Concerning Abortion

I just fin­ished read­ing Fran­cis Scha­ef­fers A Chris­t­ian Man­i­festo and Peter Kreeft’s The Unaborted Socrates and it seems that Scha­ef­fer, like Kreeft, places strong empha­sis on abor­tion and the issues sur­round­ing abor­tion. Rightly so, I think. So, maybe some com­ments on Kreeft and Scha­ef­fer. On the legal­iza­tion of abor­tion Scha­ef­fer comments:

“The door is open. In regard to the fetus, the courts have arbi­trar­ily sep­a­rated “alive­ness” from “per­son­hood,” and if this is so, why not arbi­trar­ily do the same with the aged? So the steps move along, and euthana­sia may well become increas­ingly accept­able. And if so, why not keep alive the bod­ies of the so-called neo-morts (per­sons in whom the brain wave is flat) to har­vest from them body parts and blood, when the polls show that this has become accept­able to the major­ity […] Law has become a mat­ter of aver­ages, just as culture’s sex­ual mores have become only a mat­ter of averages.“[1]

Scha­ef­fer sub­se­quently quotes Charles Hartshorne in the Jan­u­ary 21, 1981, issue of The Chris­t­ian cen­tury, pages 42–45, titled ‘Con­cern­ing Abor­tion, an Attempt at a Ratio­nal View’:

“He begins by equat­ing the fact that the human fetus is alive with the fact that mos­qui­toes and bac­te­ria are also alive. That is, he begins by assum­ing that human life is not unique. He then con­tin­ues by say­ing that even after the baby is born it is not fully human until its social rela­tions develop (though he says the infant does have some prim­i­tive social rela­tions an unborn fetus does not have). His con­clu­sion is, ‘Nev­er­the­less, I have lit­tle sym­pa­thy with the idea that infan­ti­cide is just another form of mur­der. Per­sons who are already func­tion­ally per­sons in the full sense have more impor­tant rights even than infants.’ he then, log­i­cally, takes the next step: ‘Does this dis­tinc­tion apply to the killing of a hope­lessly senile per­son or one in a per­ma­nent state of coma? For me it does.‘[2]

The dan­ger in Hartshorne’s def­i­n­i­tion of what it means to be a human being is that as a def­i­n­i­tion, it’s entirely arbi­trary. Hartshorne believes social func­tion is the mark of ‘full human­ity,’ but why should we agree? Per­haps one is ‘fully human’ when one can feel pain, or think, or ask ques­tions. Maybe one is ‘fully human’ when one looks human. Even lack­ing all of these fea­tures, per­haps one is still fully human. Does level of devel­op­ment and func­tion­ing as a human nec­es­sar­ily dic­tate whether one is fully human or not? Which is also to ask the ques­tion, if one is not fully human, then what are they?

In exam­in­ing the United States Supreme Court rul­ing of Jan­u­ary 22, 1973, which gave every woman the right to an abor­tion, Scha­ef­fer quotes Joseph P. With­er­spoon, “In this 1973 deci­sion the court … Held that the unborn child is not a per­son within the mean­ing and pro­tec­tion of the term ‘per­son’ uti­lized in the four­teenth amend­ment so as to strip all unborn chil­dren of all con­sti­tu­tional pro­tec­tion for their lives, lib­erty, and property.“[3] Scha­ef­fer goes on to note how invok­ing the four­teenth amend­ment (which does not define ‘per­sons’) is arbi­trary in a num­ber of ways; firstly, it’s med­ically arbi­trary. Quot­ing from Our Future Inher­i­tance: Choice or Chance (1974), Scha­ef­fer notes that accord­ing to the book, the ques­tion of when human life begins is open, “It [abor­tion] can be car­ried out before the foe­tus becomes ‘viable’ — although when that is, is in itself an arguable point […] a biol­o­gist might say that human life started at the moment of fer­til­iza­tion when the sperm and the ovum merge”.[4] Rightly observ­ing that, “the full genetic poten­tial for becom­ing a human being and will be come one if implan­ta­tion [in the womb] and ges­ta­tion are suc­cess­ful. At what stage of devel­op­ment should the sta­tus of a patient be attrib­uted to the embryo or foetus?“[5]

Need­less to say, in Kreefts The Unaborted Socrates, Socrates and Dr. Her­rod (an abor­tion doc­tor) had this very dis­cus­sion over degree of devel­op­ment and the accept­abil­ity of abor­tion as a viable option:

Her­rod: All right. Look at the dif­fer­ences between the zygote and the adult per­son. Those who call abor­tion mur­der say that a per­son begins at con­cep­tion, that the zygote is a per­son. SO they must say there is a greater dif­fer­ence between prezy­gote and zygote than between zygote and adult, since the first dif­fer­ence, they say, is a dif­fer­ence in kind, between non­per­son and per­son, while the sec­ond is only a dif­fer­ence in degree, between two stages of growth of a per­son. It is this claim, I feel sure, we will be able to see as absurd. Surely you see the enor­mous dif­fer­ence between a zygote and your­self: a far greater dif­fer­ence than that between prezy­gote and zygote […]

Socrates: Let us begin with some­thing we do know. What are the dif­fer­ences between an infant and an adult? […]

Her­rod: All right. Let’s see … For one thing, infants are obvi­ously much smaller […] they are much less devel­oped in all their bod­ily sys­tems […] they are more depen­dent on their mother for sur­vival […] the infant does not move much unless moved, while the adult roams about at will.

Socrates: Now — one more ques­tion before we return to the fetus […] Do any of these four dif­fer­ences we have just men­tioned make a dif­fer­ence as to whether killing is mur­der or not? For instance, can we say that it is mur­der to kill a large per­son but not a small per­son? Or is it worse to kill a larger per­son? […] Would you say that it is not mur­der, or less seri­ous mur­der, to kill a pread­o­les­cent child whose repro­duc­tive sys­tem is not fully devel­oped, than to kill a late ado­les­cent, whose sys­tem is complete?

Her­rod: Of course not. But it does seem to me worse to kill an adult than a ten-minute-old infant. The degree of devel­op­ment does seem morally relevant.

Socrates: Let us see if this “seems” is an “is”. If the degree of devel­op­ment makes a moral dif­fer­ence, then a great dif­fer­ence in degree of devel­op­ment would make a great moral dif­fer­ence, and a small dif­fer­ence in devel­op­ment would make a small dif­fer­ence in moral­ity […] Then if it is much worse to kill an adult, than an infant, it would be a lit­tle worse to kill a late ado­les­cent than a pread­o­les­cent […] And it would also be not such a ter­ri­ble thing to molest or beat or kill small chil­dren as large ones.

Her­rod: No, no. If any­thing, it’s worse. The small ones are less able to defend them­selves. Every­one detests child molesting.

Socrates: The absurd con­se­quences nec­es­sar­ily fol­low from your false principle.

Her­rod: What false principle?

Socrates: That the victim’s size of degree of devel­op­ment makes a dif­fer­ence to the moral­ity of killing.[6]

Craig rein­forces the above, “Those who deny that the lit­tle one in the womb is a human being typ­i­cally con­fuse being human with being at some later stage of devel­op­ment […] This argu­ment seems to me com­pletely fal­la­cious. On this rea­son­ing, we could with equal jus­tice say that because a child is not an adult, he is not a human being; or because a baby is not a child, he is not a human being. Of course, an embryo is not a baby, but that doesn’t mean that an embryo is not a human being. All of these are var­i­ous stages in a human being’s devel­op­ment, and it is com­pletely arbi­trary to cut off one stage and say that because it is not a later stage, it is not a human being.[7] As Her­rod said, “either there is a sharp break, and then abor­tion after that is mur­der, or else there is not, and then it is not so bad to kill a ten-year-old as a seventeen-year-old”.[8]

It seems then to me the ques­tion nat­u­rally turns to via­bil­ity, that some how it nec­es­sar­ily fol­lows that because a fetus is some how depen­dent upon its mother for sur­vival, it is not a human being (or less human?). Not for­get­ting that young babies are just as depen­dent on us to con­tinue liv­ing. The idea here is that if a baby can be born and sur­vive, it is a per­son. If not, then it is not a per­son. This seems wholly ridicu­lous, how­ever, as even born babies can­not sur­vive out­side of the womb for very long. It seems to me, how­ever, that via­bil­ity (just as time and loca­tion) is not an indi­ca­tor of per­son­hood. For instance, a baby born in the mod­ern age and kept alive in an incu­ba­tor might not have been viable in the clas­si­cal age, but is nev­er­the­less a person.[9] It does not seem to me that there is any pos­si­ble way, save inten­tional igno­rance, that one could claim a fetus to not be a human being, a per­son. “The fact is that from con­cep­tion to old age we have the var­i­ous stages of devel­op­ment in the life of a human being. It seems there­fore that the med­ical and sci­en­tific facts make it vir­tu­ally unde­ni­able that the devel­op­ing fetus is a human being”.[10]

[1] Fran­cis Scha­ef­fer, How Should We Then Live? (Wheaton: Cross­way, 2005 ), 223.
[2] Fran­cis Scha­ef­fer, A Chris­t­ian Man­i­festo (Wheaton: Cross­way, 1981), 21–2.
[3] How Should We, 219.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., 219–20
[6] Peter Kreeft, The Unaborted Socrates (Down­ers Grove: Inter­var­sity, 1983), 57–8.
[7] William Lane Craig, Hard Ques­tions, Real Answers (Wheaton: Cross­way, 2003), 116–7.
[8] The Unaborted Socrates, 60.
[9] Ibid., 62.
[10] Hard Ques­tions, Real Answers, 120.

Related posts:

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