Abortion: Not Cessation of Life

Brandi Slavich

Politics, religion and sex; three taboo topics you are never supposed to bring up.  For that reason, when they do get brought up, you should run, not walk, away from that conversation because things tend to get very heated.  However times are changing making it seem that we should, now, add abortion to that list.  Abortion is a topic that has quickly grown becoming more public.  Still being debated, pro-life advocates tend to argue that “[if] life is present from conception, [then] abortion amounts to cessation of life.”  However this is not a valid argument because life is not present from conception and even if it was abortion is, still, not cessation of a life. Classifying an abortion as murder poses numerous and insurmountable philosophical problems.

It seems indisputable that the main crime concerning abortion is the crime against potentialities.  Be that it may, if someone were to try to dispute this fact a serious question would arise;  what is the philosophical difference between aborting a fetus and destroying a sperm and an egg? Well, for one thing, …

These two contain all the information [or, all the potential] and their destruction is, philosophically, no less grave than the destruction of a fetus.  The destruction of an egg and a sperm is even more serious philosophically: the creation of a fetus limits the set of all potentials embedded in the genetic material to the one fetus created.  The egg and sperm can be compared to the famous wave function (state vector) in quantum mechanics – the represent millions of potential final states (millions of potential embryos and lives).  The fetus is the collapse of the wave function: it represents a much more limited set of potentials.  If killing an embryo is murder because of the elimination of potentials – how should we consider the intentional elimination of many more potentials through masturbation and contraception? (Vaknin)

Cessation of life or the prevention of a future the acts look the same but, murder is the intentional termination of the life of a human who possesses (at the moment of death) a consciousness and, in most cases, a free will, especially the will not to die, which neither the zygote, embryo or fetus have.  Abortion is the intentional termination of a life which so happens to have the  potential to develop into a person with consciousness and free will. However, philosophically, no identity can be established between potentiality and actuality… A cluster of cells a human makes only through the agency of Nature.

The Human embryo has a very long tail and branchial arches resembling gills.  First forming a parallel to a fish like kidney, then later, discarding and replaced it with a mammalian kidney.  Consequently, in many respects an early Human embryo more mirrors a fish rather than a Human Being.  That being the case, when are we considered  human beings?  Clearly, when able to live outside of its mother given the support of available medical knowledge, with a functioning heart and brain, with pain and pleasure sensors, the baby in the mother is indeed a human being and deserving of the right to live. (Potter) Whereas when it comes to zygotes, embryos and fetuses the answer to that question is unclear.  Incidentally many people have used multiple explanations from Immanuel Kant’s work as a starting point. For instance…

In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant clearly defines ‘person’ as a moral agent; as a being with certain cognitive capacities, ‘a subject whose actions can be imputed to him. Moral personality is therefore nothing other than the freedom of a rational being under moral laws.’ (Manninen 73)

Unlike a child, already born, that has a mind and therefore has begun its development of rational nature, whereas zygotes, embryos and fetuses lack rationality because they have not begun that development.

It is impossible to attribute moral status to a [human embryo] on grounds of its physical characteristics alone – even when its potential is considered – because there is no point in the process of ontogeny at which a scientific finding can be made, as it were, that a glob of protoplasm is now sufficiently endowed with moral freedom that it has become a responsible agent or sufficiently endowed with cultural, aesthetic, and ethical capacities that it has become a human being. (qtd. in Manninen 74)

Other philosophers may even show that embryos or fetuses possess human knowledge (difficult, given Kant correlates this control to certain cognitive capacities), or claim that, at conception, human knowledge is somehow united with the empirical self (a Kantian immediate animation).  However they cannot protect the embryos and fetuses are people, like you and I;  thus not providing a strong argument why humanity applies to embryos and fetuses, losing their theoretical grounds against experimentation.

People who oppose abortion choice would have to argue that, unlike any other person, a human fetus has a moral right to instrumentalize a person for sustenance even against the latter’s wishes. (Manninen 80)  In spite of this even if we were to consider the fetus as a person from conception it does not follow that others, namely a pregnant woman, have an obligation to provide the fetus with whatever it needs to survive, especially if someone’s body is being used against her will.

The right to be born crystallizes at the moment of voluntary and intentional fertilization. If a woman knowingly engages in sexual intercourse for the explicit and express purpose of having a child - then the resulting fertilized egg has a right to mature and be born. Furthermore, the born child has all the rights a child has against his parents: food, shelter, emotional nourishment, education, and so on.

It is debatable whether such rights of the fetus and, later, of the child, exist if the fertilization was either involuntary (rape) or unintentional ("accidental" pregnancies). It would seem that the fetus has a right to be kept alive outside the mother's womb, if possible. But it is not clear whether it has a right to go on using the mother's body, or resources, or to burden her in any way in order to sustain its own life. (Vaknin)

The right to be brought to life, to become or to be pertains to no one. If this right existed, it would imply an obligation or duty to give life to the unborn and the not-yet conceived; however no such obligation or duty exists.

We do not, as a society, compel individuals to donate blood or bone marrow, even if this means people will die as a result of not getting these vital bodily fluids, and certainly nine months of pregnancy is a greater bodily sacrifice than  donating blood or bone marrow… As a society, we recognize the moral imperative to treat all persons as ends in themselves and that all persons are worthy of intrinsic respect. And we recognize that this imperative applies even if respecting it in one person entails the death of another…

I can grieve the lives lost as a result of bone marrow or blood shortage and yet still maintain that donations must be voluntary - that no one can be strapped down and have their marrow or blood forcibly extracted…

I am not arguing that people do not have a right to life... I am arguing only that a right to life does not guarantee having either a right to be given the use of or a right to be allowed continued use of another person’s body – even if one needs it for life itself. So the right to life will not serve the opponents of abortion in the very simple and clear way in which they seem to have thought it would. (Manninen 80-83)

Nonetheless, even when an old person is sick and dying we do have established rules when death has occurred or when it is considered acceptable to “pull the plug.”  Perhaps the same rules that apply to the end of life should be applied to the beginning. If the analysis of brain activity shows no conscious thought then life is considered over. This suggests that life begins with the formation of a brain and the initiation of conscious thought. (Potter)

Still, there is no conflict between the rights of the mother and those of her fetus. Abortion involves loss; loss of hope that various parties may have invested and loss of something valuable in its own right. Respecting something is to appreciate the value it has and claims it introduces to us. Even if the fetus were considered a [human] person from conception, it does not follow from this alone that others, particularly a pregnant woman, have an obligation to provide the fetus with whatever it needs to survive, especially when this entails the unwilling use of someone’s body. [Therefore] if a woman does choose to abort, it is a decision that should be reached with care, judiciousness, and ideally in situations where the woman has other moral obligations that parenthood would render it difficult or impossible to fulfill. (Manninen 75-85)  Thus, even though life is not present from conception, abortion cannot be treated considered of a life. Abortion is, if anything, a crime against potentialities.

Works Cited

Manninen, Bertha Alvarez. “A Kantian Defense of Abortion Rights with Respect for Intrauterine Life.” Diametros 39 (2014): 70-92. PhilPapers. Web. 28 Oct. 2014.

May, Simon Cabulea. “Principled Compromise and the Abortion Controversy.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 33.4 (2005): 317-48. JSTOR. Web. 16 Sept. 2014.

Potter, Steve. “Is the Killing (Abortion) of Human Embryos Always Murder?” Eveloce Science Blog. WordPress, 25 July 2011. Web. 6 Nov. 2014.

Reader, Soran. “Abortion, Killing, and Maternal Moral Authority.” Hypatia 23.1 (2008): 132-49. JSTOR. Web. 16 Sept. 2014.

Vaknin, Sam. “Abortion - The Aborted Contract and the Right to Life.” Samvak Tripod. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 Nov. 2014.