On Abortion

Abortion is a pretty big issue, and can be pretty emotional at times. I’ve been thinking about it a bit recently, and I’m writing about this, hoping that I can write it in a way that no-one can disagree with. If that’s possible. I want to outline the issues, provide a couple of arguments for and against, but at the end of the day I’m not going to conclude it all. Well, I’m going to try…

My first point I’d like to make is that the debate around abortion is not primarily about whether or not you believe it is ok to kill another human being. It is primarily about when you believe life begins. If you believe that human life begins at conception, then you will likely fit in the so called ‘pro-life’ camp, and be anti-abortion, believing abortion is killing a human being. If you believe that human life begins at birth, then you are likely to fit in the so called ‘pro-choice’ camp, believing that abortion is not killing a human being, and therefore the woman should be free to make their own choice. Of course, it’s possible to believe that human life begins at a time between these points, and people have varying degrees of certainty in their belief of when life begins.

The key point is that your belief about when life begins will determine what you think of abortion. And the problem is that it’s really hard to come up with a consistent argument for what constitutes human life. There just isn’t an easy answer. What I’d like to look some ways we can try to use to determine when life begins, and make a bit of a comment about them.

• The Potential to become Human. The argument is that once conception has occured, if the embryo is left uninterfered with, it will eventually become human.
  However, a good number of viable embryos do not make it to full term, and therefore each embryo represents a chance at human life, not a definite human life. Are we allowed to try and alter such probabilities? Perhaps. On one hand, if I throw a grenade into a room that may or may not contain people, the fact that the room only contained a chance of having people wouldn’t be a justifiable reason for throwing the grenade. On the other, if we must in all cases preserve any and every potential human life, then we must ensure that every egg has it’s maximum chance of being fertilized. Most people consider abstaining from sex acceptable behaviour.
• Unique Genetic Code. Once conception has occured, a cell with a distinct genetic code is formed. If we define human life on the basis of a unique genetic code, then life begins at conception.
  A couple of things need to be taken into account here. First, a person is more than their genes. Identical twins have pretty much identical genes, but they are different people, and each entitled to their own unique human life.
  Second, in every human being there are a number cells that have different genetic codes, as the consequence of mutations, and even as part of normal functioning (when B Lymphocytes are being produced, their genome is shuffled to produce different antibodies). If you define a human life simply on the basis of a distinct genetic code, you will need to consider each of these cell populations to be human lives. Cancer is has a unique genetic code, but we don’t consider cancer to be a human life.
• Physical appearance, based on Embryology. Using this criteria, something is alive if it resembles a human being. You’ve probably seen photos of little fetuses, who are only so many weeks old, but they’ve already got fingers, and by the time they’re four weeks old they have their own heart, etc… So, abortion is wrong after the first few months of pregnancy.
  This method can tend to be very subjective, when we need some objective criteria, otherwise it’s just based on a gut feeling, and what if my gut feeling disagrees with your gut feeling. The objetive criteria needs to exclude non-human embryos, which in early stages can resemble human embryos. The other thing we need to take into account is that someone doesn’t lose their humanity if they are disfigured. If someone were scarred beyond recognition, do they lose their humanity? If losing the appearance of humanity doesn’t mean losing humanity, then it follows that gaining the appearance of humanity doesn’t mean gaining humanity.
• Sentience / Consciousness. If something can think, then it is alive. If we use this criteria, abortion is wrong after the fetus has become self aware.
  There are a couple of issues with this. Firstly, if I lose consciousness, I remain human. People are not entitled to kill me in my sleep, just because I’m not awake. So perhaps a better definition would be the capacity for consciousness?
  Secondly, how do we know if fetuses have consciousness? We can’t ask them when they’re in the womb, because they can’t speak, and we can’t ask them when they can speak, because by the time they’ve learnt the language required to answer such a question, they will have forgotten.
• Independence from Mother. If something can exist on it’s own, then it is alive. So once a baby can survive on it’s own, it’s effectively human. Using this criteria, abortion is ok up until an age when it’s sufficently developed to survive on it’s own (so you’d need to look at how young a preterm birth can be, yet still be viable).
  On the other hand, a new born is still dependant on the Mother until it’s old enough to look after itself. In fact, some babies don’t really become independant until their twenties…