Abortion

Margaret Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921 and Planned Parenthood in 1942 to promote the voluntary use of contraception and forced sterilization of “those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.” [2] Her work arose from the social eugenics movement, which sought to encourage desirable traits and diminish undesirable traits in the general population. In practice, eugenics functioned as a pseudoscientific rationalization for racial segregation. Planned Parenthood insists that “Sanger never described any ethnic community as an ‘inferior race’ or as ‘human weeds,’” [3] without noting that she utilized the phrase to identify the poor and marginalized who spread “feeblemindedness” through reproduction. [4] She established a family-planning clinic in Harlem—the first with a Black staff and advisory board—and disseminated contraceptive techniques to Black doctors through “The Negro Project,” with the support of civil rights leaders such as W.E.B. DuBois and Mary McLeod Bethune. Her paternalistic and dehumanizing rhetoric indeed “caused irreparable damage to the health and lives of generations of Black people, Latino people, indigenous people, immigrants, people with disabilities, people with low incomes, and many others,” as Planned Parenthood admits. [5] She did not, however, promote abortion, which was a particularly dangerous procedure during her lifetime. Planned Parenthood evolved into America’s largest abortion provider after the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling that nullified various state restrictions on abortion in 1973 and cannot easily distance themselves from Sanger’s eugenic vision, given the disproportionate impact of abortion on Black and Latino communities.

Judith Jarvis Thomson: "A Defense of Abortion"

Judith Jarvis Thomson and Mary Anne Warren formulated influential cases for abortion immediately prior to federal legalization, which shaped the abortion debate for decades. Thomson employed colorful thought experiments to demonstrate that fetuses are not entitled, as a rule, to use the bodies of women for gestation in her 1971 essay, “A Defense of Abortion.” [6] First, imagine that the Society of Music Lovers surgically attaches a famous, ailing violinist to Hananiah for dialysis without his consent. Thomson maintained that he is morally permitted to detach the violinist, even though the violinist would die. By analogy, women are morally permitted to abort their fetuses in cases of rape. Or imagine that Hananiah would die due to the stress on his kidneys. Again, he is morally permitted to detach the violinist; and, by analogy, women are morally permitted to abort their fetuses during life-threatening pregnancies. [7]

Second, imagine that Mishael is enjoying a quiet night at home when an airborne “person-seed” drifts through a defective window screen, implants in his plush carpet, and sprouts a person. Thomson insisted that he is morally permitted to uproot the “person-plant,” even though he intentionally opened the window. By analogy, women are morally permitted to abort their fetuses in cases of consensual sex when contraception fails. She concluded that women are not generally obligated to endure pregnancies for which they are not entirely responsible, on the assumption that fetuses have no natural right to commandeer women’s bodies. Abortion may be “indecent” in some cases, she admitted, but not unjust. [8]

A spurious disanalogy between the violinist, the person-plant, and a pregnancy involves the distinction between killing and allowing to die. By detaching the violinist, Hananiah denies him life-giving access to his kidneys; and, by uprooting the person-plant, Mishael denies him the safety of his carpet. Strictly speaking, they do not kill the violinist and person-plant but allow them to die. Neither analogy, therefore, is applicable to post-viability abortions, in which fetuses are destroyed. Fetuses are, of course, also destroyed in pre-viability abortions but, as Michael Watkins asks, “does anyone think that it would be morally better to surgically remove a nonviable fetus without killing it, knowing that it cannot survive outside the womb? So, the active-passive distinction, whatever moral weight it might have in some cases, would seem to be irrelevant for morally evaluating cases of abortion.” [9] Since most abortions occur before viability, the distinction between killing and letting die is, to Watkin’s point, largely moot.

A substantial disanalogy concerns the purposes of Hananiah’s kidneys, Mishael’s carpet, and a woman’s womb. Hananiah’s kidneys are meant to filter his blood, not the violinist’s blood. Mishael’s carpet is meant to cover his floor, not to incubate a person-plant. By contrast, the womb is the natural environment for a fetus, ordered toward conception and gestation. Opponents of elective abortion insist that the right of a fetus to gestate supersedes the bodily autonomy of his or her mother, and to characterize pregnancy as enslavement or intrusion is disingenuous. A fetus draws on maternal resources and occupies his or her proper place in accordance with nature, not as the result of a devious scheme or arbitrary happenstance, and cannot be characterized as an imposition, like the violinist or person-plant. In life-threatening cases, the mother’s right to life must be weighed against the fetus’s right to life; in other cases, the mother’s bodily autonomy must be weighed against the fetus’s right to life and right to gestate. Proponents of elective abortion may reply that the appeal to natural function does not necessarily override considerations of bodily autonomy, but the point remains: Thomson’s analogies avoid the critical question altogether by depicting peculiar scenarios with no analog to the right to gestate and, thereby, fail to address a principal pillar of the anti-abortion position. [10]

Thomson denied that women bear inalienable obligations to their fetuses “by virtue of their biological relationship”; yet supposed that “if a set of parents do not try to prevent pregnancy, do not obtain an abortion, but rather take it home with them, then they have assumed responsibility for it, they have given it rights, and they cannot now withdraw support from it at the cost of its life because they now find it difficult to go on providing for it.” [11] But how do one’s parents “give” her protections against physical harm that she does not already possess in virtue of being a human? And why should voluntary consent to parenthood entail binding rights for children? More plausibly, women bear parental responsibility at conception because the overriding right of a fetus to gestate places duties on his or her mother. Thomson’s crude analogies trivialize the mother-child relationship. Motherhood is not a cost-benefit analysis but an indispensable model for varieties of sacrificial love and care, without which humanity is morally bankrupt.

Mary Anne Warren: "On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion"

Alternatively, Warren argued that fetuses are not persons, or members of the moral community to whom we owe moral duties, in her 1973 essay, “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion.” [12] She asserted that persons exemplify five personal characteristics (PCs) that facilitate moral interaction: consciousness, self-awareness, rationality, communicability, and free will. But, since adults cannot morally interact with embryos due to the absence of PCs, embryos are not persons. In other words, some early-stage genetic humans (and, presumably late-stage, declining genetic humans) are not moral humans.

Arguably, fetuses do not perceptibly acquire personhood at a definitive stage between conception and birth. Thomson admitted that “the prospects for ‘drawing a line’ in the development of the fetus look dim… we shall probably have to agree that the fetus has already become a human person well before birth.” [13] Viability is arbitrary, depending on the state of medical technology, and developmental accounts of personhood are vague. One need not possess the self-awareness of Marcus Aurelius, the rationality of Aristotle, or the communicability of William Shakespeare to be a member of the moral community. How much of an individual characteristic is enough for personhood? How many characteristics must one exemplify to qualify as a person?

Warren could not specify because PCs are epistemological rather than ontological criteria for personhood, meaning that, while we recognize personhood in other beings by detecting active personal characteristics (APCs)—that is, the occurrent exercise of one’s PCs—APCs do not determine personhood. Suppose that Azariah falls asleep and ceases to exemplify APCs. Does he cease to be a person? No, one might wake him and observe that he is a person. He exemplifies immanent personal characteristics (IPCs)—that is, the capacity to promptly exercise one’s PCs—whether he is awake or asleep. Suppose further that a doctor subjects Azariah to a medically induced coma such that he ceases to exemplify IPCs for nine months. Again, he does not cease to be a person but exemplifies embedded personal characteristics (EPCs)—that is, the temporarily inactive capacity to exercise one’s PCs—through the course of his coma. The doctor will medically wake him and observe that he is a person. What, then, is the relevant difference between his EPCs, by which he will demonstrate personhood in nine months, and an embryo’s natural personal characteristics (NPCs)—that is, the gestational capacity to exercise one’s PCs—by which she will, also, demonstrate personhood in nine months? Perhaps Azariah is a person during his coma because he was a person prior to his coma, whereas an embryo is not a person during gestation because she was not a person prior to conception. To be exact, only human beings exemplifying EPCs, which entail prior personhood, are moral humans. Human beings exemplifying NPCs, which do not entail prior personhood, are mere genetic humans. So, would an embryo who lived a past life be a person? Assuming that pro-abortionists are inclined to deny that reincarnated embryos are persons, prior personhood is irrelevant to their judgments about whether comatose individuals or fetuses are moral humans. And, since personhood does not mysteriously emerge after conception, genetic humans are moral humans.

The Lord forms, calls, and enthuses persons in the womb. David sang:

You formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them (Psalm 139:13-16; cf., Job 10:8-9, 31:15; Psalm 22:10; Ecclesiastes 11:5).

The psalm, being poetry, does not provide medical details about whether personhood begins at conception or a later stage of development. Nonetheless, the inference that God intimately relates to individuals from the formative stage of life is valid. He called Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Paul while in the womb (Isaiah 49:1, 5; Jeremiah 1:5; Galatians 1:15). And John the Baptist leaped for joy by the Spirit in Elizabeth’s womb upon hearing Mary’s voice (Luke 1:41-44). Again, such passages emphasize that God personally invests in certain individuals from the formative stage of life.

Excursus on Exodus 21:22-25

Exodus 21:22-25 pronounced the Mosaic penalty for striking a pregnant woman such that “her children come out”:

When men strive together and hit a pregnant woman, so that her children come out, but there is no harm, the one who hit her shall surely be fined, as the woman's husband shall impose on him, and he shall pay as the judges determine. But if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

The main interpretive issues concern whether “come out” (יָצָא, yatza) refers to premature birth or miscarriage, and whether “harm” applies to the child or to the mother. On one reading, the penalty for causing a premature birth was a fine, while the penalty for causing a miscarriage was death. On another reading, the penalty for causing a miscarriage was a fine, while the penalty for killing the mother was death. [14]

The grammatical details ostensibly support the premature birth reading. Yatza frequently indicates descendancy (e.g., Genesis 15:4; 1 Kings 8:19; 2 Kings 20:18) or live birth (e.g., Genesis 25:25-26; Genesis 38:28-30; Job 1:21, 10:18; Jeremiah 1:5, 20:18) unless context clues indicate a miscarriage (e.g., Numbers 12:12; cf., Job 3:11). “Miscarry” (שָׁכֹל, shakol; e.g., Genesis 31:38; Job 21:10; Hosea 9:14) appears in Exodus 23:26 but not Exodus 21:22. And the explicit subject is “her children” (יְלָדֶיהָ, yeladeha; e.g., Genesis 21:8; Exodus 2:3; Ruth 4:16; Isaiah 9:6) rather than a “stillborn child” (נֶפֶל, nephel; e.g., Job 3:16; Psalm 58:8; Ecclesiastes 6:3). The passage may be ambiguous about whether harm to the child or mother demands retribution because punitive protections applied to both. It does not definitively assert that retribution applies when the mother, alone, is harmed.

The historical context, however, favors the miscarriage reading. [15] Adjacent ancient near eastern law codes—Sumerian, Hittite, Babylonian, and Assyrian—imposed fines on those who caused miscarriages. The famed Code of Hammurabi levied penalties depending upon the class of the injured woman: 10 shekels of silver for the fetus of a noblewoman, 5 for the fetus of a common woman, and 2 for the fetus of a slave woman. The code also prescribed vicarious capital punishment for killing a pregnant noblewoman [16] but imposed fines for killing a pregnant common or slave woman. Middle Assyrian law, alternatively, imposed fines for some acts of intentional or negligent feticide and capital punishment for others, including self-managed abortions. Russell Fuller concludes that such laws “were primarily concerned with legal status, not with personhood. So the argument that differences in punishments imply differences in personhood fails.” [17] Hence, set in historical context, the miscarriage reading of Exodus 21:22-25 does not suggest that fetuses are less than a moral humans. Neither does it imply that elective abortions are permissible. After all, ancient near eastern law codes unanimously penalized miscarriages due to negligent or intentional harm, not to mention self-managed abortions.

The earliest Christian sources consistently condemned abortion. The Didache warned, “you shall not murder a child by abortion, nor kill a child at birth.” [18] And Tertullian explained that “there is no difference whether you destroy a child in its formation, or after it is formed and delivered. For we Christians look upon him as a man, who is one in embryo.” [19] Athenagoras of Athens, Hippolytus of Rome, Basil, and Jerome denounced the use of abortifacient drugs. Apparently, the Septuagint rendering of Exodus 21:22-23—"if two men strive and smite a woman with child, and her child be born imperfectly formed, he shall be forced to pay a penalty: as the woman's husband may lay upon him, he shall pay with a valuation, but if it be perfectly formed, he shall give life for life” [20]—did not persuade the church fathers that elective abortions are permissible. Nor did they regard fetuses as mere genetic humans, even though the Greek translators took significant interpretive liberties by introducing developmental language—“imperfectly formed” (μὴ ἐξεικονισμένον) and “perfectly formed” (ἐξεικονισμένον)—that is absent from the Hebrew text.

Footnotes

[1] Many consider the terms “pro-abortion” and “anti-abortion” pejorative, today. They were considered descriptive prior to the widespread popularization of the terms “pro-choice” and “pro-life.” I use the terms non-pejoratively.

[2] Margaret Sanger, "Apostle of Birth Control Sees Cause Gaining Here; Hearing in Albany on Bill to Legalize Practice a Milestone in Long Fight of Margaret Sanger—Even China Awakening to Need of Selective Methods, She Says," New York Times, April 8, 1923.

[3] “Opposition Claims About Margaret Sanger,” Planned Parenthood, https://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/facts-figures/fact-sheets-reports. The emphasis is mine.

[4] See chapter 4, “The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded” in Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization (New York, New York: Brentano’s Publishers, 1922).

[5] Planned Parenthood, “Opposition Claims About Margaret Sanger.”

[6] Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1.1 (1971): 47-66.

[7] Thomson invented another thought experiment, involving a rapidly growing child in a tiny house, to further stimulate the intuition that abortions are morally permitted during life-threatening pregnancies (Ibid., 52-53).

[8] In response, Mary Anne Warren lamented that “we would almost certainly conclude that it was necessary to look carefully at the particular circumstances in order to determine the extent of the woman’s responsibility and hence the extent of her obligation. This is an extremely unsatisfactory outcome, from the viewpoint of the opponents of restrictive abortion laws, most of whom are convinced that a woman has a right to obtain an abortion regardless of how and why she got pregnant” (“On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,” The Monist 57.1 [1973]: 46). Warren, consequently, encouraged proponents of abortion to contest fetal personhood so as to secure unrestricted legal access to abortion.

[9] Michael Watkins, “Re-Reading Thomson: Thomson’s Unanswered Challenge,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 20.4 (2006): 45.

[10] Watkins notes that “critics of Thomson have often complained that her examples are unlike cases of pregnancy, and students often balk at the bizarreness of those cases. However, if one were to offer an argument by analogy concerning abortion, either pro or con, the examples employed would have to be bizarre in order to be nearly analogous. There’s just nothing like pregnancy except for pregnancy” (Ibid., 52). Thomson’s analogies are not bizarre but inapt. They are intended to show that a fetus’s right to life does not entail a woman’s obligation to gestate. But the anti-abortion point is that a fetus’s right to gestate entails a woman’s obligation to gestate.

[11] Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” 65.

[12] Warren, “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,” 43-61.

[13] Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” 47.

[14] Major English translations that opt for an explicit premature birth reading include the New International Version, the New American Standard Bible, the New King James Version, and the Amplified Bible. Translations that opt for the miscarriage reading include the Good New Bible, the Revised Standard Version, the New American Bible, and the Contemporary English Version. The English Standard Version and the King James Version, among others, leave the phrasing as ambiguous as yatza allows. John Ellington remarks that “those who are using the so-called ‘Base-Model Approach’ should not be misled by the fact that both RSV and GNB follow the miscarriage interpretation without any acknowledgement that there exists another possible view of the text… the translators owe it to their readers at the very least to acknowledge the other possibility in a footnote” (“Miscarriage or Premature Birth?,” The Bible Translator 37.3 [1986]: 337).

[15] Historical translations and commentaries, from the Septuagint to Martin Luther, also affirm the miscarriage reading. John Calvin may have been the first commentator to recommend the premature birth reading in Commentaries on the Last Four Books of Moses.

[16] The daughter of the assailant was executed.

[17] Russell Fuller, “Exodus 21:22-23: The Miscarriage Interpretation and the Personhood of the Fetus,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 37.2 (1994): 173.

[18] Didache: The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (Zeeland, Michigan: St. Ignatius Orthodox Press, 2014), 7.

[19] Tertullian, The Apology of Tertullian, trans. William Reeve, The Ancient and Modern Library of Theological Literature, vol. 31 (1709; repr., London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden and Welsh, 1889), 32.

[20] The standard English translation of the Septuagint is Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton, The Septuagint with Apocrypha: Greek and English (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 2003). 

Biblical quotations are from the English Standard Version, unless otherwise noted. 

Cite as Merchant, Sanjay. "Abortion." Trinitas Social. https://www.trinitassocial.com/ethics/abortion.