Monday, June 7, 2021

Carl Trueman on the Problems of Pro-Abortion (so-called pro-“choice”) Arguments

 

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)