Fetus: human being, if not, what?

We’ve all heard it said before:

I don’t feel that a fetus is alive until it can sur­vive out­side of the mother. I’m not going to change my mind about that…

I find this an unten­able posi­tion, though at least he used the word fetus rather than baby, excus­ing the emo­tional lan­guage, more on this in just a lit­tle bit.

This entry isn’t intended as any sort of exhaus­tive dis­cus­sion of abor­tion, it isn’t even nec­es­sar­ily intended as a reli­gious exam­i­na­tion of abor­tion, though keep­ing in mind a Chris­t­ian world view would be of great ben­e­fit (as that is where I am ‘com­ing’ from, even if I try to remove as many of my pre­sup­po­si­tions as pos­si­ble). These are my ini­tial thoughts which will more likely than not be expanded elsewhere.

In dis­cussing abor­tion it seems clear to me that we need to define a few terms, terms that would be com­mon to any dis­cus­sion (or argu­ment) relat­ing to abortion:

1. What is killing?
2. What is murder?
3. What is a human being?
4. What is a fetus (is it or is it not a person?)?

You will notice that in the above set of ques­tions I avoided those ques­tions approach­ing the so-called rights of women over their bod­ies, this is a sec­ondary issue wholly decided by the above, dis­agree if you like. I also did not ask any­thing approach­ing the ques­tion of what it means to be alive for the sim­ple rea­son that if a fetus is a human being, it is there­fore alive.

For the sake of this (brief) dis­cus­sion we’re going to do away with a few of the dic­tio­nary def­i­n­i­tions of killing and mur­der as I find them inad­e­quate (killing doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily per­tain only to human beings and mur­der doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily always require mali­cious thought). I shall define (1) killing as ‘depriv­ing an organ­ism of life; war, guilty human beings’ and I shall define (2) mur­der as ‘killing an inno­cent human being; exclud­ing war’. Of course, I’m sure these def­i­n­i­tions could always be bet­ter stated, how­ever, I shall agree with them for now.

The easy part fin­ished, we must now move to dis­cuss (3) what is a human being? And (4) what is a fetus (is it or is it not a per­son)? Two ques­tions which I don’t believe are as dif­fi­cult as they seem. To begin with (3), we must ask what is the essence of a human which dif­fer­en­ti­ates human beings from ani­mals or com­put­ers? Bor­row­ing from Peter Kreefts The Unaborted Socrates (please bear in mind that what fol­lows is not an exhaus­tive dis­cus­sion, sim­ply my thoughts on a few argu­ments we might encounter on the abor­tion issue):

Socrates: That is your answer: the will to know. No com­puter and no ani­mal is a philoso­pher, a lover and pur­suer of wis­dom. In plan and sim­ple terms of observ­able behav­ior, no com­puter or ani­mal does what we have been doing: ask­ing ques­tions. Even if com­put­ers reason–which I do not grant–they do not will to. The one thing you never observe a com­puter do is ques­tion its programming–unless it is pro­grammed to do so, and then it does not ques­tion that pro­gram­ming. Unless it is pro­grammed to do so. There is always an unques­tioned pro­gram; every­thing is done in obe­di­ent to that. Com­put­ers are obe­di­ent; rea­son is dis­obe­di­ent. We are obe­di­ent to rea­son by being dis­obe­di­ent to our pro­gram­ming. We have been told by our par­ents or teach­ers to think cer­tain things, but we ques­tion them. We are philoso­phers. ¹

We see then that man is defined as a ratio­nal (human) being, dis­tinct from ani­mals and com­put­ers in that ani­mals and com­put­ers both lack the will to know, whereas human beings do pos­sess this will to know — human beings ask ques­tions. With this def­i­n­i­tion we of course run into a com­mon objec­tion, pre­sented by Dr. Her­rod to Socrates:

Her­rod: …Do we ever observe a fetus ask­ing ques­tions?
Socrates: No.
Her­rod: And a human being is one who ques­tions?
Socrates: Yes.
Her­rod: Ergo, a fetus is not a human being, and there­fore abor­tion is not mur­der. Quod erat demon­stran­tum. Finis. Con­sum­ma­tum est. Case closed.²

Not so, how­ever, for it is at this point where one may reply (as Socrates did), do infants or sleep­ers ask ques­tions? Surely they don’t, and yet it would be con­sid­ered mur­der to kill a baby or one who sleeps. In this we under­stand then that being a per­son and func­tion­ing as a per­son are to be under­stood as two dif­fer­ent, though related, things. One might be a per­son while not func­tion­ing as a per­son. Thus, even while a fetus may not will to know (ask ques­tions), this does not mean that a fetus is not a human being. This does not in itself show or prove that a fetus is a human being, though if not, then what? Here we turn to William Lane Craig:

…It seems to me that it is vir­tu­ally unde­ni­able sci­en­tif­i­cally and med­ically that the fetus is at every state of its devel­op­ment a human being. After all, the fetus is not canine, or feline, or bovine; it is a human fetus. From the moment of con­cep­tion on, there exists a liv­ing organ­ism which is a genet­i­cally com­plete human being and which, if left to develop nat­u­rally, will grow into an adult mem­ber of its species. Con­trast the com­plete human embryo with a sperm or an unfer­til­ized egg. Nei­ther the sperm nor the egg alone con­sti­tutes a human being: each is genet­i­cally incom­plete, hav­ing only one-half the chro­mo­somes nec­es­sary to make a com­plete human being. If left alone, they don’t develop into any­thing: the sperm dies in a cou­ple of days, and the unfer­til­ized egg is expelled in a woman’s monthly cycle.³

Of course, ask­ing dif­fi­cult ques­tions doesn’t prove any­thing. From this we might move into when a fetus might be con­sid­ered alive. How­ever, any­thing but con­cep­tion seems to me to be com­pletely arbi­trary and philo­soph­i­cally ludi­crous. To me the ‘issue’ seems far less com­pli­cated when removed from the emo­tion­al­ism many peo­ple bring to the issue. That said, per­haps more on the issue later — those are my incom­plete thoughts for now.

Related posts:

1. Anti-abortion… Anti-women?
2. Con­cern­ing Abortion
3. Abor­tion and Infanticide