In addressing the
matter of abortion, Singer lists a number of standard liberal arguments for
abortion. First, he points to the moment of birth as the most obvious way of
setting a point at which killing the fetus becomes unacceptable. This is the
one, in his words, that “would suit liberals best” because it is instinctively
harder to agree to the killing of a being that “we can all see, hear , and
cuddle” than one to which these do not apply (Singer, Writings on an Ethical
Life, 147). In short, Singer points to the fact that this dividing line
really reflects what we might call an aesthetic issue, and given the arguments
for earlier chapters in this book, it should not be a surprise that aesthetics
offers a plausible foundation for ethical thinking.
Yet, as he proceeds
to comment, birth is still somewhat arbitrary. The fact that children can be born
prematurely and survive birth indicates that at some point in the womb they
have the same features and the same capacity for awareness and for experiencing
pain (Singer, Writings on an Ethical Life, 147). We might recast this as
saying that the aesthetic arguments on which the “birth as dividing line” view
rests are based simply on our inability to see the child in the womb, and thus,
they are demonstrably arbitrary. This is one of the reasons why sonograms have
significantly changed attitudes to abortion: they have not changed the nature
of the child in the woman, but they have changed the aesthetic experience of
such children by adults. Passing through the birth canal really does not change
anything except the immediacy of others’ experience of the child.
A second liberal
argument for abortion that Singer examines is that of viability, the point at
which the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade drew the dividing line.
Singer finds this position lacking on two counts. First, there is a need to
provide a justification for why viability should hold such a key place in the
pro-choice argument. Second, viability is itself an elastic category, subject
to the level of available medical science and care and thus subject to the vicissitudes
of both time and space. A viable fetus in the twenty-first century may not have
been viable in the sixteenth, and a viable fetus in modern Manhatten may well
not be viable in today’s Mogadishy. Are the metaphysics of personhood and concomitant
questions of the sanctify of life to be simply the functions of happenstance
regarding where and when the woman conceives? Nor is total dependence on the
mother for existence an argument that gives the mother sovereign rights of life
and death over the child. There are numerous contexts in which one person is
totally dependent for survival on another in which we do not regard the latter
as having the right to kll the former (Singer, Writings on an Ethical Life,
148).
Singer also addresses
other ways in which liberals have attempted to establish a decisive boundary
beyond which abortion is unacceptable. He dismisses the idea of “quickening,”
or the moment when the soul enters the body of the child, signaled by the baby’s
first movement, as a piece of theological mystification. He also reject s the
moment at which the child feels pain as arbitrary—though here he points to the
fact that the pain argument achieves neither what pro-lifers desire (protection
of the child from harm from the very moment of contraception) nor what
pro-choices desire (because it pushes the boundary for abortion to the very
early stages of pregnancy when the woman might not actually know that she has
conceived [Singer, Writings on an Ethical Life, 149-50]).
Singer also rejects
the argument that abortion laws simply drive abortions underground, making them
illegal but not stopping them. That, he notes, is an argument against abortion
laws, not an argument in favor of the moral legitimacy of abortion considered
in itself (Singer, Writings on an Ethical Life, 150-51). He also rejects
the idea that, as a “victimless crime” analogous to homosexual acts between
consenting adult males, it should be outside the scope of legislation. This
notion falls because the very debate about abortion is really a debate about
the status of the baby in the womb and thus about whether abortion can
therefore be categorized as involving a victim (Singer, Writings on an
Ethical Life, 151-52).
Finally, he addresses
the standard feminist argument that the fetus is part of the woman’s body, for
her to deal with as she chooses. In the cases of rape and incest, this
reasoning is particularly powerful: the woman can then argue that she has an alien
being in her body, parasitically dependent on her for its existence. Singer
rejects this argument un utilitarian grounds: if the overall effects of
aborting the children was worse than keeping the child (viewed in terms of the
overall happiness that would accrue to the world through the birth of another
human being), then the woman has no absolute right to dispose of the child as
she chooses, however difficult the situation might be in which she has found
herself through no fault of her own (Singer, Writings on an Ethical Life,
152-55). (Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural
Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution [Wheaton,
Ill.: Crossway, 2020], 317-19)