by John Paul Nunez
As a bioethics student, I’ve encountered several challenging arguments in favor of abortion. In my research on the subject, there have been several authors who’ve forced me to think about the issue more deeply and to sharpen my arguments against it.
But there are also some pretty bad arguments out there. In popular-level discussions about abortion, you’ll often hear pro-choice advocates use arguments that completely miss the point and that show a lack of familiarity with the arguments on the pro-life side. In this post, I want to point out four such arguments and show how they’re really nothing more than red herrings.
The first bad argument for abortion is the idea that you can be personally against it, but you shouldn’t force your beliefs on others. People who use this argument often say that the pro-life view is a religious belief, but in America we’re all free to choose whatever religion we want (including not having any religion). The problem with this argument is that most people who are pro-life believe that abortion is murder, so it doesn’t make any sense to be personally against it while supporting it as a legal right for others.
Would you be personally against committing murder but in favor of allowing others to do so? No, of course not. So this argument misses the whole point of the pro-life position. If abortion really is murder, then nobody should be allowed to do it. Period.
Furthermore, the pro-life view isn’t just a religious belief. There are legitimate philosophical arguments against abortion (for example, the ones I’ve advanced in some of my previous posts) that don’t appeal to God or to any religious traditions. Now, you may disagree with these arguments and think that they don’t really prove that abortion is murder, but that’s different from simply dismissing them as religious beliefs without actually engaging them head-on.
The second bad argument for abortion is that a woman can do whatever she wants with her body. You’ll often this argument expressed in pithy slogans like “My body, my choice.” The idea here is that the government can’t tell a woman what to do with her body, so it can’t tell her not to have an abortion. But the problem with this argument is that if abortion really is murder, then it’s not about the woman’s body; it’s about the child’s life. And the government can tell a woman not to murder her child. So like the first argument, this one completely misses the point of the pro-life view.
Proponents of abortion have to first argue that a fetus isn’t a person with a right to life, and only then can they say that a woman has a right to do whatever she wants with her body. Skipping the first part is putting the cart before the horse. You can’t talk about bodily rights without first showing that a fetus really is just a part of a woman’s body.
A third bad argument is that it’s a women’s issue, so men have no right to tell a woman that she can’t have an abortion. We men don’t know what pregnancy is like, so we can’t tell women that they have to endure nine months of it. But again, this argument only works if fetuses don’t have a right to life. If they do, then it doesn’t matter who can get pregnant. If a fetus has a right to life, then a man has just as much of a right to point that out as a woman does. It’s a philosophical issue, and whether or not we men can get pregnant has absolutely nothing to do with our ability to understand, evaluate, and espouse the arguments on either side.
The last bad argument for abortion is that it should be legal because women will keep having abortions even if it’s not, and we should at least ensure that they will have them in safe environments (instead of in back alleys with rusty equipment). By now, the flaw in this argument should be clear. Would you be in favor of safe murder? People are going to keep committing murder even though it’s illegal, so we should legalize it to ensure that they’ll be safe while doing so. Of course we shouldn’t; that’s absolutely ridiculous. And the same is true of abortion. If it really is murder, then we shouldn’t legalize it just to ensure the safety of mothers who kill their children.
There’s a common thread running through all four of these arguments: they all assume that fetuses don’t have a right to life. And if that assumption is true, then these really are good arguments. If a fetus doesn’t have a right to life, then there’s no reason why all women should be banned from having abortions even though some may choose not to. And if a fetus doesn’t have a right to life and is just a part of a woman’s body, then pregnant women should be able to do whatever they want with them.
But we pro-lifers don’t grant that assumption. We believe that fetuses do have a right to life, so the first thing a successful argument for abortion must do is show that this belief is incorrect. But as long as pro-choicers don’t do that and instead simply present these four arguments by themselves, they’ll remain red herrings that just miss the point.
14 Responses to Bad Arguments for Abortion
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I actually agree with *everything* you said in this post, *except* for the claim that you have previously advanced “legitimate philosophical arguments” against abortion in previous posts, for said arguments actually rested upon equivocation and circular reasoning. (I even think that there *are* legitimate philosophical arguments against abortion, that is to say, arguments worth serious attention, not necessarily sound ones. You just haven’t given us any yet.)
But you’re quite right that the four main “pro-choice” arguments you’ve given are lousy. Of course, so are so many of the standard pro-life arguments, resting on irrelevant claims like “the human fetus is human, not another species”, or “abortion stops a beating heart”. As Andrew pointed out a few weeks ago, there are lousy poster/bumper sticker arguments on both sides of many contentious debates, including this one. You haven’t advanced arguments quite that bad, of course; I merely note that the practice of giving oversimplified arguments pervades both sides of the debate, and it’s worth noting this before we go on to consider the more serious arguments of each side.
You’re also right that “the pro-life view isn’t just a religious belief.” Yet it might be reasonable to conclude that *most* pro-life people hold their views for religious reasons only, after seeing that their *best* arguments rest upon assumptions which beg the question. For example, after seeing your own technique of repeatedly assuming, using a myriad of locutions, that some entity is the “same” entity in a morally relevant sense as some later being, in the course of an argument purporting to prove precisely that identity, one may suspect that there is some further motivation for reaching the conclusion other than rational consideration of the evidence. And when it is part of a set of moral views argued for on varied but equally absurd grounds, all of which so just happen to be on a list of moral views that a specific religious authority has ordained for his followers, a list shared in toto by almost no one outside of that particular religious tradition, then guessing that /this/ may be the real source of the position is tempting indeed.
Yet even I don’t think there are /only/ religious motivations for the pro-life position; there are complex emotional inclinations to care for potential human life, long before it becomes fully sentient and developed. There is a serious question of how much we are ethically obligated to take such impulses into consideration, even when they lack a rational basis. Our natural inclinations may indeed have some moral weight simply because it’s hard to resist them and doing so can be disruptive, and perhaps they lead to moral behavior in normal contexts. For example, the tendency to avoid cannibalism and generally dispose of human bodies quickly without morbid examination are very strong and not usually worthwhile to fight, and may keep many of us out of a good bit of trouble. But if one has crashed in the Andes, or discovers that medical knowledge can be advanced through autopsies, then we have good moral reasons to override our impulses. These impulses may still have some moral weight, but we must put that weight into context with greater good, or with the very goods they normally serve, but may fail to do so in some cases upon careful examination. I suspect that a great deal of the appeal of the pro-life position is like this; it is a plausible extension of the quite understandable value that expectant families and those who sympathize with them place on a developing human life. Yet as understandable as that value is given our evolutionary history and emotional make-up, we should not mistake it as being the conclusion of a rational argument for identifying that value with the the value we *must*, logically, place on other beings who actually can value things as we ourselves do. Nor should we let this motivation confuse us into thinking that other, circular arguments are rational ones.
1 and 3 are irrelevant. 2 and 4 are not.
4 first. Concerns about harm reduction are admittedly pretty minor if indeed abortion is murder. But they are still morally relevant, and they still might have serious heft if a pro-life case showing abortion to be similar to murder doesn’t work, but a lesser case showing abortion is sub-optimal, regrettable, or to be discouraged does. Then a harm reduction case can be pressed that despite abortion being regrettable, keeping it legal is the least harm causing policy (the moves would mirror the debate surrounding drug legalization).
The bigger problem is 2. Bodily integrity and autonomy commonly motivates arguments for abortion. Further, such arguments are deployed even if one grants (if only arguendo) full personhood to the fetus. Given you’re a student of bioethics, you should be aware of Violinist-type examples attempting to show that certain violations of bodily integrity or autonomy (like pregnancy) can be ‘opted out from’ even if such opting out kills someone. On it’s face a position like “I can never be morally obligated to another human being the bodily demands of pregnancy, and I am morally ‘within my rights’ to terminate any such arrangement”, or “Given there is no criminally actionable duty to rescue, there should not be a criminally actionable duty to carry to term”, can’t be facilely dismissed as ‘bad argument’.
So it’s just wrong to say that people making this sort of case need to answer the prolife case about personhood first – that our answer to the personhood question answers the abortion question. Violinist-type arguments are precisely engineered to try and show that pro-choicers can grant pro-lifers the personhood question without needing to concede anything about abortion. Thus the demand that “first thing a successful argument for abortion must do is show that this belief [that the fetus has a right to life] is incorrect” is (ironically) itself a bad argument, or at least a bad misunderstanding of the arguments in play.
I think the article makes some excellent points. The violinist argument in its own way only emphasizes the problem pro-choice advocates face. For starters it relies on a highly artificial situation. If abortion rights are so defensible, why do we have to make an analogy about someone plugged into another person via a tube. I suppose the idea is to create some sort of visual similarity to the umbilical cord while removing the argument from any idea of motherhood or responsibility or an infant. It is also interesting that abortion doesn’t simply disconnect the fetus from the mother. For the violinist argument to be more accurate one would have to be faced with the choice of directly killing the violinist via forceps poison burning or puncturing his skull and removing his brain. To be more accurate the connection between the violinist should at least be a familial one. And the connection via the violinist and the “donor” would have to be naturally occurring.
The other big problem with the violinist argument is that it is just not convincing. A lot of people tend to see the donor who refuses the violinist as heartless and selfish; and it is not very hard to see why. After all, the Violinist through no fault of there own is totally reliant on the donor and all that needs to be done is for the person who already finds himself attached to the violinist is to put up with some shortness of breath and a few other symptoms that while bothersome and tiring will not kill them except in the rarest of cases. Cases where the other side will most reasonably allow for disconnection. Add to that the fact that the violinist is a family member the donors own son or daughter. Many people would walk through fire for their own kids without a second thought. I suppose pro-choice advocates can try to make the argument that parents don’t have to walk through fire for their kids or provide for them with anything but the bare minimum that the law enforces on child supporting parents and deadbeat dads but at this point such a comment only serves to highlight an apparent lack of genuine human feeling and justice.
I think the violinist argument only serve to highlight how most pro-choice strategies out there only seem to work in so far as they distract from the actual situation the mother and child are facing. A strategy that underscores a lack of confidence in ones own ideas and principles.
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The violinist argument is made by Judith Jarvis Thompson in her essay “A defense of Abortion” for anyone who is not clear on the exact analogy she uses. At first glance it seems pretty reasonable. No one has the right to take over and use someone’s body without their permission, because each person has the right to bodily autonomy. The question is whether or not the unique situation of being pregnant falls into the category governed under that principle and whether someone’s right to bodily autonomy is more important than someone else’s right to life. The unborn child is in the only place she is supposed to be, not comparable to an intruder who enters into space not her own, or a stranger who is all the sudden hooked up to your body. In fact, the very purpose of the uterus in a woman’s body is to be used for /someone else’s/ body. The unborn child does not make a conscience choice to be in someone else’s body, receiving a proper nourishing environment, but being conceived and growing in the uterus is the most natural of processes. All human beings start out this way inside their mother. And yes, while generally speaking, one person does not have a right to use someone else’s body, it does not mean that one can do whatever you wish to rid yourself of the person using your body. In the case of the violinist, you would not have the right to reach over and stab the violinist to free yourself. While you may choose to unplug yourself, that action is not what kills the violinist. He was already dying from another disease. By stabbing him, your action is what kills him. Relating that example to a pregnant woman, having an abortion would be the equivalent of stabbing the violinist to free yourself from him. Unlike the violinist, the unborn child was perfectly healthy and not dying of any disease. She was in a perfectly natural, healthy environment and removing her from it would be the cause of her death, not some pre-existing unhealthy state.
The violinist example is really only is analogous to the situation in which a woman is raped and becomes pregnant. In other situations, the woman has consented to the action that causes the pregnancy to occur. This doesn’t mean she wanted, or intended to become pregnant, and may have even taken measures to try and prevent it from occurring but the natural, biological consequence of sex is conceiving a child. With this in mind it seems like we have an obligation to be responsible for the consequences of our actions, in this case the new, dependent and completely vulnerable human being that was created through the action of having sex. Seeing as Thompson grants that the unborn child is a human being with a right to life, the woman then has a duty to respect that right to life and not take it away by allowing the child to be killed by abortion. She also does not consider that the right to life may be stronger, or take precedence over the right not to be bothered or inconvenienced in some way, which does not even seem to be a right in the first place.
The duty to be responsible for the consequences of one’s actions doesn’t seem to be adequate to show why her claim is not applicable to children conceived by rape. In this case, the women did not consent to any actions which caused the child to come into existence. However the child does now exist and according to Thompson, has a right to life of its own. Without choosing to become one, the woman who was raped is now a mother, albeit through tragic and undoubtedly very painful circumstances. We should consider the fact that we normally assume parents have moral obligations towards their offspring that they do not have towards strangers. If a parent neglected to feed, or clothe, or clean their child we would consider that child abuse and the parents would have to suffer the consequences of neglecting their duties in that way. They therefore have to use their bodies, to work for example, to keep their children alive. It does not follow that a person must do that for strangers. It might be a virtuous thing to help a stranger or a child who is not your own, but you are not neglecting your duty by not going out and feeding every hungry child, and you would not face legal consequences for failing to do so. Even if a woman was raped, the child who was conceived is still her offspring and she therefore still has a moral duty towards it.
I actually never found Thomson’s violist argument very compelling, and think that Mary Anne Warren’s “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion” makes a better argument directly against the personhood of the fetus (agreeing that *this* is indeed a key factor is one of the few points on which I agree with John Paul Nunez). Indeed, Warren gives some argument against Thomson which I find compelling (and agree with some of those given on this blog).
But—I think that your claims here beg precisely the question at issue, Alanna, and perhaps one of the (few?) virtues of Thomson’s argument is precisely that it can help us challenge certain prior intuitions, by describing all the supposedly essential biological aspects of the dependency of one body on another, but in a strange situation so that our usual intuitions may not apply; if what we used to “suppose” to be true no longer seems so in the analogous case, this provides motivation for challenging our earlier suppositions.
You also beg the question by assuming that the embryo is “supposed” to be where it is. By whom? And again by claiming that the “purpose” of a woman’s uterus is to be used by someone else. This merely rests upon a simplistic and absurd natural function argument. Under the same terms, I think I know the purpose of your vagina: to be entered and inseminated by a penis. I could suggest some candidates…but perhaps you demure, and presume to demand the right to choose *which* or indeed *whether* you want this or that person’s organ in you? Take your objections here back to the case of the uterus, and you’ll understand why the fact that *you* might suppose that a certain body should occupy a certain uterus might be reasonably objected to by the very person whom the uterus belongs to.
Well again, I’m no great fan of the violinist argument; yet your response is clearly inadequate. For if these were truly the important factors, it would follow that if we could abort a child by causing it no harm, merely by inducing an early birth or perhaps even teleporting it intact outside the womb—to its inevitable death, assuming no one steps up to provide it with nutrition and a substitute womb—then this would be OK. But I doubt that you or most abortion opponents think that.
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