What Do You Think of The Person/Human Position In Abortion?

QUESTION: Advocates of Abortion make the case that we only need to consider the freedom, rights and autonomy of the mother because the fetus, might be human but it isn't really a person.  What do you make of that?

ANSWER: I think the distinction has to be made, because abortion on the face it is inhumane.  Everyone everywhere knows, "I was once a fetus."  Therefore, we know instinctively the right we grant to end pregnancies is fundamentally granting the right to (hypothetically) end, me.  But I don't want to be ended, not now, nor even and perhaps especially when I couldn't resist or express my desire to live, when I was most vulnerable and voiceless.

So abortion apologists have always had to work around that very instinctual, visceral repulsion most have to abortion on demand.  We all know why women and men want to end pregnancies and our hearts go out to them.  Babies can be deeply, profoundly, unwanted, inconvenient, ill-timed, because of the threats a new life poses to physical security, career, romantic interests, financial health, etc.  But to grant a right to end a life during pregnancy even for all these exigencies, requires an argument powerful enough it can overcome that respect for life so deeply embedded in our law, and in our consciences, and in our desire for self preservation.

This supposedly is that powerful argument: that a fetus is not really a person with a right to life.  It may be human, a distinct and unique individual entity, but not a person.  Therefore it can be killed, especially in light of the impacts unwanted pregnancy have on individual women's lives.  This personhood argument has two advantages. One, it tries to get around the personal empathic response to abortion by saying, you need not identify with the fetus, because the fetus isn't one of us.  It doesn't have a will or desires.  It isn't conscious or sentient like you so there's no need to imagine yourself as a fetus because it isn't a "self".

Human Embryo - 30 Days

The second benefit of this argument is that it tries at least, to stay up to speed on the science of fetology.  As I made clear in this post, abortion arguments used to center on the idea that the fetus was an "indeterminate cluster of cells".  Though this is sometimes repeated today, it rarely is by people in the know, since science tells us abortion is never accurately described as the removal of a "cluster of cells" - in two ways:

First, because all abortions, even the earliest are never done on a fetus during the first month when it is microscopic in size and lacking the basic embryonic shape we're all familiar with. 


Second, because the human embryo is always, from conception on, a differentiated, separate organism, with its own DNA, its own blood type, its own existence.  It is not the woman's body, it is another body.  A human body; that is exactly like any human body, different only in size, and development.

Ignoring these facts, I saw a meme recently with pictures of an raw egg, an acorn and a silk worm with the tag lines, this is not a Chicken, a Tree and a dress, respectively.  Then the picture of an egg cell with a sperm cell next to it, "this is not a person."  The level of naivety or intentional ignorance involved in this argument is staggering.  No one makes the argument that an unfertilized egg is a person or even a human!  Show a chick in the shell, or a seedling or a dress in any stage of development and compare to an embryo, and the argument is fairer, but then, of course, the argument falls apart!

But there's the larger problem.  Obviously, most everyone agrees that the "merely human" fetus turns into a person at some point.  But when?  Even many abortion advocates know that there is no moment post conception that can be pointed to, to mark the dividing line.  Some concepts are thrown out to define personhood, such as "self awareness" and "sentience", but if these are what makes a person someone with rights, then there are stages and states of adult life where personhood must disappear - can you kill an adult who loses sentience or self awareness or self-consciousness or memory?  But more troubling is simply that these concepts of "personhood" are as absent in babies as they are in fetuses - making them eligible to be killed by the same criteria.

If you think this is a fear mongering tactic, it's actually a simple assessment of the logical end of the argument for abortion from personhood.  No less a thinker than Princeton bioethics professor Peter Singer has said:

Peter Singer

"The liberal search for a morally crucial dividing line between the newborn baby and the fetus has failed to yield any event or stage of development that can bear the weight of separating those with a right to life from those who lack such a right."

He's right.  In this way he agrees with pro-life advocates that there is no ontologically significant difference between the fetus and a newborn. True, there are differences of size, location, dependency, and development, but these are morally irrelevant.  I agree.

But rather than realize the flaw in the personhood argument, because there's no line inside the womb that marks the "dividing line", he doubles down on the personhood argument and admits that not only can we not assign personhood to a fetus at any clear stage of gestation, we can't grant personhood to newborns either!  He goes on: 

Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time. They are not persons.

Accepting that "personhood" is tied to a suite of mental abilities, Singer is forced by implications of that premise to reject birth as a relevant dividing line between person and nonperson.  So, he boldly calls us to lose the taboo against infanticide - a word abortion supporters are usually loathe to use:

“We should certainly put very strict conditions on permissible infanticide, but these conditions might owe more to the effects of infanticide on others than to the intrinsic wrongness of killing an infant.”

In other words, killing babies should have restrictions, but more because of our sentimental attachment to babies, than to the inherent wrongness of the act.  As abhorrent as this may sound, full marks for logical consistency.  Once the value of a human has been reduced to personhood, and personhood has been expanded to a set of traits that bequeath value, this is a rational landing place.

Of course, abortion advocates don't follow Singer's logic publicly because it would likely erode public support, to put it mildly.  Already, pro-choice people are rarely fans of abortion, and a majority see their support as something of a Faustian Deal - sell a piece of your soul to get the promised liberation for women and a world of only wanted children. Most want some restrictions on abortion.

But I suspect that just behind the rhetoric about wanting abortions "safe legal and rare" and behind the agnosticism about when a fetus becomes a person, lurks Singers utilitarian definition of personhood.  

I say this with increased confidence these days, after the recent spate of abortion laws passed to protect and expand abortion "rights".  No more compromise language in these bills, no more sense of abortion being a "difficult decision between a woman and her doctor" and certainly no thought that a line exists past which it would be morally indefensible to end a pregnancy.  No, these bills have sought to protect the right to kill a fetus up to the point of birth.  And they remove penalties for doctors who do not give care to abortion victims born alive.  Is there another word for watching a living, heart-beating infant on a sterile tray, and letting it die, other than infanticide?

https://nypost.com/2019/01/31/the-abortion-debate-the-rha-legalizes-infanticide/

These bills have unmasked that behind abortion is Singer's logic, acknowledged or not.  Of course the Ben Sasse bill was voted down (the one protecting children born alive after an abortion)!  Because everyone knows the deep incongruence and absurdity of allowing a doctor to kill an organism one minute and literally the next minute being forced by law to administer life saving care to that same organism.

But, in choosing consistency, those who killed the bill also chose a chilling kind of acceptance of infanticide over and against the more popular acceptance of a woman's right to chose pregnancy or not.  In the case of a botched abortion, all the popular battle cries remain inviolable, as the mother gets to end a pregnancy, she had the choice.  Yet if life saving care won't be required for a breathing infant outside the womb (no matter what its prospects), it seems there is one more battle cry they missed telling us about: we want the right to a dead baby.  That this doesn't seem the horror that it is, is only possible because personhood in this case is defined, not as viability, nor as sentience, nor as consciousness, but finally as the mother's desire for the baby to live, or not.  If it's inside or outside her womb, heart beating and moving, if she doesn't want it alive, it doesn't get to live.

The personhood argument suffers from deep, deep subjectivity.  Every line it could appeal to is arbitrary:  like the presence of brain waves, or capacity for relationship, or memory, or oxygen in the lungs or looks or heartbeat or consciousness.  The problem is any time you draw any line other than the inception of the child, you end up arguing for a right to kill people outside the womb.  That should scare all of us.

So, either human life has intrinsic value or it only has instrumental value.  If the latter, the bright red line ceases to be the anxious question of "when is a baby a person?".  The bright red line is in reality the unquestioned, unrestricted right of a person to end pregnancies whenever and however they choose - or even, as we've seen with Singer, to end the lives of small children.  When that is publicly admitted, as Singer has done, the veil of moral ambiguity around abortion will lift (for most of us I pray) and this holocaust just might be mitigated or, dear God, end altogether.

What are Your Beliefs About Birth Control and the Right to Choose?

QUESTION:  What are you beliefs on birth control and the right of women to have control over their own bodies?

ANSWER:  

BIRTH CONTROL
The Creation mandate God gave in Genesis is where he called humans to be fruitful and multiply (Gen 1:27).  Some Christians believe this command teaches us that sex should only serve the cause of procreation and thus any expression of sex that doesn’t lead to children is wrong, and so also would be birth control.

But Scripture has much more to say about sex than that one command.

In 1 Corinthians 7 for example, the apostle Paul talks to married couples about sexual intimacy.  And he calls them to not deny sexual intimacy from one another and to be mindful the other’s needs in that area, especially as the culture is so loose with its sexual mores and provides constant temptation to unfaithfulness.  In that whole discussion of sex, children are not brought up (except for a cryptic mention in 1 Cor 7:14).

The Song of Solomon also is a celebration of married sex which is enjoyed for the sheer joy of increased oneness, intimacy and the mutual pleasure it brings.  When Hannah is depressed because she can’t have children, in 1 Sam 1:8, her husband Elkanah tells her that their love and union should be more important than the children who may or may not come from it. 

So sex in Scripture plays a vital role in marital health beyond the utilitarian function of procreation.  Sex is a gift for intimacy and bonding between husband and wife with children as the glorious byproduct of the union rather than the specific goal of it.  Therefore, it seems clear that God grants couples the freedom to determine the size of their families.

The specific subject of birth control is not really considered in Scripture, probably since in the ancient agrarian cultures where it was written, a large family was often your retirement fund and social security.   The only person in Scripture shown to use a crude form of birth control is Onan in Genesis 38:9.  He is condemned by God, not because all birth control is evil, but rather because he is selfishly withholding from his wife the very retirement/social security which a child would bring.

Many cultures in history have practiced other more cruel forms of birth control, which amounted to forms of population control by dealing with unwanted children who could not be afforded or who were born the “wrong” gender, or who threatened political rule.  Killing of babies in battle and infant sacrifice was normative in ancient Canaan, and the Romans abandoned unwanted children so regularly they had identified public places where the “waste” could be dropped off.

Clearly, it would be preferable to have no children than to have children that you let die or actually kill.  The Biblical imperative to provide for one’s offspring makes this very clear indeed (1 Tim 5:8).  If you have limited resources (which most do) some form of birth control is simply a part of being a shrewd manager of the life God gave you.  And isn't it true that even those who believe birth control is wrong, nevertheless still at times practice a form of birth control (abstinence) for this very reason?  If all birth control was bad because the creation-mandate demands that we procreate as much as possible, even abstinence would be bad, and I don't think anyone takes that position.

Therefore, if sex is for other purposes than procreation and if responsible stewardship of limited resources honors God and shows high character, we mustn’t condemn birth control based on the creation-mandate alone.   Couples should be free to use birth control to limit the number of children they have or not have them at all, based on their own pasts, their stage of life, their level of resources, or their calling from God for other ministry.

However, if the choice becomes normative (in the developed world childlessness is reaching crisis proportions) out of pure self interest in order to maintain a more self-indulgent lifestyle, I would be (and am) deeply concerned if the Church followed suit.  Countries whose governments are paying for couples to have babies because it’s threatening their societies, show us that there is an enduring wisdom and moral imperative inside God’s creation mandate to have kids.  In other words, it is part and parcel of the others-oriented, selfless loving call of the Christian gospel, that parenting should be honored and considered normative (while not mandated) for disciples.

ABORTION

About your second question:  The simplest form of the women's rights argument in favor of abortion goes like this: a woman has the right to decide what she can and can't do with her body.   A fetus is part of a woman's body.  Therefore that woman has the right to abort a fetus they are carrying.  Of course the fundamental flaw in this argument is premise 2: the fetus is NEVER a part of a woman's body, as her appendix is or any other 'part'.  The fetus is, from conception, a wholly unique individual, with it's own DNA, it's own blood type, it's own unique existence.

It is, in fact another body.

This scientific fact is in keeping with the value and personhood God places on in-uteri babies throughout Scripture (Deut 21:22-25; Ps 139:13-17; Jer 1:5; Lk 1:41-44).  And so the general rule of corporeal autonomy becomes an argument against abortion rights, not for it.  If women should have control over their bodies, then it stands to reason that no one should have a right to usurp control over someone else’s body.  But with a fetus, that is, in fact, what we have: someone else's body.  To kill somebody else in the name of exercising bodily integrity, is obviously incoherent.

Of course, pregnancy is this amazing state of being where the bodily autonomy of two distinct individuals may come into direct conflict with each other.  Until we find a way to incubate life outside of wombs, this conflict is inevitable and I suspect God would always want it so.  Why?  Because the radical dependency of life at its earliest stages underlines the radical nature of selfless love which God wants to define all of us (Matt 22:39) because these qualities of love define God (1 John 4:16).

So my view of abortion comes down to this:  You have two individuals with the right to life and liberty because they’ve both been made in the image of God.  The less powerful life may be inconvenient or present risk to the more powerful life and so their rights are in conflict.  As in all life, the more powerful is in position to be the “oppressor” of the weak, but love calls us to care for the weak, to defend the cause of the fatherless and the helpless.

In short, love and moral law calls for the one in power to sacrifice for the one who has no voice and no power (Ps 82:3,4).  If God calls us to this way of thinking for the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed, I can’t see why we change this way of thinking when the potential victim of oppression is in the womb. 

Freedom for others isn’t convenient to me.  Love isn’t easy.  Here’s what love is however:  1 Cor 13:4-8, “Love is patient, love is kind. …it is not self-seeking, …It always protects, …Love never fails.”  And so I think abortion is simply a horrible failure to love.

The only argument against this position is to posit that the womb arbitrarily makes any body inside it not true a human individual with rights of their own.  No one thinks that my right to bodily integrity gives me the right to usurp someone else's similar right.  So arguments must be made that a fetus is not a person, or as Christians we might say, not endowed by God with his Image.  Clearly alive, clearly human, clearly another body (scientifically these are inarguable facts) but not a "person".

But the "personhood" argument fails every test of science, morality and logic.  When does “personhood” fall on a human body?  Conception is the only objective choice.  Every other line we might draw is deeply arbitrary:  When brain waves are present?  Heartbeat? Fingerprints?  Oxygen in the lungs?  A spinal column?   Looks?  Sentience?  Ability to feel pain?  Age of Viability (which is getting younger as technology improves)?

These arbitrary lines are actually fault-lines - because the side of the line you stand on has seismic consequences.  We are talking about the line between life and death, the line between constitutional protections and no protections; between taking an innocent life and a benign surgical procedure.

Yet, before the legal arguments get rolling, the unalterable biological fact is so obvious it gets missed: human life begins at conception and continues until death.  The science of fetology wasn't around in 1973, the year the Roe v. Wade decision was made, so maybe we could imagine the fetus was some undifferentiated cluster of cells then.  Not anymore.  The idea that what is killed in an abortion isn't "human" has largely been dropped.  I mean, what else is it in there if it’s not a human? It’s not a dolphin!  This is how human persons begin:  small, helpless, a distinct organism, from one single cell.  There is no magic moment post-conception where “God’s Image” or “personhood” (and thus human rights) falls on them after the fact – at least none that any of us are qualified to judge.

If it's human but not a "person", does this make the birth canal magic?  What pixie dust powers it must have to confer on a previously value-neutral biomass (morally akin to a pancreas) the precious, protected status of “human being”!  Because this is patently absurd, everyone making abortion arguments really knows it is not about the personhood of the fetus at all – abortion is finally about procreative freedom.  Of course, procreative freedom matters – but does it matter more than life?  

I know this is a hard answer to a controversial question.  But it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Christians today oppose abortion.  Christians have felt strongly about abortion since there have been Christians.  Abortion was pandemic in ancient Rome and the Didache, a very early manual for new Christians, instructed disciples thus: “do not murder a child by abortion or kill a newborn infant.” They were guided by their Christ who said, “if you have done it to the least of these brothers of mine, you have done it to me.” (Matt 25:40)

With that ethic of love as our guiding value, Christians ought to still be first in line to defend the cause of the fatherless and the innocent and to sacrifice for them – and to support women who are pregnant in harsh circumstances who are called upon by Love to sacrifice the most to care for “the least”.