I am continuing my rebuttal of the Physicians for Life (PFL) article, “In Defense of Life: Rebuttals to Abortion Arguments.” In Part 1, I addressed the arguments directed at the bodily autonomy of pregnant people. In this post, I am going to address the arguments made about personhood and the ethics of forcing one’s religious morality onto the general public.
My position on prenatal personhood has not changed since my “Why Abortion is Permissible” essay. I still have not found a satisfactory account of personhood that establishes that the prenate is a person with the same right to life as you and me. Likewise, I still have not found a satisfactory account of personhood that establishes prenates are not persons with the same right to life as you and me.
One thing that does strike me about debating prenatal personhood is that, especially for the slave mongers, “personhood” serves as a secular stand-in for ensoulment. This is partly because the anti-abortion stance is pushed almost entirely by religious conservatives, the vast majority of whom would argue God gives people their souls at conception. Or, if one argues that abortion is permissible to a certain point of pregnancy (e.g,. the “quickening”), that person often means this is the point where the prenate has acquired personhood, or in religious terms, a soul. And, usually, a religious person who believes that one acquires a soul either at birth or sometime after birth, if they object to abortion at all, do so on grounds other than prenatal personhood. Physicians for Life, perhaps inadvertently, makes this connection in its article, when it states, “It may not be possible to prove that personhood or 'ensoulment' begins at conception; however, you cannot prove that personhood does NOT begin at conception.”
It also seems to me that even though those who are nonreligious and do not believe in the soul are also, in a sense, using personhood as a secular stand-in for ensoulment. Let’s take Bob Seidensticker’s spectrum argument. If someone has been debating abortion long enough, they will sooner or later run across some variation of the saying, “An acorn is not an oak tree.” Seidensticker develops this saying by pointing out that there are many instances where we know there is a spectrum, and that the thing on one end of that spectrum is certainly not the same thing as that on the other end. While we may not be able to pinpoint exactly where on the spectrum something becomes the other thing, that does not invalidate the fact that, for example, an acorn is not an oak tree. He suggests, and later develops the thought that personhood is an emergent property, rather than an inherent one. But in doing so, he is taking a position that is not that far from what traditional Christianity has said about ensoulment for more than 1900 years.
Given the quasi-religious nature of the term “personhood” and its beginning, I am going to engage the personhood portions of PFL’s article using both secular and religious arguments. In doing so, I am not saying I can prove that God exists, souls exist, and that they are acquired at a particular point. Nor am I making an argument that they do. I am taking this approach for two main reasons. First, I am engaging the slave mongers on the basis of common ground. Second, since I am going to engage the ethics of forcing one’s religious stances on the general public, the contrast between my religious views and the slave mongers is relevant to that discussion.
So, let’s start with defining what a person for the purpose of this essay. A person is a being whom, for whatever reason, it is presumptively wrong to kill. With this definition, I want to highlight two aspects. First, this does not assume that only humans, or even that humans in all stages of life are persons. If that “whatever reason” applies to other species, whether on Earth, other planets, or other dimensions, then those species would be also be persons. It also means that the “whatever reason” has to exist for the individual member of the given species. So if that “whatever reason” does not apply to, say, prenates, then it would not be presumptively wrong to kill them.
Second, to say it is presumptively wrong to kill a person is not the same thing as saying it is always wrong to kill them. It does mean that: 1) if it is presumptively wrong to kill such a being, then such killing has to be justified and 2) the reason for the wrongness of killing such a being is not “because [insert situational circumstances].” In other words, it is not presumptively wrong to kill non-person beings, although there may be reasons other than personhood that will generate moral outrage in the killing, (e.g., excessive cruelty). So if we were to determine that, say, infants, are not persons, and we still want to say killing them is wrong, we would have to do it on grounds other than personhood.
But it also means that killing persons is not always wrong either. It simply means the general rule is that killing a person is wrong. Killing a person may be justified, as in cases of self-defense or the execution of murderers. What this means is that even if we determine it is presumptively wrong to kill prenates, this would not in itself settle the abortion debate. We would still have to determine whether abortions are justified.
In “Why Abortion is Permissible,” I wrote that I believe that humans probably do not acquire personhood until birth. I base that position on Scripture, especially Genesis 2:7//Moses 3:7//Abraham 5:7 and 3 Nephi 1:13. This is consistent with the scriptural view that the “breath of life” is what distinguishes the living from the dead (e.g., Genesis 7:22, Job 33:4, Psalm 104:29, Ezekiel 37:10, and obliquely Ether 15:31). Exodus 21:22-25 only mandates a fine for causing a miscarriage while applying lex talionis should further injury befall the pregnant person. Numbers 5:11-31 prescribes a ritual whereby a jealous husband may make his wife undergo a trial by ordeal that, if she fails, results in her womb discharging and her uterus dropping, with no concern over the fact this will result in a miscarriage if the wife is pregnant. Finally, all those passages that require being born again as a condition of salvation (e.g., John 3:3, Mosiah 27:25, Moses 6:59) presume one was born the first time around. From Genesis to The Articles of Faith, Scripture shows a remarkable lack of concern for prenatal life, especially if we are meant to believe a person has a soul from the moment of conception.i
This scriptural view comports well with reason. It seems absurd that God would bequeath a soul on a newly fertilized zygote when 73% of them will not survive implantation and be flushed out in the next menstrual cycle, and up to 3% more will not make it until birth under normal circumstances. I believe God is rational, and it staggers the imagination that God would be so wasteful in distributing souls.
Furthermore, ensoulment at conception raises unanswered questions. Consider monozygotic twins, where one zygote is split either naturally or artificially into two or more embryos. If ensoulment occurs at conception, that naturally leads to the conclusion that each of the identical twins split the one soul between them. Yet it is usually maintained identical twins are separate persons with their own souls. However, this requires mind-boggling ad hoc explanations when the simpler explanation is that ensoulment occurs sometime after conception.
Or consider tetragametic chimerism, which occurs when two fraternal twins merge into one embryo. If ensoulment occurs at conception, that naturally leads to the conclusion that the tetragametic chimera has (at least) two souls. I have yet to get a straight answer from a slave monger to the question of how many souls a tetragametic chimera has. Hydatidiform moles also form from fertilized eggs, which, if ensoulment occurs at conception, would mean it would be presumptively wrong to kill them. Yet not even the most extreme slave monger goes this far, although they can not give me a straight answer to why hydatidiform moles are not persons.
The simplest answer that would account for all these phenomena is that the earliest point ensoulment happens sometime after conception, and probably sometime after implantation as well. It also seems most reasonable that if ensoulment does occur before birth, it would happen at some point where it is clear the fetus will be born and survive in the natural course of events. Anencephalic fetuses and sirenomelic fetuses, to cite two examples, probably do not have souls.ii
With these preliminaries out of the way, let us turn to the PFL article. In section one, the first argument is the slippery slope argument that if you can not pinpoint exactly when you became a person, you need to accept that you were a person from the moment of conception. This argument is handled quite readily by the spectrum argument outlined above. But given the preliminaries I have established, we may be able to say more.
Recall my definition of a person is a being that is presumptively wrong to kill for whatever reason. Also recall that the “whatever reason” which makes a being presumptively wrong to kill may or may not apply to the being at all stages of the being’s life. The implication of the slippery slope argument presented here is that merely being human is the “whatever reason.” However, this raises all sorts of questions that the slave mongers have problems answering without ad hoc explanations. For example, what about hydatidiform moles, which are also began with fertilization and also has nothing added to it except what is provided by the person with a uterus’ body and the time to grow? But if it is not presumptively wrong to kill the hydatidiform mole, that would suggest that merely being human is not the “whatever reason” that makes something human a person.
My religious mythology points both to the “whatever reason” and provides the cut off date for when a human becomes a person. In the creation stories recounted in the books of Genesis, Moses, and Abraham, God formed Adam from the dust of the ground. Adam had a human body, but it was not a living soul until God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. When Jesus told Nephi that he would come into the world the next day, Jesus’ body already existed in the form of the fetus in Mary’s womb. It was not until birth Jesus came into the world.
Obviously, you do not have to accept my religious beliefs in this matter, and I certainly do not expect Physicians for Life to accept my religious beliefs, either. But this is an exercise you can perform for yourself. If I were to ask you what makes a person a person, most of you would probably respond with a list of traits, e.g., intelligence, sentience, consciousness. Or you might respond by saying it is the physical structures of the brain which gives us intelligence, sentience, consciousness. Or you might have some other response. I am not going to dictate your “whatever reason.” However, I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that however you answer my question, your “whatever reason” either developed or was acquired sometime after conception. And this would mean even though you have been human since conception, you were not always a person.
In the next argument, PFL points out that we can treat fetuses and even directly operate on them for conditions such as spina bifida. It urges the slave monger to ask who the patient is in such cases. I honestly do not see the relevance here. Since I have never reviewed patient listings for such cases, I cannot answer that specific question. However, I have taken my dogs to the vet, and it has always been the dog that is identified as the patient, no matter what vet I go to. Does this mean my dog is a person?
I would leave my answer at that, but there is something I want to highlight about this argument. We should ask the counter question, “How does the doctor get to the fetus to operate on it?” The answer, of course, is through the pregnant person’s body. Notice how the pregnant person is totally ignored here. It’s almost like only fetuses exist according to Physicians for Life. This is a theme we will return to.
Physicians for Life next urges the slave monger to ask pro-choice advocates if they can provide a description of what it means to be viable. Yes, I can—when the lungs are formed enough that the prenate can breathe on its own outside the womb. I call this natural viability because it is the definition that does not rely on medical technology to make it true. Medical viability is defined as the point where, given advanced medical technology, at least half of neonates born at that stage will survive. While I have reservations about this definition, I am not going to challenge it in this essay.
Either way, I am not sure what point PFL is trying to make here. My guess, based on the next question, is that the question is directed toward late-term abortions, which are rarely performed and then for reasons of extreme fetal abnormality or because of serious threats to the health or life of the mother anyway. In the United States, late-term abortions are usually limited to those reasons, thus asking about viability is a moot point. In terms of personhood, the question would only be relevant for those for whom the “whatever reason” applies to pre-viability prenates anyway.
The next argument goes directly into late-term abortion territory by asking pro-choice advocates to consider the case of two people with uteruses, both of whom became pregnant the same day. One gives birth at six months to a premature but healthy (unlikely, but I will grant it for the sake of discussion) baby. The other decides a week later (apparently just because this person is a heartless bitch) that they do not want to have a baby. Then the pro-choice advocate is asked why the first person could not kill the newborn but the second person could be allowed to abort.
For one answer, see the section addressing viability in “Why Abortion is Permissible.” Does PFL seriously think pro-choice advocates have never thought about the question? I’m guessing these slave mongers figure that even if the pro-choice advocate does not believe the personhood does not begin at conception, surely they would have developed or acquired personhood by viability.
Physicians for Life does not want the slave monger to accept the answer that one is born and the other is not on the grounds that this is merely a difference in location. But in my religious beliefs, and speaking directly to personhood, the born infant has acquired a soul while the fetus has not. So for me to say because one is born and the other is not does not just indicate a difference in location. It indicates a difference showing that it is presumptively wrong to kill the infant while it is not presumptively wrong to kill the fetus.
For section one of the PFL article, I have presented, as much as possible, answers to the slave mongers’ arguments with both secular rebuttals and responses derived from my religious beliefs. The secular responses show their arguments do not prove anything about prenatal personhood, while the religious responses help provide the basis for a later argument down the road.
Section two has only one argument, which is meant to address the pro-choice argument that no one can say with certainty when a fetus becomes a person. I quoted this section above while discussing personhood and ensoulment. Acknowledging that ensoulment at conception cannot be proven, the slave mongers’ argument is to “err on the side of life.”
At first glance, this argument seems reasonable enough. But in fact, the argument is deceptively cruel. Let me explain.
What does it mean to err on the side of something? To err on the side of caution means not to take unreasonable risks so we are not injured or killed. With regard to people, it means to give a person the benefit of the doubt in dubious situations. For example, in criminal law, if jurors find a reasonable doubt in the prosecutor’s case, they have the duty to give the defendant the benefit of the doubt, that is, to err on the defendant’s side and find them not guilty. If someone tells you a story that is not intrinsically implausible, you tend to believe that story unless and until presented with evidence the story is not true. Not only is this simpler than radical skepticism, but erring on the side of the storyteller’s truthfulness helps build personal relationships, while explicitly or implicitly accusing the storyteller of lying without evidence assaults their dignity for no good reason. To err on the side of love is to treat others how you would like to be treated instead of what you think they deserve. In short, to err on the side of a person is to respect that person’s rights and dignity.
This is not what Physicians for Life is asking you to do if you doubt prenatal personhood. What they are asking you to do is side with may-or-may-not-be-a-person prenates against unambiguously-a-person pregnant people. What they are asking you to do is deprive pregnant people of their rights, including but not limited to: their right to life, liberty, and security of person; their right to be free from slavery; their right to be recognized as a person before the law; their right to equal protection under the law; their right to be free from torture; their right to bodily integrity; and their right to decide when and if to have children. And they are asking you to do this even though the pregnant person has done nothing wrong, and in cases of rape, even though it is the pregnant person who has been wronged.
Erring on the side of life would be valid if the prenate had an independent existence and all one had to do is let it be for it to develop on its own. But this is not the case, and once again PFL totally erases pregnant people as if they did not exist, did not have rights of their own, and did not have interests of their own. To “err on the side of life” in this case is to deny the personhood of the pregnant people.
When it comes to may-or-may-not-be-a-person prenates and unambiguously-a-person pregnant people, it is clear whose side we should err on: pregnant people.
Section three is meant to address the pro-choice arguments that prenates may be humans, but not necessarily persons. Here, I am going to combine and respond to both tactics pressed here because they are both the same tactic with different follow-up questions. Both tactics encourage the slave monger to detail the differences between a human and a person. Then based on the assumption that the pro-choice advocates responses are also applicable to born people or fails to actually distinguish humans from persons, asks questions like, “What other groups of persons can be killed for any reason?”
I will engage in some “philosophical mumbo jumbo” for a moment, despite the slave mongers’ desire to avoid it. It is exceedingly difficult to get a handle on what exactly constitutes a person. One thing we can be pretty sure about is that human and person are not necessarily synonymous. I am not merely talking semantics here. We can easily conceive of non-human persons and it would not violate the law of noncontradiction. Even if we cannot easily define what a person is, if characters like Kal-El, Spock, Legolas, or E.T. really existed, we would have no problem identifying them as persons. Setting aside these fictional characters, serious arguments are being made that other existing species qualify for personhood, especially bonobos and orca. Indeed, traditional Jews, Christians, and Muslims certainly believe in a non-human person: God. Still, the only beings universally recognized as persons are members of Homo sapiens. Does this philosophical reflection get us anywhere here? Perhaps. I would suggest that even if we cannot necessarily agree what a person is, we would know a person if we interacted with one, once communication barriers like language differences were overcome.
This leads to a practical thought experiment that I think will help answer the questions PFL want the slave mongers to press. Take any ten beings that are universally recognized as persons with the right to life. Now consider a newborn infant and a fetus. For the purpose of this experiment, the infant is not unambiguously a person, that is, an infant's status as a person is questionable. As in real life, the fetus’ status is not settled either. What do all the beings who are unambiguously persons have in common? All are homo sapiens, most certainly. All were conceived by a sperm combining with an egg (at least so far), most certainly. They were all also actually born.
Now, it is easy to see that prenates and infants both have the first two things in common with beings universally recognized as persons with the right to life. Infants, however have that third thing in common with unambiguously recognized persons, whereas prenates do not. Therefore, a neonate, even one born after only 23 weeks gestation, is a person with the right to life, while the prenate, even at 23 weeks gestation, is not. Birth does intrinsically change things.
On the religious level, my answer is fairly simple. A person is a being that has a soul. Not all members of the human species have souls, because souls are acquired at birth. And the answers to the questions flow naturally from there.
I am going to skip the next section for now since it has nothing directly to do with prenatal personhood. Section five presents the pro-choice advocate saying, “The fetus is a potential life.” I do not see this happening very often, and when it does, “life” is usually used as a synonym for “person.”
In any case, the slave monger’s response is to point out such a saying would be insensitive and belittling to a person who has suffered through a miscarriage. And for once, PFL is absolutely right. Any person saying something like this to someone who lost a wanted pregnancy should be chastised. One does not have to believe the prenate is a person to comfort and aid a person who lost a pregnancy they wanted.
As a side note, it is interesting that this is the only place in the entire article where Physicians of Life actually treats pregnant people as human beings. Apparently pregnant people are only persons if they want their pregnancies and would grieve their loss. Either way, the argument itself does not say anything about the personhood of the fetus.
The next argument is that dogs produce dogs, whales produce whales, and nobody has any problem recognizing this. Why do pro-choice advocates have problems recognizing the fetus is a human being since it was produced by human beings? I have no problems in saying that a dog zygote is a potential dog. We just do not have separate terms for dog zygotes as we do with acorns and oak trees. A dog fetus is a potential dog the same way a human fetus is a potential human being. But until personhood is actualized for the human, it is not a human being.
At this point, I am going to skip over the other arguments and address section twelve. I have already dealt with section nine in Part 1. I will come back to the skipped sections in later post(s).
Section twelve deals with the religious argument. Specifically, it is attempting to answer the pro-choice advocate arguing against imposing religious morality on people.
First, let’s get the outright lie out of the way. Susan B. Anthony did not call abortion “child-murder.” If she had an opinion on (the legality of) abortion, she kept it to herself. She was far more concerned that laws about abortion were being promulgated even though those most directly affected by those laws (i.e., women) had no vote on those laws.
Speaking of which, one thing really struck me when I first read Justice Harry Blackmun’s majority opinion in Roe v. Wade. The opinion gave a historical overview of anti-abortion restrictions. Interestingly enough, there were few legal restrictions on abortion until the birth of feminism and anti-abortion measures became more restrictive the more traction arguments for women’s suffrage gained. I cannot definitively say whether this association is causal or casual, but I am convinced that it is not coincidental.iii
PFL does make the point there are also atheist and agnostic slave mongers, but let’s face it, the anti-abortion movement is driven primarily by religious people. Atheist and agnostic slave mongers are so few in number there would hardly be an abortion debate at all without religious conservatives driving it.
Medical textbooks do not define whether something is presumptively wrong to kill, so PFL’s contention they need only consult one instead a church to see if abortion is violently killing a person is merely begging the question.
Now we come to the final question of this section, which directly ties to their main argument: “Would a religious argument favoring the legalization of abortion be treated the same way as a religious argument opposing it?” PFL acknowledges there are religions that allow pregnant people to have abortions. And I certainly do agree that the majority of laws are based on some moral code. But then it goes on to make the absurd argument that legalizing abortion forces immorality on them.
This is why I detailed my religious beliefs in an essay that is already overly long. It should be obviously, painfully clear that my religion supports abortion rights. So let’s say I became king of the world and proclaimed that henceforth and forever abortion is to remain legal. What am I forcing you to do? Nothing. What am I prohibiting you from doing? Nothing. Which of your rights am I violating? None.
So if I were to stake my case for legalized abortion on my religious beliefs, would it be treated differently than a religious case against it? I presume my argument would be treated more favorably, but not because it is a religious argument. It would be treated more favorably precisely because my religious beliefs about abortion forces nothing on no one. Even if my religious beliefs were dismissed by others as crazy, they would acknowledge my beliefs hurt no one.
In contrast, if PFL successfully imposes their religious views into law, it forces pregnant people to gestate, effectively making them state-sanctioned slaves to the prenate. In addition to violating the rights I outlined above, it does so regardless of the pregnant person’s religious beliefs about prenatal personhood. If a pregnant person’s religious beliefs require them to have an abortion in certain cases, PFL would outright violate that person’s freedom of religion. And that would require a damned good secular case if we are going to accept a mass violation of pregnant people’s rights, something PFL does not have.
In my next post, I am hoping to mop up the rest of PFL’s argument, but that will depend on long that essay is. I am hoping that, at most, I will need only two more posts to completely deal with the PFL arguments. Please continue to bear with me.
[Updated 14 Dec 2020; 22 June 2021; 30 June 2021; 26 Oct 2021]
iI am, of course, aware of Scriptures or at least interpretations that may indicate ensoulment happens sometime before birth. It is not my intent here to do more than lay out a general outline of the scriptural case for ensoulment at birth. However, I will note that seemingly contrary passages, even if granted, do not require us to push ensoulment back to conception.
iiIt is not my intent to lay out all the fetal abnormalities that would probably prevent ensoulment given this reasoning. It should also be pointed out that even my stance that ensoulment occurs at birth can be problematic under this reasoning as well. For example, there are numerous birth defects where the infant would not survive for long after birth but for modern medicine. One could ask whether such infants were given souls only after modern medicine made it possible for them to survive. Scriptures like Leviticus 27:6 and Numbers 3:15 may reflect a certain amount of uncertainty given this problem.
iiiKatha Pollitt makes the connection between the anti-abortion stance and “women’s growing freedom and power.” However, she does not make a specific link between Women’s Suffrage and the criminalization of abortion in the late 19th century. Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights (pp. 32-33). Picador. Kindle Edition.
