The Cocktail That Defeats Bodily-Rights Arguments

In September 2021, Human Defense Initiative kindly reprinted this article. However, the “I would not question” disanalogy below is a later addition that does not appear on their blog.

The most convincing bodily-rights arguments for abortion rights say that everyone should be legally permitted to refuse to let their internal organs be used, even if such refusal will result in the death of an innocent person. Such arguments analogize legal prevention of abortion with compelled organ donation/use among born people. I feel that such arguments cannot be defeated by pointing to any single disanalogy or by any other single argument, but feel that they are defeated by a “cocktail” of disanalogies/arguments. My moral intuitions say that the cumulative force of the following set of disanalogies/arguments does clearly defeat such bodily-rights arguments:

• 99% of unborn children result from a voluntary act by two people who know that a child thus created will be dependent on the mother’s body. By that voluntary act, the two people incur an obligation toward that dependent child. It may be that neither any similar act in and of itself, nor any circumstance in and of itself, would be sufficient for anyone to incur an obligation to let one’s internal organs be used by a needy born person, but such an act would at least contribute toward such an obligation; and thus the voluntary act that results in an unborn child adds its weight on top of all the arguments that, taken together, I feel, disallow abortion even if there was no voluntary act –

• See “Bodily Rights and a Better Idea: the Short and Easy Version”

• Abortion is active killing of a child that would likely otherwise have lived, whereas when someone passively refuses to let their body be used by a sick person, the person dies of their own disease. I feel there has been a tendency in recent years for pro-life groups to over-rely on this one disanalogy, but nevertheless, the disanalogy should be identified.

• A person whose organ is demanded had rarely benefited from an organ transplant prior to the demand on themselves, so in a requirement to give blood or bone marrow or a kidney, there would be a lack of reciprocity. But in a country where abortion is legally prevented, all women who might think about aborting had themselves benefited from the protection of those laws when they were small and had perhaps survived only because of those laws, so there is reciprocity. (The benefit that women had received when small is a fact that women should reasonably remember, also, but it is a fact whether they remember it or not. And by the way, it cannot be claimed that under pro-life laws anyone has any special rights. “Under pro-life laws, everyone before they are born will have the right to use someone else’s body without consent, and everyone once they are born will lose that right.”)

• While it is true that a woman who gives birth to a child who needs her blood or bone marrow or kidney (hers and only hers) in order to live is not legally obliged to give it to the child, such cases are very rare, and the woman never knows that that will occur. If she knew that (given conception and birth) that would always occur and if the sexual act was consensual, the situation would be different. [Edit: She then likely would be legally obliged to give a kidney. (If pro-life laws were in effect, the likelihood might actually be less, because then society would consider the fact that she had by that time already been legally obligated to carry the pregnancy to term, and that giving a kidney would be piling one obligation on top of another. But the point would still stand that if a born child’s need for a bodily donation were as inevitable as an embryo’s need for a uterus – if such situations were more like pregnancy – the parents’ legal obligations would be greater than they actually are.)] Even presently, I would support legally obliging parents to give bone marrow to their born children in some cases, and would support legally obliging even unrelated persons to give blood in many cases, perhaps on a lottery basis.

• The younger and more defenseless a person is, the more protection they deserve, and taking advantage of another person’s helplessness is particularly ignoble.

• If the government forcibly seizes someone’s body part, it is the government who will initiate the use of force/violence, whereas if the government applies force against an abortionist or pill vendor (or even a pregnant woman, though pro-lifers do not propose that) to prevent an abortion, it is the woman (or someone coercing her) who proposed to initiate the violence.

• I would not question that a person whose body contains two kidneys is the sole owner of those kidneys. But a uterus is unlike a kidney in that a uterus is housing, and housing is a human right. Human rights are something that society as a whole has an interest in protecting, so housing is something that society as a whole has an interest in providing. And a uterus is in fact the only housing that will be adequate for any member of human society at one particular stage in their development.

Finally, a counter-analogy:

• If we ask whether one conjoined twin should be able to force a surgical separation that would kill their twin – even though waiting 6-9 months would ensure the survival of both – nobody will say the one twin’s right to bodily autonomy supersedes the other’s right to life. (Thanks to @DrSteveJacobs for this particular articulation. This counter-analogy too is not free from disanalogy. Between woman and unborn there is an asymmetry not present between the twins. The woman is clearly the host of the unborn, and had an existence prior to the unborn, and hence, through the conception, has lost something that she had once had. But how much importance should our moral intuitions give to that disanalogy?)

Our moral intuitions come out of our unconsciouses in some way we cannot understand, so ultimately no one knows why they hold the moral intuitions that they do. But I think that the above disanalogies/arguments are probably the reasons that I feel that abortions should normally be illegal, while I do not feel that organ donation/use should be legally compulsory.

The contribution that I hope this article will make to the defeat of bodily-rights arguments is to provide a foundation that can endure. It should have the power to endure, because there is flexibility for the specifics that rest on the foundation. The specific points can be added to or subtracted from or improved, while the understanding of the necessity of a cocktail remains.

© 2018

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

Bodily Rights and a Better Idea: the Short and Easy Version

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Four years after writing the first version of what I would later call
“Bodily Rights and a Better Idea” (12,000 words), I have finally found a way to write a short and easy version:

 

1. The pursuit of happiness, whether it is earthly happiness or another kind of happiness, really explains everything that people intentionally do. I think that society grants rights based on the idea that an unfettered pursuit of happiness ought to be allowed unless there is some reason to fetter it. Society feels it ought to grant people the rights that people desire to have, unless those rights come in conflict with the rights that others desire to have, or unless they should seemingly be limited for some other reason.

Those “ought to’s” stem from society’s members’ moral intuitions and perhaps also from an implicit social contract. (In the case of bodily rights, which we will get to below, the moral intuitions stem in turn from empathy with people’s psychological sense of body ownership, since everyone shares that sense.)

2. Setting aside all the other variables that might arise, the strength of a right that society grants will vary according to the strength/intensity of people’s desire for that right.

3. People have a strong psychological sense of individual body ownership. There is no scientific or necessary philosophical reason to think that each of us own our own bodies, but we have that strong psychological sense. (Philosophically, it would be equally coherent to say that there should be collective ownership of the body parts of everyone in society. If ants had the skills for organ transplants, presumably an ant colony would operate with collective ownership. I am not recommending this, but I’m making the point that bodily rights stem from an inborn psychological sense.)

4. Because of that strong psychological sense in everyone, our moral
intuitions tell us that we (society) should grant strong bodily rights.

5. That psychological sense is not a fixture but an occurrence. It occurs particularly when our bodily ownership is challenged or when we imagine it being challenged. Moreover, there is no reason that it should be equally strong in the face of every type of challenge. As mentioned, the strength of a right that society grants will vary according to the strength/intensity of people’s desire for that right.

6. There are reasons to think (see section 7 of “Bodily Rights and a Better
Idea”) that an attempt to prevent abortion does not normally and on average elicit in pregnant women as strong a sense of bodily ownership (there is not as strong an occurrence of that sense) as an attempt to forcibly remove or use a body organ elicits in people in general. For instance, a woman might well feel at some level of consciousness that the unborn shares with her ownership of “their” uterus.

At least, we should not assume that a woman whose abortion it is proposed to thwart will necessarily feel an equally strong offense to her sense of body ownership as will a person whose kidney it is proposed to seize. It is an open question. If I am correct about how rights originate in society, then analogical right-to-refuse arguments do implicitly make that assumption, but the burden of proof is on them. Neuroscience may answer the question in the future. For now we have to research the question in less technological ways, and society has to use its intuitions.

7. If we (society) consciously recognized, which we have not as yet, that the strength of the psychological sense of bodily ownership varies from situation to situation, and if we confirmed that it is not as strong in pregnant women when prevention of abortion is proposed as in people in general when forcible removal or use of a body organ is proposed, our moral intuitions would not tell us to grant as strong bodily rights to a pregnant woman faced with prevention of abortion as to people in general faced with forcible removal or use of a body organ. Again, the burden of proof is on those who use analogical right-to-refuse arguments.

8. Once the role of the psychological sense of body ownership in society’s granting of bodily rights is understood, we can find a better ethics recognizing that role than the present concept of bodily rights. We can find a better idea.

 

The most convincing bodily-rights arguments for abortion rights say that everyone should be legally permitted to refuse to let their internal organs be used, even if such refusal will result in the death of an innocent person. Such arguments analogize legal prevention of abortion with compelled organ donation/use among born people. I feel that such arguments cannot be defeated by pointing to any single disanalogy or by any other single argument, but feel that they are defeated by a “cocktail” of disanalogies/arguments. My moral intuitions say that the cumulative force of several disanalogies/arguments does clearly defeat such bodily-rights arguments, and that the above-mentioned possible lesser strength of the sense of bodily ownership in pregnant women may qualify as one of them.

 

Appendix, July 2022:

If identity arguments and bodily-rights arguments can be defeated (if in the case of bodily rights, they exist and count for something, but they don’t outweigh the right to life), then killing an unborn is sufficiently like killing a three-year-old to make it impermissible Strong bodily-rights arguments depend on kidney-type analogies, so if such analogies can be defeated, abortion becomes a human-rights violation. There is no one disanalogy (not the above, in 7.,  “our moral intuitions would not tell us to grant as strong bodily rights to a pregnant woman faced with prevention of abortion as to people in general faced with forcible removal or use of a body organ” or any other single disanalogy) that can defeat the analogies, but a constellation or “cocktail” of disanalogies can defeat them. Even if “not . . . grant as strong bodily rights to a pregnant woman faced with prevention of abortion as to people in general faced with forcible removal or use of a body organ” fails, the rest of the cocktail is enough to defeat them. Please see the above link to a cocktail of disanalogies/arguments.

© 2018

 

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

A Pro-Life Feminist Balance Sheet

 

Secular Pro-Life has published an article of mine under their paid blogging program.

 

A sentence in the next-to-last paragraph reads:

Because even if the legality of abortion is morally neutral and abortion does not psychologically harm women, there is no question that reliance on the practice to solve various problems denigrates women’s femaleness, instead of honoring it and demanding that society accommodate it (remember the point about female functions above) . . .

But as I said in a main comment under the article, “I should have written ‘Because even if keeping abortion legal is not morally wrong and abortion does not psychologically harm women, there is no question that reliance on the practice to attain equality with men denigrates women’s femaleness, instead [etc.].'” The entire comment reads:

I wrote in the article, Because even if the legality of abortion is morally neutral and abortion does not psychologically harm women, there is no question that reliance on the practice to solve various problems denigrates women’s femaleness, instead of honoring it and demanding that society accommodate it (remember the point about female functions above) . . .

I should have written “Because even if keeping abortion legal is not morally wrong and abortion does not psychologically harm women, there is no question that reliance on the practice to attain equality with men denigrates women’s femaleness, instead [etc.].” I was trying to be brief, but I wasn’t very successful in being both brief and clear.

Early in the article I had written: Women will no longer have to live in a society that gives official sanction to the idea “. . . Often, the female sex can become equal to the male only by assaulting a female function . . .” There were a number of reasons that abortion was originally made legal in the US. The stated reason was “privacy,” but that does not mean that that was the actual main reason in the collective inner mind of society – or if it was, the main reasons might have shifted – and I don’t think that in popular belief that is now the main justification for the legality. Justice Ginsburg wrote in Gonzales v. Carhart, quoting from Planned Parenthood v. Casey, “[Women’s] ability to realize their full potential . . . is intimately connected to ‘their ability to control their reproductive lives.’ Thus, legal challenges to undue restrictions on abortion procedures . . . center on a woman’s autonomy to determine her life’s course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature…

Ginsburg was talking about equal citizenship stature to be achieved by assaulting the normal bodily functioning of a female who has happened to get pregnant. She was giving official sanction to the idea that that is sometimes the price of equality and thus that women are by nature less than equal. (Which pro-life feminism disputes. Pro-life feminism blames society rather for not accommodating women’s nature.) If in the popular mind the reasons for the legality of abortion were other than such equality – for instance if people believed that it is legal because making it legal is, due to bodily rights or whatever, morally neutral or morally right, then the legality of abortion would not have the effect of denigrating women’s femaleness – but if people believe the reason to be equality, then the message they get from official quarters is that by nature, women are less than equal.

And in a reply to a commenter, I further wrote –

Suppose I had said, “there is no question that if a pregnant person allows her physiology, which scientific consensus calls female and not-male, to function unhindered, the result will be a born baby (or at least is much more likely to be a born baby than if she deliberately hinders the functioning)” — ? I think you would say, okay, there’s no question.

However, am I justified in equating unhindered female functioning with femaleness? Though I might think twice about how I use “femaleness” if I find that word has been used differently by pro-life feminist thinkers, I guess I would define it as “female anatomy/physiology (along with any inborn, hardwired female behavior traits, if there are any) as the ultimate basis of female identity.” Let me explain.

Suppose a person has typical male anatomy and physiology but identifies as female. Okay, so if you ask me the person’s gender identity, I will say “female”. But does that mean that anatomy is completely unrelated to identity, as some might claim? I don’t think so, because the fact that the person identifies as female means there is such a thing as a female. And what defines that concept of “female” that the person is using? It can only be what scientific consensus calls female anatomy and female physiology. Unless “female anatomy/physiology is the ultimate basis of female identity,” then there can be no such thing as feminism, there can be no meaning to “women’s struggle,” “women’s rights,” “Women’s March,” “women’s health.” Or even “equality of men and women.”

So, a few or many females (by identity) may have male anatomy, but still female anatomy/physiology is the ultimate basis of female identity. Take away that basis and female identity will become meaningless

You might be trying to tell me, “If women hinder their physiological functioning, that is not denigrating their female identity, because they don’t identify with their anatomy/physiology.” But they DO identify with it.

I wrote, “there is no question that reliance on the practice to solve various problems denigrates women’s femaleness.” I should have said “certain problems,” or more specifically “problems that jeopardize their equality.” If a woman’s problem is that the unborn has some cosmetic defect, that’s not a good reason to abort, but she is not aborting for the sake of equality with men. But if she aborts in order to compete with men at work,* then the abortion is a statement “If I allow my normal physiological functioning then I’m inferior to men.” An abortion for that reason denigrates her femaleness.

* The Justice Ginsburg justification for legal abortion — see the main comment that I made in this comments section.

Whereas if the woman said, “I’m going to go ahead and deliver the baby, maybe even raise it, and I demand that society reward me for doing that job as much as it rewards the men whom I will now lag behind at the office,” then she’s a pro-life feminist. PL feminists say No, I can have my normal physiological functioning without being inferior to men. But I will be different from men, and society has to accommodate me along with my difference . . .

– and to another commenter I wrote:

. . . The institution of legal abortion, as the article says, entails both benefits and losses for women, and most of those benefits and losses are primarily material, not moral. For instance, if abortion is legal, it will be a little safer — a benefit in terms of the health of aborting women, a material benefit. However, if the institution of legal abortion is morally wrong and if that institution exists, then the whole society becomes to that extent an immoral society and everyone (including women) will be polluted morally by having to live in it. Whereas if the institution of legal abortion is morally right and if that institution DOESN’T exist, then the whole society becomes to that extent an immoral society and everyone (including women) will be polluted morally by having to live in it. So though the article counts up mostly material benefits and losses that stem from making abortion illegal, there will also be a benefit or loss in terms of moral pollution BY THE VERY FACT that abortion is legal or illegal.

Though I think myself that the institution of legal abortion is morally wrong, some think it’s morally right, and I wanted all the benefits and losses to be undebatable, so as you may have understood, I did not (in this particular article) come to any conclusion about its morality.

But I did say that if the institution of legal abortion is not morally wrong, then as an institution (THE VERY FACT that it is legal), it doesn’t come in the “losses” column. But even if the institution of legal abortion is not morally wrong, that institution DOES send the message that femaleness is inferior — that institution denigrates women — which DOES come in the losses column. That’s what the sentence is saying.

That denigration is not exactly a material loss or a loss in terms of moral pollution. It’s an image loss . . .

 

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

“Pro-Lifers Don’t Really Believe That Zygotes Are Persons”

A New Yorker review, summarizing a key argument of Katha Pollitt’s 2014 Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, proclaimed that “No person actually imagines that a zygote is a person.” (Meaning that certainly the pro-lifers who say that it is don’t actually imagine that.) The 2015 Newsweek article “America’s Abortion Wars (and How to End Them)” came to the same conclusion. A 2007 article by a law professor focused on pro-lifers who make an exception for rape; the logic offered in the article leads to the conclusion that some such pro-lifers (though not all) “take the position that abortion kills an entity that is something less than a full person. The earlier in pregnancy an abortion occurs, the greater the appeal of this position for many.” Under a Huffington Post article, the commenter CourtDecisions once told me that according to his legal knowledge, “. . . the advocates of fetal personhood don’t really believe in fetal personhood.”

While there is another segment of pro-choicers who go to the opposite extreme and claim that pro-lifers are a religious cult who worship fetuses, the above voices represent probably the bigger and more serious group, and advance a sometimes thought-provoking case. They usually adduce two kinds of evidence for their claim (but occasionally a third kind):

1. They say that pro-lifers’ actual public-policy recommendations, and pro-lifers’ claims about personhood, are deeply inconsistent.

After “No person actually imagines that a zygote is a person,” the New Yorker review goes on:

If they did, they would actually equate murder and abortion, and their conduct – only the tiniest fringe is willing to advertise comparable penalties for both – shows that they know perfectly well that they aren’t the same. . . . One would have to oppose capital punishment. . . . One would find it difficult to support any war or military action at all.

Meanwhile, the law professor opens her reasoning with the observation that pro-lifers who would allow the abortion of an unborn child of rape, would not allow the infanticide of a born child of rape. She then proceeds to eliminate some of what might appear to be explanations for this distinction, and at the end we find that out of all the possibilities of explanation she has provided, the explanation in the case of some such pro-lifers must be the view that the unborn is less than a full person. CourtDecisions wrote that “even the advocates of fetal personhood believe that abortion should be legal for rape, incest and fetal abnormalities. Consequently, the advocates of fetal personhood don’t really believe in fetal personhood.”

(The New Yorker and the law professor then proceed to think up reasons why pro-lifers may actually oppose abortion: “religious dogma,” “misogyny,” “intercourse as a sin.”)

I would agree that pro-lifers who would allow abortion for incest or fetal abnormalities, unless they would also allow euthanasia or eugenic killing of born children, don’t really believe that the unborn are persons. But the argument against those pro-lifers fails against pro-lifers who do not support those exceptions, and the arguments about capital punishment and war also fail against a particular group of those who don’t: they fail against the group of pro-lifers who support a consistent life ethic.

The argument about a rape exception, however, seems more challenging, at first sight, for those pro-lifers who happen to advocate that exception, and the “comparable penalties” argument is challenging for most pro-lifers.

At this point let me mention that I am only personally acquainted with a small number of active pro-lifers and not with hundreds or thousands, and I would not be surprised if there are some pro-lifers who genuinely do not perceive zygotes as equivalent in moral value to born persons. And I would not be surprised if out of those who do not, there are a few who claim that they do. But that is not the point. I don’t think that moral truth is always determined democratically. What I will aim to do here is to represent the views of very thoughtful pro-lifers, as I understand them.

I think that most such pro-lifers do not want to give prison sentences to women who abort – if they would even award such sentences to all abortionists without exception – comparable to the sentences they would give in cases of homicide of a born person. Let’s look now at that “inconsistency” (as compared to cases of homicide of born persons) in awarding penalties. I think there are five factors at work, any one of which explains that “inconsistency” better than does the idea that pro-lifers secretly devalue the unborn:

First, I think that many pro-lifers, particularly those who have arrived at their own pro-life thinking only through a process of study and reflection over a period of years, can understand that the humanity of the unborn may not be immediately obvious to all; moreover, they give due credit to the efficacious campaign of dehumanization of the unborn that has gone on, in the US and some other cultures, for the last fifty years. Author and abortion-rights advocate Naomi Wolf admitted 20 years ago that “Many pro-choice advocates developed a language to assert that the fetus isn’t a person, and this, over the years has developed into a lexicon of dehumanization. . . . service staffers referred to the fetus . . . as ‘material’ (as in ‘the amount of material that had to be removed…’)” Unmentioned by Wolf, but perhaps still more effective in dehumanizing or simply erasing the unborn, were cunning bits of verbal engineering that assured women that only one “body,” theirs, was involved in any abortion. I think that often pro-lifers feel that many pregnant women simply do not know, or have been misled not to know, what it is that they are aborting. Pro-lifers do not demand harsh treatment for that reason. (This obviousness-of-humanity factor is also discussed, along with some possible factors that I will not touch on here, by Christopher Kaczor in his article “Equal Rights, Unequal Wrongs,” and was the subject of a Secular Pro-Life blog post some time back.)

Second, it may more often be hard to determine that an abortion was not medically necessary than to determine that the killing of a born person was not self-defense. Abortion cases may more often be foggy in an evidentiary way, resulting in a cautious approach toward the prosecution of all abortion cases in general.

Third, when a crime of any kind is very common, prosecuting all cases might overwhelm the courts. An alternative might be to make examples by prosecuting only the “big fish” – in this case the abortionists (and abortion-pill vendors).

Fourth: In order to outlaw abortion in any country or state of the world in the first place, a sizeable part of the political jurisdiction’s population will have to feel that abortion is wrong; and I think outlawing abortion will contribute further to the perception that it is wrong, just as outlawing slavery must have contributed to the unanimous perception we now have that slavery is wrong. But it may take time for a consensus to develop that stiff penalties are in order even for abortionists, or that penalties of any kind are warranted for the women involved. Though in many US states the general public would now be willing to prosecute abortionists, they won’t so quickly feel the wrongness to the extent that they will be willing to prosecute women – even apart from the extra complexities of abortion cases mentioned in my first and second points above.

Fifth and perhaps most importantly, pro-lifers, like anyone else, respect the mental sense of body ownership that underlies the concept of bodily rights. The importance accorded to that sense rests on a kind of intuition, and hence the importance varies somewhat from person to person, but I don’t think there is a night-and-day difference in that regard between pro-lifers as a group and pro-choicers as a group. To put it simply, pro-lifers as well as pro-choicers believe in “bodily rights.” So pro-lifers feel that as a moral starting point, or as a default moral principle, everyone has a right to refuse to let their body be used unless they give permission. Certainly one’s body cannot be used for just any purpose under the sun. Where pro-lifers differ from pro-choicers is that pro-lifers are likely to feel that a woman does not have that right when her body is the only hope for survival of a new human being – a situation that they feel confers some degree of responsibility on her – and when her pregnancy is not expected to be unusually rough or dangerous. And the responsibility is all the greater if she became pregnant through consensual sex.

But the belief in a default principle of bodily rights has two important consequences:

a. Many pro-lifers, given that default belief, may feel that a woman does retain the right to refuse the use of her body if serious health consequences are expected for her – even though her situation is not life-threatening. Most pro-lifers might say that even in such a situation she should not abort, but many would feel that she has the right to do so. So many may be ready to permit abortion for the sake of the woman’s health, even at the cost of the baby’s life.

Does this mean that they deem the unborn to be less human than the woman? Not at all. Remember that the default principle is simply: anyone has a right to refuse to let their body be used. That one can lose that right under any circumstances at all (such as a pregnancy that is expected to be relatively smooth) testifies to the fact that the unborn is considered fully human. But even though the unborn is fully human, the woman’s bodily rights mean that she retains a right to refuse to let her body undergo truly dire kinds of suffering.

b. It is similar regarding the prosecution of abortion cases as something less than murder. Abortion is less than murder not because the victim is not fully human, but because everyone has bodily rights such that in many circumstances, one would have a right to kill in order to defend their body. We could almost say that by default, one does have a right to kill to prevent the unconsented use of one’s body. I have written elsewhere, and others also have written elsewhere, on why there should be no such right in the case of a normal pregnancy, but the point here is that there almost is such a right. Abortion is not extremely far removed from such self-defense. For a woman, the offense of abortion, once abortion is illegal, will be the offense of not letting her default right to kill be offset by other considerations present in a pregnancy. That offense may not even be defined as a crime; and if it is so defined, it will not be murder. Even what the abortionist (or pill vendor) himself does may or may not be murder, because the abortionist can be seen as simply assisting the woman in an excessive assertion of her bodily rights.

According to the moral intuitions of many pro-lifers, in the case of pregnancy the value of a human life (the child’s) does override what would normally be the woman’s bodily rights, and therefore abortion should be illegal. But if a pregnant woman violates the law and claims what would normally be her bodily rights, it is, though a defiance of the law, something less than murder.

(And the more so if the pregnancy resulted from rape. The law professor I have quoted actually mooted bodily rights as a possible explanation for why a pro-lifer might make a rape exception in spite of considering the unborn as a person, but rejected that explanation – too hastily, I think.)

And if a woman is sorely tempted to ease the anxieties of her own brain with alcohol at a time when she happens to have a child inside her, that is not morally the same as plying her newborn with alcohol without any similar temptation – though the results for the child may be the same.

Few pro-lifers would say that the validity of the pro-life position is an open-and-shut case. I think most feel that it involves a balancing of different legitimate values, in which the balance does not fall overwhelmingly on the pro-life side, though it falls clearly enough.

2. They claim that thought experiments reveal that pro-lifers do not highly value the early unborn.

The Newsweek article, which contained numerous bad arguments, also contained this thought experiment:

A building is on fire. On one floor, five healthy babies are in cribs. On another, 10,000 embryos are in petri dishes, being grown for 10,000 women who want them implanted (new scientific advances guarantee that all the embryos will survive until birth). Because of the rapidly advancing flames, you have time to evacuate only one floor: Either five babies will die or 10,000 future humans will be destroyed. Which do you choose?

Hopefully, the answer is obvious – anyone who decides to rescue globs of cells over living, breathing babies is a monster. But this hypothetical exposes the absurdity of the claim that women who choose abortion are “murdering” babies or that a human being pops into existence at conception, even though a zygote or embryo is no more sentient than a sperm.

The author clearly does “hope” that the answer is obvious, but also clearly understands that there may be those to whom it might not be obvious, and thinks he’d better ensure the obviousness. He proceeds to pull out the stops with pejoratives for the poor embryos, and hyperbolic insults for the poor reader who might see things differently than he does. Should all that fail, at the end he reminds us of the old sentience argument.

One reason the author is right to brace himself for disagreement is that his thought experiment has stacked the deck: despite the concession that all the embryos would survive until birth, he has selected a means of death that will be painful to the born babies and not to the embryos; and we are likely to imagine that some adults have already bonded with the born babies, unlike with the embryos.

But what if we leveled the playing field, so that the born babies as well as the embryos would die in some painless way, and so that none of the sadness that we might feel in either case comes from any personal bonds that have become strong over time?

First let me say that for myself, I would then definitely save the embryos – and the number of them would not have to be 10,000. For me the ratio could be very close to 1:1. And I would not hesitate. But I should explain that I have been exposed to this thought experiment for some years now, and I have had time to think about it. Had I found myself in that situation without such mental preparation, some emotions and instinctively-programmed protective impulses would have operated one-sidedly on behalf of the born babies, and might have determined the outcome.

It seems that we are biologically programmed to see babies and small children as cute and to feel protective toward them, and to feel emotional when they are threatened. I would guess we are also biologically programmed to feel protective toward a woman who is obviously pregnant – to feel protective, that is, toward anyone who seems to need protection, but more so toward a pregnant woman. Maybe we do not automatically feel equally protective when a woman shows us the results of a very recent pregnancy test, but then how could we be programmed in such a way? Our biological programming took place on the savannahs of Africa at a time when we lacked pregnancy tests, microscopes, and ultrasounds. Such programming would require cues (such as the cuteness of a born baby or the obvious bump of a developed unborn baby), while for embryos and zygotes there simply would not in those days have been any cues. Moreover, nature may have seen less need for such programming than in the case of the born, because for the unborn, the mother’s body was present as the first line of defense – unlike for born babies whom the mother or father might not tend at every moment.

But as Javier Cuadros has written:

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. . . . 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 . . .

The Newsweek author wrote that “anyone who decides to rescue [embryos] is a monster.” If he had written, before 1492, “anyone who decides to go east by sailing west is an idiot,” it would have struck a chord with the people of that time. But in a century of frequent flyers, not only does it seems to us truthful that we can do exactly that, it seems to us so in a way that is reflexive and completely natural.

Some of us pro-lifers have been thinking about embryos and embryology for a long time, and I suspect that the Newsweek author had not. Though it did not happen in my thinking overnight, to me a human life seems like one seamless process that has to start somewhere. I no longer feel surprised to think that it may have to start small. If we set aside the possibility of feeling pain or fear, and set aside the memories about a child that may have formed in the minds of others who have bonded with it, then from my perspective, anyone who can see a big difference between the death of a 4-year-old and the death of someone who will be a 4-year-old soon enough, simply hasn’t thought about it or otherwise lacks vision in the matter. (Or applies a cerebral kind of identity argument that I find weak but will set aside here.)

(With some effort, I can see how someone could develop the idea that if there has never been any sense of self, then nothing can be lost to any individual. But neuroscience tells us that the self is an illusion anyway. So what actually counts is a bundle of independent pains and pleasures, fears and hopes, that has an illusion of self seemingly tying it all together. What counts is whether such a bundle that would have existed is lost. Whether or not a particular illusion has occurred is not something that can count.)

Above I have responded to the two main arguments that I have seen for the claim “Pro-lifers don’t really believe . . .” But there is another argument as well that deserves to be looked at.

3. Some point out that pro-lifers are not doing all that they could do to save zygotes from natural death.

In a blog post called “No 5k for the biggest killer – so does anyone really believe it’s a killer?,” Fred Clark quotes from a book called Broken Words

. . . between 50 percent and 75 percent of embryos fail to implant in the uterus. . . . Surely, a moral response to a pandemic of this magnitude would be to rally the scientific community to devote the vast majority of its efforts to better understanding why this happens and trying to stop it. Yet the same pro-life leaders who declare that every embryo is morally equivalent to a fully developed child have done nothing to advocate such research. … One could say that this massive loss of human life is natural, and therefore, humans are under no obligation to end it. But it is not clear why the same argument could not be used to justify complacency in the face of AIDS, cancer, heart disease, and other natural causes of human death

– and then comments:

That suggests one of two things. Either these pro-life advocates are complacent monsters every bit as callously unconcerned with saving unborn babies as those they oppose. Or else, just like those they oppose, these folks do not really believe that “every embryo is morally equivalent to a fully developed child.” [Emphasis mine.]

I think that Clark has a point, and I think that consistent pro-lifers should be much more alarmed about those deaths than they presently are. But I think that again, bodily rights is at work, and the rest is a partially pardonable lack of awareness; and triage; and an understandable, if not completely pardonable, tendency to shrink from what could be a monumental sacrifice. I do not think that pro-lifers “do not really believe.”

Unlike with any kind of cure for AIDS, cancer, etc., saving those zygotes and embryos would require treating not the body of the victim, but the body of another person – the victim’s mother. When abortion is proposed, pro-lifers feel that the life of the embryo should normally override the bodily rights of the woman, and therefore that a justified infringement of her bodily rights is appropriate. But that infringement by society takes the form of preventing a pro-active act of violence on the part of the woman – it is not society pro-actively obliging a woman (a woman who plans no conscious and pro-active act) to ingest some (yet-to-be-developed) chemical or undergo some treatment that would trick her uterus into being more receptive to an embryo. Such an act by society would be a more intrusive infringement on her rights. And even before that infringement, society would have to pro-actively oblige her to submit to tests for the presence of an embryo whose presence would not otherwise be known – probably not even known to her.

I think that we should R&D some treatment that many women might wish to undergo voluntarily. But this lack, on society’s part, of a right to make sure, once the treatment is developed, that it would ever be used and would ever save lives, would be one reason that we do not passionately pursue its development.

I mentioned a “partially pardonable lack of awareness.” There must be many pro-lifers who do not know enough embryology to be aware of these deaths at all. But the pro-life leadership must certainly be aware, and does nothing to educate people. They must certainly be aware; but I feel it may all remain somewhat abstract even for thinking people, because the knowledge is purely statistical. When a sidewalk counselor sees a woman walking into an abortion clinic, that counselor sees a specific case of a life that (seemingly, at least) need not be lost; but we would not even know that the “between 50 percent and 75 percent figure” (assuming that is correct) is a reality, had not technologically-enabled investigations been made, followed by extrapolation from the findings.

“Triage”: I think that we should respond to those little one-celled or 800-celled sisters and brothers of ours exactly as we would respond to our born little sisters and brothers if they were under any threat. But we can expect most of those children whom we will save to be born sickly, and if a billion of our born little sisters and brothers each required the most costly, resource-intensive, and personnel-intensive kind of medical support during their lifetimes of whatever length, our moral obligation to save them by depriving everyone else would have some limit. The pro-choice argument about quality of life is not wrong; their mistake is to apply it discriminatorily, saying that it is particularly one group who must die to free up resources for others.

And finally, I mentioned “an understandable, if not completely pardonable, tendency to shrink from what could be a huge sacrifice” (a mild version of Clark’s “callously unconcerned”). Triage would only justify inaction about those deaths up to a certain point. I think that consistent pro-lifers should be ready to minimize their own expenditure and recreation to do something about those unborn children and everyone else in the world who is seriously suffering, and I don’t know if we’re all ready to do that yet.

I think that consistent pro-lifers should be much more alarmed about the natural deaths of zygotes than they presently are. But I think that if we look for the reasons they are not alarmed, a failure to “really believe” that they are persons is not among those reasons.

© 2016

Bodily Rights and a Better Idea

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A positive review of the original version of “Bodily Rights and a Better Idea”, written by LMJ Deputy Editor C.J. Williams, appeared in Life Matters Journal Volume 5 Issue 1 — April 2016

I hope that this essay has only become clearer since 2016. It was last updated 30 December 2023.



You might first want to read “Bodily Rights and a Better Idea: the Short and Easy Version.”

See also the Ownership of the Body section of “The Body, the Uterus, and the Question of Ownership”



Robert McFall clearly needed some of David Shimp’s bone marrow more than Shimp needed it. When Shimp – McFall’s first cousin – refused to give it, McFall took him to court.

The judge’s gavel came down. He wasn’t enthralled with Shimp as a person, but every speck of the bone marrow in Shimp’s body was, in the eyes of society, private property – Shimp’s private property. McFall’s eyes closed on the world, for the last time, before his 40th birthday.

A caring society views both such persons as equally valuable. Such a society has an interest in seeing both thrive and not come to harm. It would seem completely logical for society to have instructed Shimp to hand over some bone marrow, and if he did not do so peacefully, to have taken it forcibly. Why doesn’t society do that? Is society wrong not to do that?

Society sometimes grants to its citizens surprisingly strong body-related rights – body-related rights that are out of proportion to what a rational fairness would seem to demand. In a moral framework, our bodies have a certain mystique. I don’t think that that is necessarily wrong. People are psychologically constructed with a strong sense of ownership of their bodies. Ownership of any kind has no foundation in science, and a strong principle of individual body ownership would be very debatable philosophically, but the psychological sense is a reality. And due to sharing that sense, which is to say, due to belief in the validity of that sense – or due at least to a pragmatic recognition of the strength of that sense – society sometimes grants to its citizens surprising rights such as those of Shimp that we have just seen. A belief in the validity of that sense could also be termed a moral intuition (whether or not it is a correct moral intuition) that near-inviolable body ownership ought to be respected.

I cannot think of a more likely explanation than this for the origin of that particular moral intuition. And I basically support such rights, at least in this part of this century. Perhaps Shimp should have been sentenced to a lot of community service for refusing to help McFall. But I say that I basically support such rights because I do not think he should have been tied down and his bone marrow removed forcibly.

It is important that the laws and conventions of society should give that psychological sense of ownership, and the actual ownership that society tends to think underlies it, its due. But is the current concept of bodily rights the most logical and coherent way to accomplish that? The value of the current concept of bodily rights is one of the first things we will examine.

The bodily-rights argument for legal abortion is usually advanced through thought experiments that create analogies with pregnancy – analogies in which our sympathies will be on the side of a right to refuse to let one’s body be used. And those arguments are usually contested by showing the disanalogies between the situations of the thought experiments, and the situation of actual pregnancy. This essay hopes to reveal that one’s bodily rights may not be as strong in the first place when abortion is being prevented as they are when organ donation is being compelled (which is in itself a disanalogy), but the main effort here will be to analyze the concept of bodily rights. I think that the resultant demystification of bodily rights will cause “bodily rights” to lose its power as a mantra and retain only a more rational kind of power – power in situations where that power serves justice, but not in situations where it doesn’t – and that that in itself will weaken bodily-rights arguments for abortion rights.

SYNOPSIS

Negative and even positive rights of different kinds can all be conceptualized in this way: they are rights not to be caused harm of different kinds. So what kind of harm can bodily rights, usefully conceived, protect us against? In order for the term “bodily rights” to be useful, such rights should not redundantly protect us in ways already covered by older and more obvious ethical notions (such as the right not to be punched in the face).

I find in this essay that the term “bodily rights” is useful only if it is confined to rights that aim to protect us against a certain kind of mental harm – offense to our psychological sense of body ownership. That form of mental harm is a real harm (a real mental harm), and it is caused by the trespass per se.

(Rather than a “sense of body ownership”, the sense may often be a sense more of identification with the body, and we also have a sense of dignity or indignity associated with the treatment of our body by others. For convenience, I will use “psychological sense of body ownership” to mean any balance among these different senses that an individual may have at any moment. In any case, they are all psychological senses that are susceptible to being offended.)

Current concepts of bodily rights do reflect some awareness of the sense of body ownership and of offenses to that sense, and they do aim to protect us against the harm of those offenses, but they also aim, redundantly, to protect us in other ways. Moreover, logically the strength of the right that protects us from that mental harm should vary in proportion to the degree of that mental harm. People advocating on the basis of the current concept of bodily rights may not (though they sometimes do) claim that bodily rights are absolute, but they do claim, at least implicitly, that the right is less than absolute only in that the strength of the right varies with the degree of trespass on the body, that is, on how deep in the body the proposed use of the body is to be. (They suggest that society may possibly require a person to use their arms and legs in some way, but it may not require them to surrender bone marrow, or to lend their uterus.) However, we find that in reality, the degree of that mental harm (consisting of offense to one’s psychological sense of body ownership) varies only partially and unpredictably in relation to the degree of trespass, so that really the degree of the harm can be ascertained only situation by situation.

This raises the possibility that a proposed use of the body, even if deep within the body, may not involve a high degree of the mental harm, and therefore may not justify a strong right to protect against it.

In relation to the abortion debate, it raises the possibility that a proposed use of the uterus may not involve an extremely high degree of the mental harm, and therefore may not justify a strong right to protect against that use. In the essay I discuss that possibility at some length. Bodily-rights arguments against abortion restrictions show us that denial of abortion is a degree of trespass on one’s bodily boundaries similar to the degree of trespass involved in other situations (such as the forcible appropriation of a body part) which nearly everyone’s moral intuitions agree are wrong. Bone marrow or a kidney is located deep within the body, and the uterus is located deep within the body. The arguments thus try to persuade us that denial of abortion is also wrong. However, they overlook the unpredictability of the mental harm, mentioned above.

I do not think that establishing the correctness of the pro-life position depends entirely on the possibility I mentioned about the degree of mental harm involved in a proposed use of the uterus. That possibility is the possibility of a big disanalogy between use of bone marrow or a kidney, on the one hand, and use of a uterus for gestation, on the other hand, but even without that disanalogy, I think that a “cocktail” of other, often better-known, disanalogies defeats bodily-rights arguments.

The moral intuition that body ownership ought to be respected seems to stem, as mentioned earlier, from the wish to spare our fellow human beings the mental harm of offense to their strong psychological sense of body ownership (which sense is an undeniable reality). So to answer the question whether there should be a right to refuse the use of one’s uterus – a right comparable in strength to the right to refuse to donate one’s bone marrow – one question that we in society have to answer is whether the mental harm to a woman when abortion is denied is really comparable to the mental harm that would occur if one’s bone marrow or kidney were taken forcibly. Since I think I will show that real mental harm is somewhat independent of the degree of trespass of one’s bodily boundaries, it is not enough, as mentioned, to show that the uterus is deep within one’s body. Rather, the degree of real mental harm when abortion is denied could be approximately determined only by psychological study focusing on the psychological phenomenon of harm in that specific class of situation, not by possible biological similarities with other classes of situation (normally I will just say “situations” rather than “classes of situation”). In the present undeveloped state of psychology and neuroscience, we in society will have to rely a lot on our intuitions, which will be discussed. To understand it in this way is to liberate our minds by demystifying bodily rights, as we seek our most correct moral intuitions about abortion.

I hope that producing a better understanding of what bodily rights really consist of and don’t consist of  will in itself help in a general way to convince readers that in invoking bodily rights we have to approach different social situations in different ways. But beyond that, I hope to show that in the specific situation of a typical proposed abortion, the possibility I mentioned, that the harm caused by offending the pregnant woman’s sense of body ownership may be less than the harm caused by offending the pregnant woman’s sense of body ownership in some other situations, is likely a reality. In this essay alone I will not prove that abortion should be illegal, but I think that I can at least help show that there is no strong bodily-rights argument against making many abortions illegal.

(The entire argument of my essay can be outlined in ten  points – see below. The foregoing nine paragraphs can be broken down into points 1-8 of the outline.)

Moreover, if society holds and sustains a “right not to be unjustly harmed physically or mentally,” and the idea of “harm” incorporates an understanding of the psychology of ownership, including body ownership, that will serve all purposes, and society can dispense with the off-target and therefore sometimes misleading idea of bodily rights. (This sentence can be broken down into points 9 and 10, i.e., the last points, of my outline.)

I would like to proceed now according to the following outline:

1. Rights are only meaningful and useful in terms of protection against wrongs, that is, against unjust harm, so the concept of bodily rights – “bodily” and “rights” – can be meaningful and useful only in situations where there is a potential for unjust harm to be done that is defined solely by trespass of one’s bodily boundaries; and only if protection by more obvious ethical notions is lacking.

2. Harm can be only harm to the body or harm to the mind, or both.

3. In terms of a right to freedom from harm to the body, the concept of bodily rights doesn’t realistically add anything to older and more obvious ethical notions. So though the current concept of bodily rights aims to protect against both physical and mental harm caused by trespass of bodily boundaries, in relation to bodily harm, the concept is superfluous and therefore not particularly useful.

4. In terms of a right to freedom from mental harm, the concept of bodily rights could be meaningful as one possible way of framing that right. (Even if it is not the best way – see 10.) People have a sense of ownership of their bodies, such that trespass on their bodily boundaries can be a source of mental harm, and “bodily rights” would be one way to protect from that mental harm.

5. Because of the sense of body ownership (and the assumption that actual ownership underlies it), in a situation of opposing interests between two innocent people that involves one person needing to use the body of the other, society does not make a simple decision in favor of the person who is likely to suffer the greater total harm of obvious kinds – that is, of kinds other than offense to the sense of ownership. It counts that kind of mental harm as harm, which weights its decision in the direction of the person whose body stands to be used by the other. (The total harm that can possibly be caused to any person by any action consists of the physical harm, the tangible mental harm, and that or some other intangible mental harm.)

6. Society weights its decision in this way so strongly, that in many cases it decrees that a particular offense against one person’s sense of body ownership is not justified even if the other person will die.

7. Although the concept of bodily rights is often expressed as a very simple principle, and sometimes as an absolute principle, when people actually apply it to different real-life situations, we see a patchwork of different attitudes, each depending on the situation. This renders the concept vague and confusing as a yardstick in any situation that has not yet been resolved, such as a proposal to abort. It turns out that the degree of mental harm caused by offense to one’s sense of ownership, which society believes to be morally relevant, is inconsistently related to the degree of trespass on the body – the degree of trespass being morally irrelevant apart from harm. Since it is inconsistently related to the degree of trespass, the degree of the mental harm when abortion is denied could be approximately determined only by psychological study focusing on the psychological phenomenon of harm in that specific situation – not simply by knowing the degree of trespass.We could speak of the situational nature of the strength of bodily rights.

8. Some actions that trespass a person’s bodily boundaries without the person’s consent are countenanced or supported by society in general (meaning that society in general does not take very seriously any offense to the sense of ownership in such cases). In my personal view, still more such actions should be countenanced or supported.

9. What matters, in terms of the rights that society should choose to sustain in this area of law and ethics, is that those rights should reflect a recognition of the sense of body ownership and its nuances – and of the possibilities of mental harm based on that sense of ownership and its nuances.

10. If society holds and sustains a “right not to be unjustly harmed physically or mentally,” and the idea of “harm” incorporates an understanding of the psychology of ownership, including body ownership, that will serve all purposes in this area of law and ethics, and society can dispense with the idea of bodily rights.

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Next Steps for the Pro-Life Feminist Movement

Secular Pro-Life has published an article co-authored by Kelsey Hazzard of SPL, and me.

 

Some further thoughts on the ideas of the article (these thoughts are mine and may or may not be thoughts of the co-author):

1.

We wrote: those who are not pregnant . . . will have to give up time, energy, and money to share the load of children . . .

What would be the economic mechanisms to ensure that sharing? The following is a comment I once posted under Sean Cahill’s “I am equal, not the same”:

 

Thanks, Sean Cahill, for providing a lot of clarity for me. I think some questions still remain, however:

“We are not liberated until both sexes are fully accepted as they are.”

As vehicles for the full acceptance of women as they are, in another guest post you listed the following things that Roe did NOT provide:

1. children born outside of marriage and their mothers are de-stigmatized

2. ensure women are able to earn a living wage

3. ensure proper maternity benefits

4. demand accommodations for parenting students and employees at colleges and workplaces

5. demand men act responsibly.

Can women as they are (i.e., without abortion) attain equality through these vehicles? The problem I see is this: Under capitalism as we know it, people win economic independence for themselves only when they get compensated for producing marketable goods or services. Child-carrying and child-rearing are not presently marketable goods or services, so if some of a woman’s time and energy goes into child-carrying and child-rearing, she will be hindered in winning economic independence unless child-carrying and child-rearing become marketable services. Handouts from those who ARE getting compensated for producing marketable goods or services do not have as much potential to add up to real money as do the direct compensations that go to the real (real in capitalistic terms) producers. And your points 2-4 above are, in a capitalistic framework, handouts.

So why not begin to treat child-carrying and child-rearing as marketable services? The answer revolves around demand. Under some neo-capitalistic system, they could indeed be marketable services, and under a socialistic system also, they could be services deserving of compensation. The level of the fee or the compensation would depend on the level of a given society’s demand for population, but in every society there is always a demand for at least some level of replacement of population. So your points 2-4 above would be upgraded from handouts to earned compensation.

Even if child-carrying and child-rearing were treated in this way, however, there would not be full equality of opportunity if these activities were to continue to be seen, as at present, as relatively menial occupations. The quip about “brood-mares of the state” would be quite appropriate. Considering the importance of upbringing in relation to whether a child grows up to be an asset to society or a liability, good child-rearing should rather be seen as a prized and highly-compensated set of skills (the most important skill being a hard one to learn — true motherly love).

But even with that “fix” in our framework, skilled mothers might not be as highly valued as top scientists, artists, entertainers and athletes. And still more importantly, pregnant women and mothers would not be equal in a society — either a capitalistic society or a socialistic society — where the demand for population was low.

All the above was probably clarified a long time ago by some feminist writer or other. Where I would differ from pro-choice feminists might be this: I don’t see any of these problems as quite adding up to justification for killing babies.

Both capitalism and socialism are materialistic. I think that pregnant women and mothers will win equality only when their contribution is recognized in a sense that is not materialistic, and when they are compensated, if not by economic independence and opportunity, then by some kind of clout in society that is as good or better. In order for this to happen, society has to recognize that the contribution made by pregnant women and mothers is at least as valuable as the contribution of top scientists, artists, entertainers and athletes. Pregnant women and mothers contribute even if their children are not needed by society in a utilitarian way. Yet their contribution will not always be recognized as long as the calculus is a materialistic one. Their contribution is to give life.

 

2.

We wrote:The full value of this uniquely female contribution cannot be understood as long as the calculus is a purely materialistic one. . . . Thus women’s true equality, including the equality of women with unplanned pregnancies, requires a deep sensitivity to the value of life and the damage done to us all when already-existing life is devalued . . .

Will this day ever come? Please see “What’s in It for the Born?”

 

3.

Here is a comment I recently posted under Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa’s “Can you imagine a world without abortion?”:

 

Recently someone said to me, in relation to pro-life feminist thinking, “Strange to see someone argue that giving people more sovereignty over their own bodies is [patriarchal].”

But “sovereignty” of course means a right to kill their offspring, and it turns out that when you give someone that right, whatever happens next is their own problem — they are on their own. If they decide against abortion and opt to carry the pregnancy to term, then to the father of the baby, and to society, it will seem that they brought the burdens of pregnancy on themselves. And if they decide to raise the child, then it is a much bigger problem yet that they “brought on themselves.” Whereas if they decide to abort, no one will suffer any negative physical or psychological consequences as much as they will (though they undeniable stand to gain something as well).

Can we at least agree on this — that, though it may be paradoxical, pregnant women who DON’T want to abort will be better off in a society where abortion is not a legal option — where they DON’T have legal “sovereignty over their own bodies” ?

So they will be better off, whereas women who do want to abort, assuming they win the small physical gamble they take when they get the legal abortion, would be better off in a society where abortion is legal — better off, that is, in terms of their materialistic situation and ambitions.

Assuming that “better off in terms of their materialistic situation and ambitions” is really better off, in net, for that group of women, then we see that a society where abortion is not a legal option will be better for one group of women and worse for another group of women, and whether it is better for women overall might just depend on how many there are in each group.

And IS “better off in terms of their materialistic situation and ambitions” in fact better off for women who want to abort? A very deep question.

An academic paper, by a woman named Sidney Callahan, on what is lost by women where abortion is legal, is “Abortion and the Sexual Agenda: A Case for Pro-Life Feminism”. It concludes:

“Another and different round of feminist consciousness raising is needed in which all of women’s potential is accorded respect. This time, instead of humbly buying entrée by conforming to male lifestyles, women will demand that society accommodate itself to them.

“New feminist efforts to rethink the meaning of sexuality, femininity, and reproduction are all the more vital as new techniques for artificial reproduction, surrogate motherhood, and the like present a whole new set of dilemmas. In the long run, the very long run, the abortion debate may be merely the opening round in a series of far-reaching struggles over the role of human sexuality and the ethics of reproduction. Significant changes in the culture, both positive and negative in outcome, may begin as local storms of controversy. We may be at one of those vaguely realized thresholds when we had best come to full attention. What kind of people are we going to be? Prolife feminists pursue a vision for their sisters, daughters, and grand-daughters. Will their great-grand-daughters be grateful?”

 

Further thoughts” may be continued later.

 

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

Evolution, and the Humanizing and Uplifting Effect on Society of a Commitment to the Unborn

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

Only a Potential Person?

 

Secular Pro-Life has published an article of mine under their paid blogging program.

 

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 Did Cecile Richards Apologize For?

Deborah Nucatola, a high-level Planned Parenthood official, was caught in an undercover video discussing how they crush unborn children in one way during a normal abortion, but crush them in a different way when they have to fill an order for certain organs — livers, hearts, lungs or intact heads. Meanwhile, she eats lunch and sips wine. After the abortion, Planned Parenthood ships the orders to research companies or the middlemen thereof, receiving compensation in order to break even or possibly “do a little better than break even.”

Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, quickly apologized for Nucatola’s tone. To the public, what had been upsetting about the tone was the lack of compassion for unborn children. But what exactly, according to Richards, was wrong with the tone?

Richards said:

Our top priority is the compassionate care that we provide. In the video . . . one of our staff members speaks in a way that does not reflect that compassion. This is unacceptable, and I personally apologize for the staff member’s tone and statements.

The strange thing about this is that Planned Parenthood’s compassionate care, even as advertising, means compassionate care for the woman only. Little of what Nucatola said (except implicitly, perhaps, what she said about altering abortion procedures for the sake of better specimens, which is not a question of tone) reflects lack of compassion for the woman. Americans were shocked by the lack of compassion for the child, not any lack of compassion for the woman, and Richards knew that.

Richards seems to have been trying to mollify that outrage about the child. And yet she could not say, “one of our staff members speaks in a way that does not reflect compassion for the child,” because that is not how they frame abortion. She may have considered saying “one of our staff members speaks in a way that does not reflect compassion for the clump of tissue,” but understood how that was problematic. So she said —

Our top priority is the compassionate care that we provide [to women]. In the video . . . one of our staff members speaks in a way that does not reflect . . . compassion [for the unborn child, she wants the public to understand, so that they will feel mollified — but she leaves “child” unspoken so she can’t be held to account for admitting that there is a child]. This is unacceptable . . .

— apparently hoping that the short attention span of her listeners would not allow them to notice the segue.

© 2015

 

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

Evolution, and the Humanizing and Uplifting Effect on Society of a Commitment to the Unborn

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

Abortion as Problem-Solving through Might Makes Right

 

Secular Pro-Life has published an article of mine under their paid blogging program.

 

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

Evolution, and the Humanizing and Uplifting Effect on Society of a Commitment to the Unborn

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