This episode is a recording of a talk I gave last week at the University of Canterbury on abortion.
As promised in the episode, here’s a summary of some questions and answers that followed.
Q: What would you say about cases like rape or incest, where the women is going to give birth to a reminder of what was done to her?
A: That’s the hardest type of scenario I think. There are a few kinds of answers I’d give. Firstly, one thing to bear in mind is that even if I said that I thought that rape was a good enough ground for an abortion, that still only allows a very small number of abortions. The proportion of all abortions in New Zealand where the pregnancy is alleged to have resulted from rape is very small.
Secondly, what would we say to a woman with a two year old son who was born because she was raped, if she said that she was going to kill her son because he reminded her of the rape? Although we might feel sorry for her and want to help her in some way, we wouldn’t think it was alright to kill the child. So it seems to me that the idea that it’s alright to kill the unborn child in these cases is trading on the fact that we have a tendency not to be as aware of the status of the unborn child, or the moral factors that I’ve discussed when I gave reasons for deeming abortion immoral. Because the unborn child is , so to speak “out of sight, out of mind,” on a psychological and emotional level we don’t form the same attachment to it, so it’s easy for us to see why killing the two year old is wrong but to at least partly overlook or not notice that wrongness in the case of abortion.
Sometimes when wrong things are done to a person (like rape), there’s no defensible way out of it, even when that involves suffering. That may sound a little harsh, but let me put it this way: Let’s not punish the son for the sins committed by the father. The fact that something terrible was done to you doesn’t give you right to do absolutely whatever it takes to get out of that situation, like by deflecting that harm so that someone else bears the brunt of it, which is what happens when we kill the unborn to alleviate the emotional pain inflicted on the woman.
Q: In your talk you refer to a fetus. Would you go further? Would your argument also apply to an embryo?
It would, yes. there’s no logical reason for it not to. I am numerically identical with an embryo that once lived. The only reason that I refer to a fetus in this talk is that most abortions in New Zealand take place from 8 to 12 weeks’ gestation, which just happens to be in the fetal stage.
Q:You say that abortion should be illegal. Do you think people who carry out abortion should be punished for murder, in the same way a murderer would be?
I don’t know. Saying that it should be illegal is not, of course, to say that it should be murder. The law already treats, for example, infanticide as a distinct crime, not because we think it’s not wrong, but I guess it’s out of recognition of the psychological factors that might come into play. I think that’s really a technical legal question. You have to look at all the relevant way one act might compare to another, there are epistemological questions involved of what the people involved could be expected to know and so forth. So I don’t make any firm claim there. For now I leave that to the lawyers.
ADDENDUM: Although to be clear, I want to say that I lean on the firm rather than lenient side of how serious the repercussions should be.
Q: Some have said that prior to legalisation there were a number of police officers who were willing to accept bribes to look the other way and ignore illegal abortion. So if we make abortion illegal it will increase corruption in the police force. What would you say to that?
A: I think that corruption in the police for is wrong in its own right and needs to be addressed in its own right. This is a consequentialist argument like the following one: If, in some Muslim countries women were not very restrictively required to wear the burqa, it might increase the risk of them being raped. Therefore they should all be required to wear it. I don’t buy that, and it seems morally similar. It really says “there’s this rampant injustice going on, but if we prevent it, then another injustice will rear its head.” My answer is that we then address the second injustice. We become very harsh on police who take bribes.
Q: I don’tknow if it works to appeal to laws written in the past and then to apply them to the abortion issue now. When law is written it might be written for a certain purpose, but a lot of law is made by precedent, the way the courts interpret it.
A: Yes that’s true, the law does work that way. Take for example the US constitution, which guarantees all persons the kinds of protection I was talking about before. People now say that since the courts have decided that the unborn doesn’t count as a person in the sense the constitution used that word, they don’t have the same protections. The way I reply to that is by noting that I have actually argued that the unborn should be regarded as having a status making it wrong to kill, and that the factors that make depriving me of basic protection also make it wrong to do it to the unborn. In this way I am prepared to argue that the courts get it wrong when it comes to abortion.
Q: Some proponents of abortion would agree with your first argument about the prima facie duty. Yes, the baby is the same identity as the fetus, but over time the value changes.
A: Agreed. All I claim to have done with the first argument is to place the burden of proof onto the advocate for abortion rights. If it’s the same entity as a human person, then it is up to those people to provide reasons for seeing abortion as an exception to our normal duty. They offer things like rationality or self awareness, but then I think they allow far too much – more than most of them would be happy with, for example very late term abortion or the killing of young children after birth.
Q: The idea of numerical identity is confusing. What you really need is an argument about the continuity of the life or soul of the baby. I mean, there’s numerical identity between a human being and a piece of your hair.
A: No, there isn’t.
Q: Yes, they are numerically one. If you take that word in the normal mathematical sense, that has to be true.
A: No, that’s not numerical identity. If I have one of me, and then over there is a piece of my hair, how many things is that? That’s two things.
Q: But you said A = A
A: Yes. Let A = Glenn Peoples and H = a piece of my hair. Just because I think A = A doesn’t mean I think A = H.
Q: But numerically they are one. A human being and a fetus are both one. One and one, so they are identical. have you taken maths?
[I'll stop recording this conversation here. It has prompted me to make my next "nuts and bolts" episode on the subject of "what is identity?"]
Q: You talk about taking away a future. But you can take away the future of a dog or a blade of grass. What’s the difference. You talk about taking away a “future like mine”? What does that mean? What’s the moral basis? This is just relativism.
What the argument does is it appeals to moral beliefs that I think my audience or opponent will recognise as true. Of course, I couldn’t appeal to any such truth if I thought that relativism were correct. So the argument’s not relativism. I’ve appealed to a belief that we take to be correct, which we couldn’t do if we were relativists.
Q (OK, not really a question, a comment): Well I think it really smacks of relativism. We need to get to the issue of the soul of the person. I think that demolishes your argument.
Q: We talk about protecting the unborn child. Good abortion law protects the child and the mother. I’ve seen plenty of women going into Lyndhurst [local abortion clinic]…. [This person later told me that he was talking about women being taken in by their male partners, who pressured them into the abortion.]
Yes, if abortion somehow harms women, perhaps it undermines their bodily or psychological integrity, then sure, that might count as a reason to regard abortion as wrong. I think the reasons I have given are more than sufficient, and I think they are the main reasons, but I don’t deny that there may be other reasons.
Glenn Peoples
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Episode 029: Is abortion immoral and should it be illegal? [50:33m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
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Abortion following on rape is not much of an issue in practice. (1) Sexual assault is not very common in New Zealand. (2) If you have been assaulted, you can immediately go to a hospital ER and get a D and C. This makes it impossible for any fertilized egg to implant itself in the uterine wall.
I think that the trackback argument has a lot to be said for it. But I did have a couple reservations about how you presented it.
First, I would not say that I am numerically identical to a fetus (because I’m not one – this just gets back, though, to the dispute we were having earlier about whether numerical identity entails qualitative identity). I would say, rather, that I am numerically identical to something that *was* a fetus.
Second, the premise that I am identical to something that was a fetus is not enough to establish that when I was a fetus I was a person. Compare: I am identical to a husband. I am identical to something that was once a fetus. Therefore, when I was a fetus I was a husband. Obviously something has gone wrong.
I think what’s needed here is a premise to the effect that anything that is a person is essentially a person. That’s a premise that, I think, a lot of abortion proponents would deny. But it strikes me as a plausible one, nonetheless.
BTW, I’d be interested in seeing you do a blog post or podcast on Thompson’s “Defense of Abortion” article (where she lays out her famous violinist example). Her article did not convince me that abortion is in general permissible. But it did convince me that abortion is permissible (or at least should not be illegal) in cases of pregnancy resulting from rape.
Kenny, you know what I think about saying that I\’m numerically identical to something in the past.
And as I said int he debate and the Q and A, all the trackback argument really does is places the burden of proof on the proponent of abortion rights. If something is numerically identical with me, then there needs to be some appeal to other criteria that absolve us of our prima facie duty not to kill it.
And yes, I must say something about Thompson\’s argument. It doesn\’t even convince me that abortion is permissible in cases of rape.
Fair enough point about the traceback argument. I do think that something like it does show the burden of proof is on those who deny the moral status of the fetus.
Also, given what you have said I would be really interested to hear your thoughts on Thompson’s article some time. If her argument does fail to show even that abortion is permissible in rape cases, then (obviously) the rest of her case crumbles. But I also think that one can resist the rest of her case even if one grants that her argument shows that abortion is permissible in rape cases.
I was really impressed that you, as a Conservative Christian, went beyond soley including humans in your defense of why killing is wrong and included some non-human animals. It can get frustrating reading anti-abortion arguments that in the end boil down to saying abortion is wrong since the fetus is a member of the species homo sapiens. Sounds pretty similar to racism to me (and Peter Singer).
If only you could apply this level of thinking to your climate change thinking!
John, I actually do think that there’s something prima facie wrong with killing homo sapiens – and saying that merely having a unique regard for human beings is like racism is rhetorically useful but logically useless. There’s certainly nothing wrong with considering humanity a sufficient condition for making killing wrong.
After all, just making a discrimination between categories is normal and morally healthy, and we do it all the time without any suspicion of wrongdoing.
I didn’t use that claim here because there are other claims that are just as good against abortion and which have a broader appeal.
In the future when we will have to deal with zombies will it be wrong to kill them/deny them a future (ummm similar to ours)?
No. Firstly, they don’t have a future like ours. Secondly, I think our duty not to kill human beings is only a prima facie duty.
What about a half human half cat creature?