A Daunting Disadvantage for the Pro-Life Side

Posted on February 9, 2019 by Facilitator

In September 2021, Consistent Life Network kindly reprinted this article. However, the Appendix does not appear on their blog.

I derive my consistent pro-life position differently than do most. I do not think that, as an ultimate philosophical truth, the lives of all human beings are of equal value. I do not think that the life of a person with no consciousness, or little consciousness, left, and who is unlikely to recover, is as valuable as that of a healthy ten-year-old. I even think that the life of a healthy 25-year-old with enough consciousness to be thrilled by art, or scientific understanding, is more valuable than the life of a healthy 25-year-old whose dreams are only about physical comforts.

And the above are my thoughts only about one’s value to oneself. I think also that in assessing overall value, we should think about people’s utility value: we should think about the contributions to humanity a person is capable of, and is likely to make. We should conceive that some people’s utility value is actually negative. Utility value too should be part of the equation, thinking philosophically.

However, I also feel strongly that it is imperative that as a social convention, every human life must be deemed to be of equal value. (I have explained further in the last paragraph here.) Thus for all practical purposes, I share the consistent pro-life philosophical position that all human lives are of equal value, on which consistent pro-life policies or political positions are based.

Of all the consistent pro-life policies or political positions, I have always chosen to focus my own efforts most on the position which often (I mention this incidentally only) is not consistently pro-life: the anti-abortion position. This is partly because numerically, legal abortion normally accounts for vastly more human-rights violations than say, capital punishment or unjust war; but also because it is only anti-abortion philosophy that necessarily brings out consciousness as what I consider the basis of human value. And although in philosophy about capital punishment or unjust war or rape, it may not be so necessary for apologetics purposes to bring out consciousness, for me it is ultimately consciousness that makes those things wrong as well.

Let me turn now to the fact that establishing the importance of consciousness is so necessary, as I have suggested, for effective philosophical anti-abortion apologetics. Many people in the public may agree in general on the importance of consciousness, but they have to be convinced that some of their convictions, particularly their conviction that killing innocent born human beings is normally wrong, depend as well on a usually-unarticulated belief that what is wrong about killing is the fact that doing so deprives those born human beings of their future consciousness life. And this is often hard for people to see, resulting in a daunting disadvantage for the pro-life side.

That a zygote or early embryo is indeed a full-fledged member of our human family, in the only way that is morally relevant when abortion is considered, can be convincingly shown by an argument that is usually attributed to Don Marquis. It is an argument focused on consciousness. We owe much gratitude to Marquis for the most precise and thorough formulation of the argument so far, but actually the essence of the argument has been present for a long time in Indian philosophy. It may also have been stated perfectly, sixty years before Marquis was born, by pro-life feminist Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to declare her candidacy for the US presidency:

. . . We are aware that many women attempt to excuse themselves for procuring abortions, upon the ground that it is not murder. But the fact of resort to this argument only shows the more palpably that they fully realize the enormity of the crime. Is it not equally destroying the would-be future oak, to crush the sprout before it pushes its head above the sod, as it is to cut down the sapling, or to saw down the tree? Is it not equally to destroy life, to crush it in its very germ, and to take it when the germ has evolved to any given point in the line of its development?

(I’m assuming that what she felt, in the case of human beings, was that it was the consciousness of the evolved germ that would make it so wrong to crush the germ.) I also once tried framing the argument in a way that I think was effective for some people.

I should mention that another argument, focused on human membership in general and not necessarily on consciousness, that seems to have convinced many people of the humanity of the unborn, is the equal-rights argument used by the Equal Rights Institute.

But to an important extent, these arguments require very careful presentation and depend for their impact on very careful thinking by those who hear them. And they take a while to sink in. I feel that for a normal mind that is a blank slate on this issue, there is nothing obvious about the humanity of the unborn.

Even a pro-life person commenting under a recent Secular Pro-Life blog post wrote, “life at conception sounds strange.” It surprised me at first to hear that from a pro-lifer, since the reality that a human life begins at conception is a fundamental tenet for our side. But then the reality of a human life at conception (or rather, the reality that that life has status as a full-fledged member of our family) sounded strange to me also till I had thought about it quite a bit.

In the circles that I grew up in in the 1950s, abortion was not a topic of conversation. I first remember hearing about abortion shortly after I turned fourteen, when a movie called Blue Denim was released. But even that movie’s implication that abortion was something heinous did not explain why it should be heinous, and as best I remember, the unborn continued to seem insignificant to me until I began to think about it seriously decades later. In my early twenties, I had been alarmed by The Population Bomb, and I had probably thought of abortion as a good thing.

Here is a comment by Javier Cuadros on the power that “original appearances” have over the minds of people and even of most scientists. [Edit: Without understanding and remembering what the DNA of a human zygote or embryo is designed to do, we will perceive that organism as if it is frozen in time, instead of perceiving it with its future dimension]:

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] . . .

Once we realize that a single-celled organism is a full-fledged member of our human family, a belief that there should be legal protections normally follows. But if that realization really does take quite a bit of thinking for many people, that puts the pro-life side at a tremendous disadvantage. That the pro-life side has nearly been able to overcome that disadvantage is a real tribute to the resolve of pro-lifers and to the human love for the truth. But the disadvantage remains, so that we have won over neither the culture nor the law.

Pro-lifers recognize this disadvantage. For many pro-lifers, their go-to attack on Roe v. Wade is to point out that it does not prohibit late-term abortions. They know that only a developed fetus is likely to win much sympathy from those who have not spared time for deep thinking.

Let’s think in more developmental terms about how this situation arises. What would children’s perceptions of the unborn be, once they learned simply that people start out in their mommies’ tummies, if those children were otherwise uninfluenced by their parents, teachers, etc? What would the most naive perception be, and how susceptible to change is it (I think very susceptible) once they start hearing pro-choice slogans and pro-life slogans, once they learn a smattering of embryology, see an ultrasound of their younger sibling, etc.? This is all very deep and complicated, and calls for a lot of research. But some things seem clear enough:

Religious pro-lifers must grow up with a kind of rote belief in the humanity of the unborn, but probably sometimes as well a real sense of brotherhood and sisterhood with the unborn that is instilled by their parents. And some people born into a religious pro-life family eventually think deeply and do their homework and come to a real sense of brotherhood and sisterhood that is not just rote.

I believe that anyone who thinks deeply and does their homework will eventually come to a real sense of brotherhood and sisterhood with the unborn, if the development of that sense does not come in conflict with some hardened ideological commitment. But it is normally a small minority of people who think deeply and do their homework. If a person neither thinks deeply and does their homework, nor receives pro-life training from their parents, I think the default will be for most people always to feel that the unborn are insignificant. After all, the unborn are out of sight, and even if we could see a small clump of cells, the genetic information driving the growth of those cells would be beyond our normal senses. Cuadros explained this well above.

Few people will seriously undertake “a process of knowledge in which we penetrate ever deeper,” either scientifically or philosophically, so I think most people, at least most secular people, dependent as we all are on our five senses and normally lacking deep thought, will tend to feel that the unborn are insignificant, making the contest of images a daunting struggle for the pro-life side. Or at least, most people’s thinking will be inchoate and therefore malleable and suggestible. If people’s minds are malleable, are their minds more likely to be influenced by the “precious human life” side of the debate, or by the “brainless clump of cells” side?

Well, many people have strong selfish reasons to adopt the “brainless clump of cells” perception and become pro-choice, whereas hardly anyone has strong selfish reasons to adopt the “precious human life” perception and become pro-life. There is nothing tangible to gain from coming to the defense of those who have nothing and cannot come to our defense in turn. So an accumulated power of human selfishness helps the pro-choice side that does not help the pro-life side.

The ranks of pro-lifers also wane because of the strong trend in the West for people to lose their religious beliefs. If they lose those beliefs, they will lose as well any perception of the unborn that they had acquired purely as rote belief.

As people age they become more pro-life, presumably because they have had more time to think about it. But by the time they become pro-life through aging, they may have few years left as voters and as role models.

These are the daunting demographics that explain why a correct view struggles so much to become a winning view.

In the buildup to the May 2018 referendum in Ireland, the Repeal the 8^th campaign circulated a list of strategy instructions. The last item on the list, understood to be a vital mantra, read simply “Savita, Savita, Savita.”It seems that the death of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland, though tragic and heart-rending, was due to medical negligence, but what if it had resulted from that country’s laws? (See Appendix.) Should a law that has saved a hundred thousand unborn children be discarded entirely if it leads to the death of one born person, or should that law, rather, be revised and refined, trying to prevent even one such death ever again, but recognizing that we can only try to the extent humanly possible?

Abortion is being legalized in Ireland to a large extent because Savita was adult-sized and visible, and the legions of the unborn who die helplessly are all small. It is frustrating that people’s thinking is so mechanistic, but this is the reality, and it is understandable. Though the realization of a pro-life feminist agenda in society will make things vastly better, to some extent when there are unwanted pregnancies there will never be a perfectly happy solution – we will always have to seek the least of the evils. If Roe v. Wade is repealed, some US state with pro-life laws will eventually face some situation not unlike what occurred in Ireland, and the response may be, as it was in Ireland, to discard the new laws. If that happens, it will be because of the daunting disadvantage.

There is every possibility that after some years of pro-life laws in the US, pro-choicers will be shouting the equivalent of “Savita, Savita, Savita.” Poor Savita should not have lost her life, but neither should our sisters and brothers who happen to be in the “tiny” phase of their life. Savita was adult-sized, visible, and relatable. The whole reality is heart-rending, but some policies are clearly better than others. For one who has thought deeply, the unborn are also relatable to every moral perception, and they are dying not on extremely rare occasions, but by the millions. For their cause to have any chance, we must educate day and night. Perfectly convincing arguments are available, but they are not arguments that can be downed just like a Pepsi. To have any chance, we must “educate, educate, educate.”

Appendix

It seems that the death of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland, though tragic and heart-rending, was due to medical negligence, but what if it had resulted from that country’s laws in a sense somewhat like the following? –

Suppose that in the time interval in which a million or several million unborn children will be saved by a particular anti-abortion law, one pregnant woman, due to some extremely rare medical condition that cannot be diagnosed accurately in advance, will also typically die as a result of the law?

Will public opinion accept any such trade-off at all, no matter how disproportionate the numbers of those saved? If the unborn are not perceived as full-fledged members of our human family, the answer will be no.

And there is no anti-abortion law that is foolproof against being misrepresented. If a woman is refused an abortion and thereafter, for whatever reason, dies, it will be easy for manipulative people to stoke sentiment against the law – unless the unborn are perceived as full-fledged members of our human family.

A further note, added June 4, 2019 –

Above I wrote “many people have strong selfish reasons to adopt the ‘brainless clump of cells’ perception and become pro-choice, whereas hardly anyone has strong selfish reasons to adopt the ‘precious human life’ perception and become pro-life.” Today under a Yahoo News article about abortion, this was one of the comments:

mikehunt8 hours ago
You will NEVER stop me from getting abortions. NEVER. You see, I paid for an abortion for my college girlfriend years ago. It was the single, best financial decision of my life. I was able to stay in school, persue a career that paid little at the start but had huge potential, and now I am a millionaire who goes on expensive vacations all over the world. And I have ALL of this because I was able to focus on school and my career, instead of an unwanted kid. Now I have more than enough money to fly my wife to any country she wants, to get an abortion. And there is NOTHING a pathetic, poor, unsuccessful republican like you can do to stop me. Go on, try it… I dare you. Hahahaha

This is what we’re up against. There are no such financial inducements spurring us to become pro-life.

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

What’s Wrong with Killing?

Posted on February 12, 2018 by Facilitator

My “What’s Wrong with Killing?” was first published by Secular Pro-Life in 2018. The following version is now re-published here, in April 2022, with their permission. In this version, some of the passages have been tweaked.

Suppose a cute toddler is playing in front of us, riding on a toy truck, laughing and having a great time. She may be my child, or she may be anyone’s child. And suppose I kill that toddler before your eyes. You will all be shocked, certainly.

What I want to dig into here is what exactly has shocked us. I would like to submit that we would not have been shocked if not for our expectations that the life of that conspicuously alive child would continue in the next moment – and the moment after that, and the moment after that. Our shock will, by definition, consist simply of emotion and a pre-logical sense of wrongdoing. Logical analysis will not constitute any important part of our initial experience. And yet that gut experience, though it does not include analysis, can be subjected to analysis. We are shocked by the violence and the gore, but the violence and the gore mean what they do to us because subconsciously we understand their consequences. Their consequences (or all too possible consequences) are that I have deprived that child of her future. I have deprived all of us, but above all the child, of the life she would have had. Underlying our sense of wrongdoing, this was the real wrong.

(Evolutionary psychology would explain our response as a successful adaptation. I think the two explanations are not inconsistent.)

Suppose I killed that child with a sudden blow from behind. She did not experience pain. She did not experience fear. Yet nevertheless what I did was wrong. Some would say that I frustrated the child’s desire to live, but in fact her desire to live was “cured” in the moment that it was frustrated, so that the child never actually experienced frustration. The frustration that those people (such as Peter Singer) claim to be crucial was in fact purely theoretical. My brutal act did not result in any frustration, will not result in any frustration, and could not result in any frustration. The real wrong was that I deprived the child of the life she would have had, her future.

Everyone agrees that to cause suffering is a form of harm, and if that harm is unnecessary, it is wrong to cause it. But if to cause suffering is wrong, then to deprive of pleasure, or the chance for pleasure, is also wrong. A “potentiality account” of the wrongness of killing is to be found in Indian philosophy, and has been developed in the West by Don Marquis.

As mentioned, we expected that the life of that conspicuously alive child would continue in the next moment (let’s call it moment A) and for many moments after that – B, C, and on and on. I deprived that individual of all that living, thus irreparably harming her, with a blow struck at moment A minus 1. But how else could I have caused that same harm to that same individual – or let’s say, how else could I have caused that same harm and even more to that same individual?

Obviously I could have caused that same harm and even more to that same individual with a blow struck at moment A minus 2, or at moment A minus 3. I could have caused that same harm and even more with a blow struck just after the child’s birth.

And, just as obviously, I could have caused such harm with a blow struck at the individual before the individual’s birth. I could have caused such harm with a blow struck at the individual just after fertilization. Whether or not we call that individual a “person” or a “human being” is completely irrelevant. I would be very comfortable calling it a “thingamajig.” The point is, whatever we may call it, if we kill it we clearly deprive it.

And the fact that there are big and identifiable differences between a toddler and a zygote doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how great the differences are, because once we have understood what exactly the harm is that is caused by killing, though the differences may be great, none of those differences are relevant to whether that harm is caused or not.

When I kill the toddler playing with her toys, the deprivation of moment A is in the future only by a moment, and when I kill the zygote, the deprivation of moment A is in the future by a couple of years, but what difference does that make? The deprivation is farther removed in time, but would not the toddler killed while still a zygote have lived moment A, soon enough, just as intensely as the toddler killed while a toddler? Of course she would have.

At either moment of killing, I have deprived that same individual of moment A and of a long string of moments, typically about eighty years of moments. They would not all have been moments of joy, certainly. Some would have been moments of great pain. But some would have been moments of joy, and all would have been moments of moral training and search for meaning. Whether I kill a particular human organism as a 3-year-old or as an embryo, the same human individual is deprived of the same thing and undergoes the same harm.

Could I also have caused such harm to that same individual earlier than fertilization? No. Because before fertilization there was no such individual. There was a sperm, and there was an egg. The maximum possible harm that I can do to a sperm is to deprive it of some moments of sperm life. (And the maximum possible harm that I can do to an egg is to deprive it of some moments of egg life.) I don’t think that we should kill a sperm just for the fun of killing it, but the moments that we deprive it of, in killing it, cannot be compared in value to the toddler’s moment A, B, etc.; so we can kill it for any utility of human beings, whereas there is very little that can justify depriving any individual of moments such as A and B.

But here we should distinguish carefully between harm and moral wrong. It may be that no moral wrong exists that does not cause harm to someone; and prima facie, causing harm to someone is morally wrong as well. What I think I have shown here is that if you kill an unborn child at any stage, you harm it as much as you harm a 3-year-old if you kill her; and therefore prima facie, killing an unborn child is as wrong as killing a 3-year-old.

But causing harm to someone is morally wrong only prima facie. Everyone will agree that killing that born girl is morally wrong as well as harmful, but some will say that killing an unborn child is often justified and that therefore even if the harm done to the unborn child is equal to that done to the born child, it is not wrong. In this article I can’t counter all the possible justifications and thereby show that abortion is almost always wrong, but I think I have shown the presence of harm and therefore at least of prima facie wrong. (And I have countered what I consider the strongest of the claimed justifications, the bodily-rights argument, here.)

A sperm is an individual biological entity for whom, as an individual entity, there is no expectation that it will ever experience a moment like moment A. An egg is an individual biological entity for whom, as an individual entity, there is no expectation that it will ever experience a moment like moment A. So any harm done in killing a sperm or an egg is not comparable to that done in killing a zygote.

Of course if I kill a particular egg or the particular healthy sperm that is ahead of the pack in racing toward the egg, I prevent our toddler from coming into existence and thus prevent her moment A, B, etc. from ever occurring. But have I harmed anyone, have I wronged anyone – and if so, whom? Our intuitions say that harms can be done only to actual individual entities, not to theoretical individual entities. I have only harmed a theoretical individual entity, not any actual individual entity. (That is, the only actual individual that I harmed was the sperm or the egg, and as mentioned it had little to lose, so the harm wasn’t great.) By killing the individual toddler, or that individual toddler while still a zygote, did I take away from her those moments she was going to have, riding on the truck and laughing, and perhaps eighty or ninety years full of moments of conscious experience? Yes. By killing a sperm or an egg, did I take away from any individual even a few moments of riding on the truck and laughing? No, the individual we’re talking about, the individual who can be deprived of a moment on a toy truck, and of many more moments of pleasure and pain over the eighty years that follow that moment, never exists if the meeting of sperm and egg does not occur.

It is to be observed that those who argue “If killing zygotes is wrong, then killing sperms and eggs is also wrong” invariably think that it is not wrong to kill sperms and eggs. And yet they agree that we cannot kill toddlers, and as we have seen, the wrongness of killing toddlers cannot be explained by pain, fear, or desire to live. So they are left with no explanation as to what is wrong with killing a toddler.

Of course it is only moral intuitions that can ultimately determine a correct moral principle, so if someone says they really have a moral intuition that depriving a theoretical individual is as harmful to that individual as depriving an actual individual, we cannot completely disprove the correctness of that moral principle with rational argumentation. But everyone agrees that “we have to draw the line somewhere,” and before no other line except fertilization can a plausible argument be made, it seems to me, that killing does not deprive an individual of moments like moment A – that the prevention of moment A is not major deprivation for the individual who is killed.

(There are arguments about “psychological personhood”: personhood does not begin until the mind is somewhat formed, and therefore the organism that existed before that point and the organism that exists after – though the “before” organism and the “after” organism are biologically completely continuous – do not share the same personal identity; if we kill the “before” organism, we kill only an organism that will never be conscious, since it and the “after” organism are not the same organism. Identities are ultimately intuited, not proved with a modus ponens, so this idea can never be debunked with rational argumentation. But the idea that the identity of an organism with mind – mind being, in the belief of most scientists, a complex arrangement of physical matter – can be separated from the identity of the organism with the material DNA that has initiated and orchestrated all the material complexity, never seems to appeal to my intuitions. Barring [Edit: scientifically doubtful] mind-body dualism, for a “person” to have an identity different from that of the original bearer of the DNA that has determined the eye color, musical aptitude, and all other traits of the person, including the traits that are part of the consciousness that supposedly makes the person a person, just seems strange. Strange and, for some proponents of the idea – I won’t say all – suspiciously convenient. [Edit: For further elaboration about psychological approaches to personal identity, please see “Was ‘I’ Never an Embryo?”])

February 2018 note

From the post: Of course if I kill a particular egg or the particular healthy sperm that is ahead of the pack in racing toward the egg. . . . have I harmed anyone, have I wronged anyone – and if so, whom? Our moral intuitions say that harms can be done only to actual individual entities, not to theoretical individual entities. I have only harmed a theoretical individual entity, not any actual individual entity. (That is, the only actual individual that I harmed was the sperm or the egg, and as mentioned it had little to lose, so the harm wasn’t great.)

What individual organisms are we talking about here? We are talking about a sperm and an egg, two individual organisms neither of which has much to lose, and a zygote – an individual organism who has much more to lose than either the sperm or the egg, or than the sum of both their losses. And the sperm and the egg are the only actual organisms, so only they (who can’t be harmed much) can possibly be harmed.

October 2022 update

I find that Alexander Pruss had basically the same idea that I expressed in my DNA argument above. His argument is perhaps better:

And there is a further objection [to the idea that I am a brain]. My brain developed out of earlier cells guided by the genetic information [in DNA] already present in the embryo. There was, first, a neural tube, and earlier there were precursors to that. Brain development was gradual, cells specializing more and more and arranging themselves. At which point did I come to exist? And why should the cells that were the precursors of the brain cells not be counted as having been the same organ as the brain, albeit in inchoate form? If so, then perhaps I was there from conception, even on this view.