The Morality of Abortion: An Ethical Non-Issue
If killing a fetus is just like killing an adult like you or I then it is prima facie seriously morally wrong. This means it is seriously wrong by default and the burden of proof for explaining why it may be permissible in some specific cases rests on those who wish to terminate a pregnancy. Whether it is in fact prima facie seriously wrong is the subject of much confusion. This paper does not argue for a “somewhere in the middle” solution to this issue. Middle-road solutions often aim more for status quo appeasement and an appearance of even handedness at the expense of logically sound conclusions.
This paper will argue for two claims. First, that before a fetus develops the capacity to process pain, there is no ethical concern with killing it. Secondly, that the potential for pain perception alone does not provide enough inherent moral value to grant an organism a right to life, and fetuses lack any qualities that provide you and I with a right to life. Therefore, abortion is morally permissible at any point in pregnancy.
The structure of this paper is as follows. First I will present the most common argument against abortion, called Sanctity of Human Life Theory, and demonstrate why it is unsound. Then I will present the best argument against abortion — more familiar to philosophers than the lay public — which is Don Marquis’ Futures of Value Theory, and demonstrate why this theory is also unsound. Finally I will explain why any moral question must be a question of suffering, and how this leads to the conclusions stated above.
The most popular argument for the immorality of abortion is the Sanctity of Human Life Theory. This argument is usually based in beliefs derived from Abrahamic religions, but basing an argument on unprovable and extremely improbable premises leaves that theory as wishful thinking at best. There is a non-religious version of this theory however, and it is formulated like this.
Premise 1: It is seriously wrong to kill human individuals (i.e. human individuals have a right to life).
Premise 2: From the moment a human sperm has successfully fused with a human egg, the resulting single-celled organism, called a zygote, is a member of the species Homo sapiens (i.e. it is a human).
Premise 3: From the moment a sperm has successfully fused with an egg, the resulting zygote has a complete set of DNA that is genetically unique, and this means it is an individual.
Premise 4: Abortion ends the life of a human individual.
Conclusion: Abortion is seriously morally wrong.
This argument assumes is that there is something unique and morally relevant about membership to the primate species H. sapiens, regardless of an individual’s state of embryological development or what physical and emotional capacities they possess. For this to make sense is to claim moral value is derived from the physical double helix of Deoxyribonucleic Acid, but only when its base pairs are arranged in an order that codes for a member of H. sapiens. This has to be the claim because the morally relevant quality of humans must be commonly shared among single celled zygotes and elderly adults. If such qualities are found only in older individuals, such as certain physical or mental capacities, then it could not extend to zygotes. The only common quality across developmental age is the DNA itself, rather than a trait that DNA bequeaths to human individuals who survive long enough to develop them.
DNA cannot be the source of unique moral worth in humans or any other animal because there is nothing morally relevant about the order in which one organizes a chain of nucleic acids. Unconscious chemicals have no inherent moral value. Since DNA cannot be the distinguishing factor of moral value the philosopher Peter Singer has criticized this theory with the term speciesism. This term comes from the observation that just as race and sex are morally irrelevant categories, so is specie membership. Speciesism leads individuals to preference members of one’s own species over members of another, even when the interests of members of a different species are greater, and this is logically equivalent to racism and sexism.
If on the other hand one wishes to argue that moral value of humans is derived from some quality obtained later in development, then this admits that human life is not inherently sacred. Certainly that the biological life of a fetus is not either. Since zygotes are accepted as human individuals, this theory also suffers from the fallacy of circular reasoning. It aims to prove it is inherently wrong to kill all individuals (fetuses) by assuming this conclusion as its premise. It assumes what it has to prove. The premise that it is inherently wrong to kill human individuals, then, is rejected. The theory is hopelessly unsound, a point which both Peter Singer and the anti-abortion philosopher Don Marquis agree.
Unsatisfied with Sanctity of Life Theory, Don Marquis posits a different theory of killing that attempts to first explain why it is wrong to kill human adults like you and I, and then to extend that criteria to include zygotes. Marquis made his argument in a 1989 paper titled Why Abortion is Immoral where he first asked, why is it wrong to kill us?
Though there can be more than one reason why killing is wrong, we assume that it is primarily wrong because of an effect it has on the person killed. Indeed it must, or else you cannot say that the person who is killed has actually suffered any harm. For this reason it is not enough to cite the suffering induced in friends and family of the person killed as a result of their death, though that is a part of what makes killing wrong, because that does not explain harm we assume is done to the killed individual. As Marquis points out, the effect on friends and family fails to explain why it is wrong to painlessly and instantaneously kill hermits without their knowledge. And we want it to always be wrong to kill hermits. To resolve this, Marquis asserts that what makes killing you or I inherently wrong is that our death causes us to lose all of our potential futures of value. He writes,
“When I am killed, I am deprived both of what I now value which would have been part of my future personal life, but also what I would come to value. Therefore, when I die, I am deprived of all of the value of my future. Inflicting this loss on me is ultimately what makes killing me wrong. This being the case, it would seem that what makes killing any adult human being prima facie seriously wrong is the loss of his or her future.”
This theory has great explanatory power because, if it is sound, it satisfies certain intuitions. For example, explaining why it is wrong to kill hermits but not wrong to kill a person with a terminal illness who freely requests to be euthanized or assisted in their suicide because they know their remaining future is not one of value. It also explains why it is wrong to kill any non-human being that has a potential future of value like ours. This theory extends naturally to argue that killing fetuses, and indeed zygotes, is prima facie seriously wrong because we were once fetuses, and so we had potential futures of value even at that young age. As organisms which have a potential future of value just as adult members of their species do, Marquis concludes it is prima facie seriously wrong to kill them.
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong provided a steelmanned formulation of this argument in his critical essay You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had: A Reply To Marquis On Abortion.
Premise 1: It is morally wrong except in extreme circumstances to cause anything the loss of a valuable future.
Premise 2: Abortion causes a fetus the loss of a valuable future.
Conclusion: Therefore, abortion is morally wrong except in extreme circumstances.
If the first premise is accepted, this theory would demonstrate that abortion is prima facie morally wrong by affording a fetus a right to life. But it would not demonstrate that abortion is impermissible, because a right to life is not sufficient to violate a woman’s bodily autonomy, forcing her to undergo biological changes and immense personal sacrifice while her body is used for the growth of another individual. Those arguments are not included here however because the first premise, and Marquis’ primary claim, is not able to be accepted.
The future is not a thing that exists, and therefore is not a thing which can be possessed or lost. Mental representations of the future may exist in our minds, called self-represented futures, which are the basis of our present desires. But our future itself does not literally exist, only mental representations of what we hope it will be like exist. Furthermore a fetus has no self aware, conscious life. As a body rather than a being, it has not yet developed the necessary consciousness for a present. It therefore has no conception of, or desire for, a future anymore than the fetus of a raccoon or a capybara.
Marquis’ own reasons for accepting his premise are unconvincing. The premise should be accepted, he argues, because a theory based on that premise would satisfy many popular intuitions about killing, and that people dying of AIDS and cancer believe that what makes their situation so unfortunate is the loss of their potential future of value.
First, a premise must be accepted because it makes sense, not because it would satisfy intuitions if it made sense. Intuitions are not universal either, and should be suspect rather than simply assumed since they are often wrong and in conflict with one another. For example, it is intuitively clear to some that homosexuality is wrong because it is “unnatural.” But this is mistaken because nothing we do can ever be unnatural, and this intuition commits the naturalist fallacy. Pestilence, starvation, rape, and venomous snake bites are all natural, but only a morally confused individual would believe this made them good. Moreover, it is intuitively clear to me that there is no equivalence between destroying a single celled zygote and a sentient, self-aware adult. His premise does not satisfy that intuition.
Second, for someone to be harmed by a loss they must experience suffering either from the effects of that loss or the process of losing it. Once you are dead you experience nothing and can suffer nothing, including the change in your biological state from living to non-living. Therefore claiming that death harms because it causes the victim to lose their non self-represented potential futures (the futures Marquis’ theory is actually based on), is not reasonable. It is to claim one suffers harm when no suffering has occurred or, in the case of a young fetus, when it can not occur.
Consider this. Imagine that a robotics lab was in possession of perfect blueprints for constructing a robot with consciousness, self-awareness, memory, intelligence, and sentience similar to equal to ourselves. They then begin to produce these robots in a fully automated factory assembly line. From the moment its assembly begins it is an entity with a potential future of value analogous to a fetus. (It needn’t be an “individual” with a unique computer code. Identical twins are not genetic individuals after all.) Like a fetus, it will not develop full consciousness, let alone self-awareness, until some point after its construction is complete. At most it will develop some minimal capacity to perceive noxious physical stimuli before its body is complete and its software completely online. To reach its potential future it is dependent on the labor of the assembly line putting it together, as a fetus is dependent on the metabolic labor of the pregnant person. Once conscious robots will have all requisite traits necessary for moral equivalence to humans, and therefore have potential futures like ours. By Marquis’ theory, to destroy the incomplete robot at any point prior to its completion would be akin to murdering an adult human like you or I.
One can only suffer the process of dying, which is a part of life rather than death. Dying itself is almost always painful and the knowledge of an abbreviated and less valuable future than you hoped for leads to emotional suffering. Death itself, on the other hand, obliterates a person and their suffering altogether. Though he attempts to formulate a theory that does not depend on suffering, it is inherent to his reasons for why we should accept his premise. Indeed it is inherent to the very distinction of futures “of value.” Any question of right and wrong must be, at its core, a question of suffering.
For abortion to require any ethical consideration, a fetus must be able to suffer. Fetuses lack any of the cognitive capacities that give older humans the ability to suffer mentally and emotionally, meaning they cannot possess the qualities necessary for the right to life we afford specially to older humans. The only question then is when it might be possible for a fetus to experience pain, and how important that capacity is.
Most sources claim that the neurological development necessary for pain perception is not mature until at least 24 weeks of gestation. This is the point at which neural projections from the thalamus into the cortex are mature. Stuart Derbyshire and John Brockman, two researchers with very different views on the morality of abortion, came together to assess the current scientific literature relevant to a fetus’ potential to feel pain and wrote a paper titled Reconsidering Fetal Pain. Though Derbyshire previously asserted that a fetus lacked the neurological development for pain perception prior to 24 weeks, he and Brockman’s review of the scientific literature provides reason to doubt this conclusion. (Both note however that their findings to do not provide evidence for a positive conclusion on precisely when an actual experience of noxious physical stimuli may occur during fetal development.)
A fully developed cortex (a region of the brain) has been assumed to be necessary for the perception of pain. Neural projections from the thalamus into the cortex are necessary for connecting peripheral nerves — which sense stimuli and send those signals up the spinal cord to the brain — to the cortex. They suggest the cortex may not be strictly necessary for pain perception however.
“One study has, for example, demonstrated continued pain experience in a patient with extensive damage to cortical regions generally believed to be necessary for pain experience. A further study has demonstrated activation of areas generally thought to generate pain in subjects congenitally insensitive to pain but receiving noxious stimuli. While certainly not definitive, those two studies appear to neatly dissociate pain experience from the cortex.”
In fact the thalamus, which develops much sooner than the cortex, might be sufficient (though it is far from certain) for pain perception. In a paper titled Neurodevelopmental Changes of Fetal Pain, Curtis Lowery et al. note that “ablation or stimulation of the somatosensory cortex does not alter pain perception in adults, whereas thalamic ablation and stimulation does.”
Immature projections from the thalamus into the cortical subplate, which develops prior to and becomes the cortex, can be present as early as 12 weeks in gestation. Since immature does not necessarily mean non-functional, it currently seems as dishonest to claim that before 24 weeks gestation the neurological capacity for pain cannot exist as it would be to claim that pain is certainly perceptible as early as 12 weeks in gestation. One can only confidently state that the minimal neurological structure necessary for physical pain perception develops somewhere between 12 and 24 weeks.
When the nervous system is developed enough to have acquired the minimum neurological hardware for fetal pain, there remains another complication to what that experience of pain is. The most authoritative definition of pain comes from the International association for the Study of Pain, who define it as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage… pain is always subjective. Each individual learns the application of the word through experiences related to injury early in life.” Pain as we know it is a reflective experience, which is impossible for a being without self-awareness or memories or desires (such as the desire to return to a remembered state where the pain was not being experienced). Whatever a fetus may experience, it is not what older humans experience as pain.
An experience of “pain” as an immediate unpleasant sensation seems possible, but the severity of such an experience is uncertain in light of a given fetus’ stage in neurological development and the insulating, buoyant, sleep-inducing environment of a womb. All conclusions about the possibility of fetal pain are necessarily based on indirect evidence because a fetus cannot communicate pain experiences to us. Though available evidence is therefore necessarily inconclusive, it is robust enough to render some viewpoints completely unsound. For instance, like any claim of fetal pain before 12 weeks of gestation. (A fetus recoiling from a pointy object in the womb has been demonstrated well before 12 weeks, but this is merely a reflex. Reflexes only require peripheral nerves, like those on your fingertips, to be connected to the spinal cord, which receives a signal from the peripheral nerves sends its own signal back to the limb, telling it to recoil. This is done without neural connection to the brain and is possible without conscious experience of pain. This is why when you touch a hot surface your hand recoils whole moments before there is any conscious perception of heat. That perception comes from a signal being sent all the way up to the pain centers of the brain, not merely to the spinal cord. In a fetus that young the signal goes to the spinal cord to elicit a reflex but cannot reach the relevant parts of the immature brain, preventing the possibility of an experience of pain.)
How does the onset of pain perception affect the ethical considerations of abortion? Before a fetus can experience pain there is no ethical consideration about abortion’s permissibility at all. It is a complete moral non-issue. If a fetus could experience pain even as early as 12 weeks, when more than 90% of abortions in the United States occur, then 90% of abortions are complete ethical non-issues. What a relief this should be. Treating first trimester abortion as a moral problem then, let alone one akin to murdering an adult, is an expression of serious confusion on the topic.
After pain perception is possible, whenever that may be, there is an ethical consideration in play, but its not a great one. Even if a fetus were awake in utero and able to perceive a painful stimulus, pain perception alone would only make the fetus the moral equivalent of some non-human animals. Fetal sedation or painkillers could be administered to nullify this consideration during rare second and third term surgical abortions, although it should be noted that anti-abortionists have often used this consideration insincerely in order to add obstacles in the way of people seeking abortions. Pain with or without sedatives is not sufficient to override a woman’s right to bodily autonomy however, and so abortion is not seriously wrong and is permissible at any point in pregnancy after the possibility of pain experience arises.
On the other side of this coin, if the pregnant person feels no great attachment to the fetus and views it only as it literally is, without the morally loaded symbolism society often heaps upon fetuses, then the fetus has neither inherent nor secondary moral value. Even if the pregnant person desires a child but has decided they are unable to care for one for whatever reason, it is their decision alone whether their own suffering will be mitigated by terminating that pregnancy. For this reason, and the unimpeachability of the pregnant person’s bodily autonomy (see A Defense of Abortion by Judith Jarvis Thomson) only the pregnant person has the right to decide whether or not to terminate that pregnancy or allow her body to be used for its development.
The United States Supreme Court is set to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, allowing up to half of the states to criminalize abortion outright for those who cannot afford it. It will remain available to politicians and wealthy individuals within those states. The poor will resort to medical abortions with illegally obtained abortion pills taken without the consultation and aid of a medical professional, unsafe black market surgical abortions, and will suffer the psychological trauma of knowing their government is expending its resources in an attempt to force them to give birth. This will not succeed in reducing the number of abortions however. As Michelle Oberman demonstrated by her comparative research between El Salvador, Chile, and the United States in her book Her Body, Our Laws complete bans on a national level have never succeeded in preventing abortions. And so they will not prevent them while it remains legally available in roughly half the states. Abortion pills are easily available and though they are safer when used under the direction of a medical professional, they are relatively safe for most people capable of doing some research. Doctors, even those who would turn over a suffering woman to the trauma of police, cannot tell the difference between a miscarriage and a medically induced abortion. For these reasons the vast majority of abortions will still occur. The women seeking them will only be made to suffer, while their fetuses cannot.
Most people who have had abortions cite a lack of financial resources as their primary reason for terminating a pregnancy, meaning a large number of abortions could be prevented by making motherhood affordable. But the same political factions most opposed to abortion are those most opposed to policies that would do this. The high cost of motherhood is a policy choice, and that choice, like the enthusiastic deployment of state violence against Latine kids at the southern border and trans kids born within our borders, is not one which is made by people sincerely concerned with the wellbeing of actual children. The inescapable threads of misogyny and cynical political expediency are woven throughout the fabric of anti-abortion activism. Still it is important to know just how confused the claims of those activists are, and to ask them why, if their concern is really about the suffering of children, they have taken up such a position at all.
