Abortion and Moral Permissibility

Is abortion morally permissible? Before this question can be fully addressed, we must establish what, precisely, is being asked. First we must agree on what we refer to when we say “abortion.” Though there are some situations in which it seems acceptable to attach moral significance to things outside anyone’s voluntary control, for the purposes of this essay spontaneous abortions, in which the fetus’s life ends without any conscious effort on the part of the mother, will be ignored. “Abortion,” therefore, refers to any voluntary action of the mother that is designed to bring about the death of the fetus inside her.

Secondly, and more importantly, we must establish what is implied about an action when we assess its “moral permissibility.” Technically, “permissible” means “able to be permitted.” That is, if something is permissible, it can be permitted, and if something is impermissible, it cannot be permitted. However, when the moral permissibility is being discussed, we tend to think more in terms of what ought to be permitted and what ought not to be permitted. If something is morally permissible, we ought to permit it to happen, and if something is not morally permissible, we ought not to permit it to happen.

Arguments defending abortion typically conclude that abortion is not morally wrong, and therefore that it is morally permissible. The easiest way to support the conclusion that abortion is not morally wrong is to claim that the fetus is not a person. If one accepts this claim along with the assertion that only persons have a right to life, one must accept that the fetus does not have a right to life. If the fetus does not have a right to life, it cannot be morally wrong to take that life from the fetus. However, there are some problems with both these premises. The first premise, that the fetus is not a person, is the one most often attacked by opponents of abortion. The typical attack maintains that, because there is no point after conception at which the line between “non-personhood” and personhood can logically be drawn, it is illogical to make any kind of distinction whatsoever between the level of personhood in a fetus and the level of personhood in an infant.

Unfortunately for opponents of abortion, the conclusion that any distinction is illogical does not follow from the premise that no line can be drawn at any particular point. To illustrate why this is the case, take the example of baldness. There is no particular number of hairs on a person’s head for which the person is bald, but for which one more hair would make the person no longer bald. From this it does not follow that it is illogical to make a distinction between bald and not-bald. Clearly, someone with no hairs on his head can logically be called bald, while someone with a full head of hair can logically be called not-bald. Similarly, someone defending abortion can say that the zygote formed upon conception is not a person, while the infant who is eventually born is a person, without having made any illogical distinctions.

The second premise, that only persons have a right to life, is far more easily attacked. The premise in and of itself may not be faulty, but fault can be found with any definition of person that denies personhood to fetuses. If a fetus is not a person, what about a newborn infant gives it personhood? The fact that the newborn exists separate from the mother is one viable characteristic, but this seems too strictly biological to work for our purposes. Surely, it is not the ability for rational thought that defines a person, because infants do not have this ability. It also cannot be the potential for rational thought, because if infants have this potential, and fetuses have the potential to become infants, then fetuses also have the potential for rational thought. Furthermore, it is not only infants who are excluded from this definition of person. In the words of Don Marquis,

This premise is subject to scope problems because the class of persons includes too little: infants, the severely retarded, and some of the mentally ill seem to fall outside the class of persons as the supporter of choice understands the concept. (R&R, p. 752)

Even if one claims, as Peter Singer does, that infants, the severely retarded, and some of the mentally ill do not, in fact, have a right to life, it is undeniable that the vast majority of us agree that they do have a right to life. Our moral intuition that infanticide is wrong is too pervasive to allow Singer’s claim much merit in the abortion debate.

Judith Jarvis Thomson takes a novel approach to the abortion issue when she argues that even if the fetus is a person, abortion is not morally wrong. Her basic thesis is that “having a right to life does not guarantee . . . a right to be given the use of . . . or to be allowed continued use of another person’s body” (R&R, p. 744). However, one gets from reading Thomson’s argument some fairly repugnant impressions. For instance, it seems likely that she would say one has the right to kill an innocent child left in one’s house by a burglar, when the only other alternative is supporting that child for nine months. Her actual examples are much more farfetched than this one, involving violinists with kidney disease and floating people-pods, but the moral implications seem to be the same as for my example. The fact that most of us believe one would not have the right to kill that child creates difficulties even for the defense of abortion for rape victims. Overall, like Singer’s claim that infanticide is not morally wrong, Thomson’s conclusions appear to be too far from mainstream morality to be of much use in this argument. Even if we do accept Thomson’s reasoning, one wonders why we have to accept that “right to life does not guarantee right to a person’s body” rather than “right to your body does not guarantee right over a person’s life.”

Arguments against abortion typically conclude that abortion is morally wrong, and therefore that it is not morally permissible. The most common premises in these arguments give a kind of symmetry to the most common arguments about abortion. Specifically, opponents of abortion claim that the fetus is a person, and that all persons have a right to life. The usual justification for calling the fetus a person was discussed above, and, as it is a slippery-slope argument, is not particularly convincing. The claim that fetuses are persons runs the risk of being too inclusive, rather than too exclusive, with the class of entities that have a right to life. For instance, if the single-celled zygote formed immediately after conception has a right to life, then what is it about a single cancer cell, which is also biologically human, denies it that same right to life? Granted, there is the fact that the zygote is both biologically human and has the potential to become a full human being, but any sperm-and-egg pair is biologically human and has this same potential.

Marquis admits that the traditional arguments of both opponents and defenders of abortion are not entirely convincing, because each argument from one side seems to be neatly balanced by a symmetrical argument from the other side. He claims that the fetus’s personhood, or lack thereof, has nothing to do with whether it has a right to life. Instead, it is the fetus’s potential for a future of value that grants it this right. Loss of a “Future Like Ours” (that is, a future of potential value to the person in question) is, according to Marquis, what makes death a misfortune in general. He says that what murder does to the victim’s loved ones and to the murderer himself are minor compared to the horrible loss suffered by the actual victim. Fetuses, while they may not be persons in the same way that we consider born human beings to be persons, have just as much potential for a future of value as any born human being has. Therefore, according to Marquis, the moral presumption against abortion should be every bit as strong as the moral presumption against murder in general.

This argument, though, is vulnerable to the same kind of symmetrical counter argument from the other side as more traditional arguments. Marquis’s first premise is that what makes death a misfortune is the loss of a Future Like Ours, and that what makes murder a misfortune is that it causes death. I believe it is more accurate to say that the loss of a Future Like Ours is indeed a misfortune, but that there is at least one more significant reason why death of a born human being is a misfortune, and yet another additional reason why murder is morally wrong. Furthermore, I believe that these additional reasons make murder a far greater misfortune than merely depriving someone of a Future Like Ours would be.

Marquis downplays the claim that death is bad because of the loss suffered by loved ones. He gives the example of an unloved hermit’s death to support the claim that we see death as a misfortune even when there are no loved ones left behind. But do we really see the hermit’s death as equal to, say, the death of a well-loved celebrity or national leader? Of course not. We may mourn the fact that the hermit had no loved ones, but that is mourning his sad life, not the misfortune of his death itself. The hermit’s death is a misfortune solely because the hermit lost the potential for a future of value. The well-loved person’s death is a misfortune not only because of this loss, but because everyone who loved that person was deprived of something as well. Granted, the rest of us were not deprived of anything as significant as the potential for a future of value, but we still lost something, and that something makes the death seem more misfortunate.

To downplay the claim that murder is bad because of the brutalization of the killer, Marquis says that “the great wrong to the victim explains the brutalization, not the other way around” (R&R, p. 754). This may be true, but that doesn’t mean that the brutalization is not an additional misfortune involved in murder. If the effect of murder on the person who commits it was not part of the misfortune of murder, than murder would not be seen as any more misfortunate than death by natural causes. Both result in one person’s loss of a Future Like Ours, and both result in the loss suffered by loved ones. Whatever makes murder worse than death by natural causes has to relate to something about murder that is not involved in death by natural causes, namely the murderer himself. The characteristic of the murderer that makes murder worse must be the brutalization, or something closely related. Murder is bad partly because of the fact that the murderer is now more likely to commit murder again than would have been the case had the person died of natural causes. The (assumed) increased potential for murder in someone who has already committed murder poses a risk both to society and to myself and loved ones. For this reason, our laws punish murderers regardless of whether they murdered unloved hermits or well-loved social benefactors.

Abortion, does not involve these two additional misfortunes, at least not to the same degree as murder. The mother does not suffer the loss of a loved one, because she is the one choosing to get the abortion. As for the rest of the potential family, it is hard to say whether they can love the fetus without ever having interacted with it to the same degree as the mother. This fact makes the death of a fetus less misfortunate than the death of a born human being, which itself would make taking the life of a fetus less wrong than taking the life of a born human being. However, there is another reason why abortion is less wrong than murder, which has to do with the effect on the person who commits it. While a murderer poses a risk to me as well as to my loved ones, a doctor who performs abortions poses no such risk. Society as a whole would crumble if murder was allowed, because everyone alive would be have a roughly equal risk of being murdered, so few people would trust each other and interactions requiring trust would cease to be meaningful. Abortion, on the other hand, does not pose a risk to society, because it only poses a risk to unborn fetuses. What’s more is that only fetuses whose mothers choose to seek out abortion are at risk, and this occurs in a minority of all pregnancies.

Abortion, then, is not as bad as murder is. When it’s done to save the mother’s life, and perhaps in cases of rape, abortion may actually be seen as the morally positive choice, because the alternative is worse than the loss the life of the fetus. When the only reason for an abortion is fear of the inconvenience of raising a child, abortion can be seen as morally wrong, because a Future Like Ours is being lost without anything about the alternative choice being of comparable moral significance. However, because abortion is not as morally wrong as murder, we can’t use the moral impermissibility of murder to support any claim that abortion is morally impermissible. Furthermore, there is no consensus view on the morality of abortion, and we shouldn’t use the moral intuition of less than half the population to support any claim that abortion is morally impermissible. Thus there is no strong valid support for saying abortion is morally impermissible. Because the concept of “impermissibility” carries so much weight in terms of its impact on people with differing moral views, it is better to say that abortion is, in fact, morally permissible. Permitting abortion allows each person to make his or her own choice based on his or her own moral views, whereas not permitting it forces every person to abide by a moral view that is not the consensus.