (blog), January 4, 2016, http://blog.secularprolife.org/2016/01/what-babies-dont-know-cant-hurt-them.html.

Further thoughts on the above LMJ essay:

1. Psychological factor 4 above is “Neurotic emotional needs. Such needs can affect one’s felt or at least expressed moral and political views in a number of ways. One way – certainly not the only way – is when the needs result in commitments, sometimes fanatic commitments, to groups or ideologies.”

I think it would be safe to say that in the context of the abortion issue, the groups or ideologies most concerned in this way are the Catholic Church and evangelical churches on the pro-life side, and the pro-choice feminist movement on the pro-choice side. My point here is not to take issue with any Christian teachings as such, or with pro-choice feminism as such; and certainly not to say that commitment to either can stem only from neurosis. My point concerns unquestioning belief. I think that it is human nature always to question, but that those Christians who happen to be fanatic about their religion due to some psychological need, will be prone to believe that abortion is wrong without further examination, just because their religion says that that is God’s command. And I think that those pro-choice feminists who happen to be fanatic about their ideology due to some psychological need, will be prone to believe that protection of the unborn is wrong without further examination, just because their ideology teaches that it is somehow part of a system of oppression of women. (By the way, pro-life feminists have offered at least some clues as to how that belief became the majority belief within the feminist movement, which, apart from the embrace of abortion rights by its majority, must be the most inspiring revolutionary movement the world has ever seen. See Serrin Foster’s speech “The Feminist Case against Abortion.”

Again, to say that people who have neurotic emotional needs (more so than the fairly neurotic average in society) – angry people for instance – gravitate toward a particular movement does not necessarily reflect at all on the movement itself. Many of the most psychologically healthy, or even radiantly healthy, people I have met are to be found among the ranks of Catholics and evangelicals; and it’s likely that some of the finest people may be found in the ranks of pro-choice feminists also. The position of the latter on abortion rights may be based not on moral blindness, but simply on blindness about the reality of the unborn. And regarding Catholics and evangelicals, I am awed by what they have done in holding the line against abortion, as much as it could be held, for all these years.

2. Above I said, “I will make one further assumption to start with: that not only are there indeed moral truths to be found, but that identical truths are to be found deep within all of us.”

Slavery in the US was never proved to be morally wrong. If after all the years of harsh exploitation of the slaves and bitter strife among the whites, a formal paper in some philosophy journal had finally convinced everybody that slavery was wrong, that document and its philosophical proof would now be more famous than the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, or the Thirteenth Amendment. But there was no such paper; rather, undoubtedly there was a multiplicity of contradictory papers, all of which together played only a modest role in the process. The collective moral sense simply evolved. Uncle Tom’s Cabin probably played a bigger role than any formal proof.

The politics – not least war, that “continuation of politics by other means” – and economics involved in the end of slavery were very complex. But moral evolution must have played its part. The chains of people’s psychological complexes faded over time so that the chains of slavery could more readily be broken. People who were incorrigible vessels of outmoded thinking died off.

And I said above:

“A similar process (along with scientific progress) will decide the abortion issue. The grip of all the psychological foibles enumerated above will be loosened. Logical syllogisms, thought experiments, and other philosophical approaches, within or without formal papers, will play a part in breaking their grip; I think that the part that they will play will be a significant one, but not, alone, a decisive one.

“Personally I expect that the truth that we will find will be mostly a pro-life truth. I expect that, as in the case of slavery, the issue will be decided to an important extent by the fuller recognition of the humanity of a previously-dehumanized group. (The importance of 13 above cannot be overestimated.) . . .”

Dismantling the Bodily-Rights Argument without Using the Responsibility Argument

Posted on July 8, 2014 by Facilitator

Clinton Wilcox of Life Training Institute was kind enough to read the semi-final draft of this post and provide a brief but insightful critique. This does not mean that he necessarily endorses any of the final contents. However, I wish to take this opportunity to thank him.

The strongest argument for abortion rights is usually considered to be the bodily-rights argument. Perhaps the most effective variation of it that I have seen appeared in a (negative) comment under Kristine Kruszelnicki’s March 11, 2014 guest post on the Friendly Atheist blog:

They [both mother and unborn child] are entitled to their own bodily rights. So exactly how does a fetus have the right to co-opt another person’s body without consent?

Let’s say for example medical science has progressed to the point of being able to transplant a fetus into another human being. In an accident a pregnant woman is injured to the point of immanent [sic] death, does that fetus have the *right* to be implanted into the next viable candidate without consent?

The commenter was arguing, in other words, “A woman who is a candidate to be made pregnant in that futuristic way would have a right to refuse to let her body be so used – everyone would agree. Therefore, why should a woman who has become pregnant in a more usual way not also have a right to refuse to continue the pregnancy?”

In the context of the abortion debate (and, significantly, in hardly any other context), the term “bodily rights” comes up often. Synonyms still more commonly used are “bodily integrity” and “bodily autonomy,” but I will say “rights” because it is rights that have practical consequences. If anything can help determine the practical outcome “Woman goes through with abortion,” it is a right, not an abstract “integrity” or “autonomy.”

The above fetus-implantation version or any version of the bodily-rights argument could be rebutted by pointing out that most pregnant women voluntarily engaged in a sex act that caused the pregnancy in the first place, and therefore have a responsibility for the child (the “responsibility argument”); but this rebuttal does not work in cases of rape, and is not convincing to some people in any situation – for reasons which I need not discuss here but will refer to in an appendix. Thus the argument remains logically strong. But is it logic alone that makes an argument strong or weak? I would like to approach this from the perspective that an argument is an instrument for changing some of another person’s brain circuitry, and the ideas that correlate with that circuitry, to resemble part of one’s own circuitry and ideas, and that some value-related circuitry and ideas are better for us as individuals and as a species than others. I will contend that though logical demonstrations (such as the above thought experiment) and their rebuttals have an important place in the debate about bodily rights, there is no clear logical resolution to the debate one way or the other; that in seemingly logical demonstrations there are psychological factors at play apart from factors which are purely logical, and that those factors sway us from our normal intuitions; and that those factors can be neutralized by understanding them and by other techniques.

I would like to see people question where their convictions come from, because I think that the more they examine where they come from, the more they will move toward better convictions.

I would like to proceed according to the following outline:

1. Morality and moral principles, including our moral principles about when morality should be backed by legislation and when it should not, derive ultimately from intuition.

2. The intuitions of many people, particularly of most pro-lifers, say that the unborn children of pregnant women should be legally protected against abortion in some (not all) situations.

3. The intuitions of most pro-choicers differ from ours in the first place and say that the unborn children of pregnant women should not be afforded any legal protection.

4. There are some people who are, in terms of moral intuitions, “on the fence,” undecided.

5. Some people’s moral intuitions are better than those of others; in this particular area of moral investigation, the intuitions of pro-lifers are better. (Keep reading!)

I think that just as “there is no clear logical resolution to the (overall) debate one way or the other,” the correctness or incorrectness of any moral intuition cannot be logically proved, but that logic can nudge us toward correct moral intuitions, that is, help us find the correct moral intuitions within us. Under this point 5 below I will include a long section analyzing logically the concept of bodily rights. It is designed to nudge us toward more correct moral intuitions about the importance of bodily rights.

6. Though the intuitions of most pro-lifers say that unborn children should in many cases be legally protected against abortion, the intuitions of many pro-lifers also agree with pro-choicers (as do the intuitions of many undecideds) that a woman who is not pregnant (as in the above thought experiment) should not be legally subject to the forcible implantation in her of a child she did not conceive, even to save the child’s life. (And our intuitions also usually say that a violinist to whom we are hooked up should not be given legal protection from unhooking; and our intuitions also agree with various other pro-choice thought experiments designed to reject, in certain situations, legislative enforcement of a broad right to life.)

7. Human logical powers are limited, and therefore a particular situation, situation A, may seem parallel to another situation, situation B, in all the important morally-relevant ways that the human mind can think of, without the two situations necessarily being morally equivalent.

8a. The situation depicted by a thought experiment always includes some imagery of greater or lesser vividness, and some emotional content. If to our logical minds (momentarily or over a longer term) some outrageous situation, A, depicted by a pro-choice thought experiment, does seem parallel to situation B – a legal prohibition on abortion in a normal pregnancy – then the imagery and emotions of situation A get temporarily transferred to situation B. Let’s call this a process of “outrage transfer.” (Below I will touch on the search for an understanding of how events such as outrage transfer might actually work neurologically.)

b. Moreover, if we are subject to an over-fascination with logic, which many people are, then our consciences/intuitions will work with wrong information (the belief that logic can completely prove or disprove the moral equivalence of two situations) and may tell us that if there seem to be strong parallels between the situation of a pro-choice thought experiment that militates against legal protection of some living being, and the situation of pregnancy, then we should discard legal protection of the unborn in pregnancy – in spite of our earlier intuition supporting such legal protection.

8a and 8b are what I had earlier called “psychological factors at play apart from factors which are purely logical.” I had said that those psychological factors “sway us from our normal intuitions” and I had gone on to say, “those factors can be neutralized by understanding them and by other techniques.”

9a. The effects of outrage transfer will fade over time. Moreover, the outrage transfer of a pro-choice thought experiment can be offset or more than offset by pro-life thought experiments such as those involving the separation of conjoined twins, or the “Cabin in the Blizzard” thought experiment of Stephen Wagner et. al. (It can be “more than offset” if only because our minds are impressionable and are always most strongly affected by the imagery and emotional triggers that stimulated them most recently.)

b. Though human logical powers are not sufficient to tell us conclusively about the moral equivalence or otherwise of two situations (as mentioned in 7 above), they are sufficient to convince us of said insufficiency, and thereby to free us from an over-fascination with logic and restore our original trust in our intuition that the unborn deserve legal protection.

Someone will say that I am discarding logic and that moreover I am saying that a pro-life position can only be defended by discarding logic. But that is not what I am doing. We should always apply logic to the fullest extent possible, and there are good logical rebuttals to the forcible-implantation and other pro-choice thought experiments, and I will discuss them in brief; but we should not think that logic, even on a base of intuition, can give us final answers to all moral questions, specifically the question of whether a right to life overrides bodily rights in the case of pregnancy.

Continue reading →

No Termination without Representation

raising consciousness about the unborn, and awakening our consciences about the rights of the unborn

Category Archives: Bodily Rights/Integrity/Autonomy

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McFall v. Shimp: More Analogous to Legal Abortion Than We Usually Think

The Cocktail That Defeats Bodily-Rights Arguments

Bodily Rights and a Better Idea: the Short and Easy Version

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Why Focus on Abortion?

Why It’s Not Murder

“Pro-Lifers Don’t Really Believe That Zygotes Are Persons”

Bodily Rights and a Better Idea

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The Psychological Morass of the Abortion Issue

Dismantling the Bodily-Rights Argument without Using the Responsibility Argument