Abortion is the destruction of an entity. Yet this simplistic depiction does little to expose the underlying reasoning necessary to decide upon the moral permissibility of abortion. What can be exterminated safely without moral impact, and what should we be careful to preserve? Characteristics specific to the objects obviously play a role in such a determination.
But which traits are significant? It seems evident that for practically anything beyond the animal kingdom, we humans accept the morality of self-betterment irrespective of the negative effects we might inflict. This seems reasonable, as edible plants and useful minerals do not seem capable of feeling distress in any conceivable manner. Following this logic, few individuals have qualms concerning harming or even killing that which cannot perceive its own demise — nonconscious beings. This, too, seems intuitive since consciousness is prerequisite to suffering. Under such a view, the controversy of abortion is resolved quite cleanly in light of the factual evidence that a fetus simply is not conscious.
But is this really how we ought to condition our evaluations? Is the ability to perceive discomfort through conceptual awareness in those affected by an action a necessary condition in the moral judgment of that action? I think this is not the case and would like to present a counterexample to dispel any such impressions.
Imagine your mother is in a serious car accident. She undergoes major neurosurgery, and the doctors place her in a medically induced coma to protect her brain from potential damage due to increased intracranial pressure. She is expected to make a full recovery.
You’ve never really gotten along with your mother and would stand to inherit her large estate if and only if she were to die in the next week. Having watched many medical television shows, you are confident that you would be able to fake her death as a complication of her current state. But is the proposition of murdering your unconscious mother really devoid of ethical considerations? Would killing her for profit be morally identical to cutting down a tree for lumber?
I think most would reject this claim and accept that the preservation of non-conscious individuals can, at least in some cases, hold weight, rather than accept the necessary outcomes of the alternative view. Of course, this does not demonstrate that abortion is immoral, but merely that one naturally attractive line of justification leads to ridiculous consequences and thus is probably not a justification with which we should be satisfied.
So why do we have ethical qualms regarding the murder of the mother in the above situation? By changing one variable and holding all others constant, we can infer the answer. Imagine the same scenario, but in this case your mother had an adverse reaction to the barbiturates used to induce her coma and will die in the coming weeks. In this case, the decision to kill your mother seems to have a smaller ethical component, and one would certainly find it much more reasonable to do so. This example demonstrates that we value expected consciousness — of which present consciousness is an infinitesimal subset. Such an account is logical because it takes into account all predicted ramifications of our actions.
Our finding should not seem so surprising. As pragmatic thinkers, humans anticipate the future. This interpretation explains why the accidental death of a child is more tragic than the accidental death of an elderly man in hospice care. More potential years of consciousness are lost. We don’t value children because of what they can do and what they are. We value children because of what they have the potential to do and what they have the potential to become. Obviously, the next step is to generalize this argument to include fetuses, which have nearly the same expected consciousnesses as newborns do and thus should be valued equivalently. But even so, this is not enough to justify a pro-life stance.
Fetuses may have sizeable worth, but why should anyone be legally required to experience massive inconvenience and pain to maintain that worth? There are actually universally accepted precedents for this — child rearing and animal breeding. As a society, we hold that individuals are morally responsible for that which they create, and this logic should apply to fetuses analogously since what we should truly value is the potential consciousnesses of individuals.
So, the parents of a fetus are morally required to act in its best interests, and thus abortion — the destruction of this potential consciousness — is unethical.
Personally, I believe the argument I’ve presented above is unsound. But as it would be prohibitively easy and meaningless to write a pro-choice piece at Brown, I thought I’d just share some of the issue’s more interesting considerations to make people question their assumptions for once.
Andrew Powers ’15 can be reached at andrew_powers@brown.edu and will respond to all questions and comments.
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