(EDITOR'S NOTE: The following article is lifted from Contemporary Issues In Bioethics, authored by Tom L. Beauchamp and LeRoy Walters, pp. 215-221. The article tries to present an ethical analysis on the issue of Abortion and Personhood as well as theoretical basis (grounding) for any moral judgment about the matter in question. As many would expect, a purely philosophical approach to the morality of abortion will have its own limitations. It would seem that such controversies surrounding the issue such as human life, person, and right "to take human life" will continue to persist, and debates involving opposing views of ethicians, more often than not, could not find "full rest," so to speak. If, however, any Christian-inspired theories can help bring about more appropriate ways of understanding the morality of abortion and its social implications, then they should be presented in a contextualized manner.)
ABORTION
THE PROBLEM OF JUSTIFICATION
Among the many reasons why abortions are commonly
sought are cardiac complications, a suicidal condition of the mind, psychological
trauma, pregnancy caused by rape, the inadvertent use of fetus-deforming drugs,
and many personal and family reasons such as the financial burden or
intrusiveness of a child. Such reasons certainly explain why abortions are
often viewed as an available way to extricate a woman or a family from
difficult circumstances. But the primary ethical issue remains: Are any such
reasons sufficient to justify the act of aborting a human
fetus? An ethicist concerned to defend abortion seeks a principled
justification where ethical reasons are advanced for one’s conclusion. It might
be decided, of course, that in only some of the above mentioned circumstances
would an abortion be warranted, whereas in others it would not be justified.
Even so, such a decision presupposes some set of general criteria that enables
one to discriminate ethically justified abortions from ethically unjustified
ones.
The central moral problem of abortion may be stated
in woman to the following general form: Under what conditions, if any, is
abortion ethically permissible? Some contend that abortion is never acceptable,
or at most is permissible only if abortion is required to save the pregnant
woman’s life or for some other similarly serious reasons. This view is commonly
called the conservative theory of abortion. Roman Catholics have traditionally
been among the leading exponents of the conservative approach, but they they
are by no means its only advocates. Others hold that abortion is always
permissible, whatever the state of fetal development. This view is commonly
termed the liberal theory of abortion and has frequently been advocated by
those adherents of women’s rights who emphasize the right of a woman to make
decisions that affect her own body, but again the position is advocated by
others as well. Finally, many defend intermediate or moderate theories,
according to which abortion is ethically permissible up to a certain stage of
fetal development or for some limited set of moral reasons that is sufficient
to warrant the taking of fetal life in
this or that special circumstances.
FACTS OF HUMAN BIOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT
Pregnancy does not begin with
intercourse, since the earliest point at which it can be dated is during the
fertilization of the female egg (the ovum) by the sperm of the male. Once
fertilization has occurred, a new genetic entity results from the combination
of the genetic contributions of the male and the female. This new unit is a
single cell capable, under normal conditions, of a constant process of
alteration and growth. This single cell has twenty-three pairs of chromosomes
(each parent contributes one chromosome in each pair). It quickly divides into
two cells, four cells, then eight cells – reaching sixteen at approximately the
third day after fertilization. Organ systems gradually appear before the eighth
week of growth, roughly the point at which brain waves can be detected. Between
approximately the nineteenth and twenty-eighth week of growth, the fetus
reaches the stage known as “viability,” the point at which it is capable of
survival outside the womb.
There exists a small but useful
body of terminology frequently used by embryologists and others who discuss
human biological development. Conception is said to occur when the
male sperm and the female egg combine; during this process, the resultant
entity is spoken of as a conceptus and is referred to in this
way until its implantation, at the wall of the uterus. It is also referred to
as a zygote
until the completion of implantation, which occurs roughly two week after
conception. Thereafter the term embryo is used to designate the
developing entity, until about eight weeks, when it is referred to a fetus.
However, the term “fetus” is frequently used to designate the unborn entity in
any state of development.
THE ONTOLOGICAL STATUS OF THE FETUS
Recent controversies about abortion
focus on ethical problems of how we ought and ought not to treat fetuses and on
what rights, if any, are possessed by fetuses. But a more basic issue is that
of what
kind of entities fetuses are. Following current usage, we shall refer
to this as the problem of ontological status. An account of
what kind of entities fetuses are will, of course, have important implications
for all issues of the permissible treatment of fetuses. But the two issues are
distinct, and we must first attempt to resolve the preliminary question.
Although there is no single problem
of ontological status, several layers of questions may be distinguished: (1)
whether the fetus is an individual organism, (2) whether
the fetus is biologically a human being, (3) whether the fetus is psychologically
a human being, and (4) whether the fetus is a person. Some who write on
problems of ontological status attempt to develop a theory that specifies the
conditions under which the fetus can be said, under which the fetus is in some
sense human, and still others are concerned to explain the conditions, if any,
under which the fetus is a person. It would be generally agreed that one
attributes a more significant status to the fetus by saying that it is fully
human being rather than simply saying that it is an individual organism, and
also that one enhances its status still further by claiming that it is a
person.
Many would be willing to concede tha
an individual life begins at fertilization without conceding that there is a
human being or a person at fertilization. Others would upgrade the fetus’s
status by claiming that the fetus is a human being at fertilization, but not a
person. Still others would grant full personhood at fertilization. Those who
spouse these views sometimes differ only because they define one of the other
of these terms differently, but most of the differences come from serious
theoretical disagreement about what constitutes either life or humanity or
personhood, including disagreements over which category correctly applies to
the fetus.
THE CONCEPT OF HUMANITY
The concept of human life is an
especially perplexing one, for it can mean at least two very different things.
On the one hand, it can mean (a) biological human life, that set of
biological classificatory characteristics (e.g., genetic ones) that set the
human species apart from nonhuman species. (This sense may be coextensive with “individual
organism.”) On the other hand, “human life” can also be used to mean (b) life
that is distinctively human – that is, a life that is characterized by
those properties which define the essence of humanity. These are largely
psychological, as contrasted with biological properties. It is often said, for
example, that the ability to use symbols, to imagine, to love, and to perform
various higher intellectual skills are the most distinctive human properties,
those that define humans as human. To have these properties, we sometimes say,
it is to be a “human being.”
To illustrate the differences
between these two sense. Infants with various exotic diseases are often born
and die after a short period of time. They are born of human parents and
certainly are classified in all relevant biological ways as human. However,
they never exhibit any distinctively human traits, and do not have the
potential for doing so. For such individuals it is not possible to make human
life in the “biological” sense human in the “distinctively human” or “psychological”
sense. We do not differentiate these two levels of life in discourse about any other
animal species. We do not, for example, speak of making feline life feline. But
we do meaningfully speak of making human life human, and this usage makes sense
precisely because there exists in the language the dual meaning just discussed.
In discussions of abortion, it is imperative that one be specific about which
meaning is being employed when using an expression like the “taking of human
life.” A great many proponents of abortion, and opponents as well, would agree
that while biological life is taken by abortion, human life in the second or
psychological sense is not.
THE CONCEPT OF PERSONHOOD
Personhood may or may not be
different from either the biological sense or the psychological sense of “human
life” just discussed. That is, one might claim that what it means to be a
person is simply to have some properties that make an organism human in one or
both of these senses. But other writers have suggested a list of rather more
demanding criteria for being a person. A list of conditions for being person,
similar to the following, is advanced by Mary Anne Warren in this chapter and
has been put forward by several recent writers:
(a)
consciousness
(b)
self-consciousness
(c)
freedom to act on one’s own reasons
(d)
capacity to communicate with other persons
(e)
capacity to make moral judgments
(f)
rationality
Sometimes
it is said by those who propose such a list that in order to be a person an
entity need only satisfy one criterion on the list – e.g., it must be conscious
(a) but need not also satisfy the other conditions (b-f). Others say that all
of these conditions must be satisfied in order to be a person. We shall see
that it makes a major difference which of these two views one accepts. But the
dominant and prior question is whether one needs to accept anything like this
list at all – a question raised in the present chapter by Philip Devine and (at
least elliptically) by Baruch Brody.
Two
issues have emerged concerning the proper analysis of the concept of person.
First, there is considerable dispute concerning the range of factual characteristics
an entity must possess in order to be a person. One might analyze personhood n
terms of a rather abbreviated list of factual, though not necessarily
biological characteristics – e.g., in terms of physical characteristics such as
genetic structure, characteristics of consciousness such as rationality and
free choice, and perhaps characteristics that can at present be applied only to
human developmental histories such as having learned a language. If personhood
can be explicated in this way by listing only elementary properties,
such as genetic structure, then fetuses might well qualify as persons. But one
might also analyze personhood in terms of a more demanding list of presumably
factual properties, such as b-f above. Clearly one would be under a heavy
burden of argument to show that a fetus is a person if criteria such as these
must be satisfied. In any event, the first controversy is over precisely this
issue of whether any of these more demanding properties must be present in
order to be a person, and if so which such properties.
A
second dispute has emerged in connection with the first one. Several writers
have suggested that the concept of personhood must be analyzed in terms of
properties bestowed by human evaluations well as in terms of
fatual properties possessed by persons. For example, it has been argued that in
order to be a person one must be the bearer of legal rights and social
responsibilities, and must be capable of being judged by others as morally
praiseworthy or blameworthy. The central question in this controversy is
whether ftuses are the sort of entity that it is appropriate to value in this
way. This issue is closely related to what we shall discuss momentarily as the
moral status of the fetus.
It
is certainly not self-evident that a fetus either is or is not a person in any
of the above senses. Anyone who claims to have resolved these controversies
about persons must be prepared either to defend a particular theory of
personhood or to show that these issues have somehow been wrongly conceived.
The
problem of ontological status is complicated by a further factor related to the
biological development of the fetus. It is important to state at what point of
development an entity is to be distinguished as fully individual, or fully
human, or fully person. This involves specifying at what point full ontological
status and only indirectly concerns what status they have.
THE MORAL STATUS OF THE FETUS
The notion
of moral status might be explicated in several ways but probably is most easily
understood in abortion contexts in terms of rights. Accordingly, to
say that a fetus possesses moral status is to say that it possesses rights. But
which rights, if any? Conservatives hold that unborn fetuses possess the same
rights as those who are born and therefore have full moral status. Devine and
Brody hold such a thesis for at least most stages of fetal development. At least some moderates contend that
fetuses have only some rights and therefore have only a partial moral status.
Liberals, on the other hand, maintain that fetuses possess no rights and
therefore no moral status, as Warren maintains. If this liberal account is
accepted, then the unborn have no more right to life than a bodily cell or a
tumor, and an abortion would seem to be no more morally objectionable than
surgery to remove the tumor. On the other hand, if the conservative account is
accepted, then the unborn possess all the rights possessed by other human
beings, and an abortion would appear to be objectionable as any common killing –
except perhaps those killings committed in self-defense.
Theories
of moral status are usually closely connected with theories of ontological
status. The conservative holds that since the line between the human and the nonhuman
must be drawn at conception, the fetus as full ontological status and therefore
full moral status. The liberal may contend that since the line between the
human and nonhuman must be drawn at birth, the fetus has no significant
ontological status and therefore no moral status.
