Abortion Isn't About Fetal Personhood (a response to Douthat)

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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In a recent NYT op-ed, Ross Douthat gestures at understanding the pro-choice position as it applies to late-term abortions. The piece begins with promise, pointing out the ways each side of the argument caricatures the other, and acknowledging how that prevents understanding. But he ultimately fails to take the pro-choice position seriously on its own terms. The closest he gets is at the outset of his critique, when he acknowledges that, “One possible liberal position on post-viability abortions is that they’re no different morally or legally from pre-viability abortions.” But he doesn’t take the possibility seriously or explore what that means or how it would work, because he only sees the question as one of fetal rights, and not as one of a woman’s right to control her own body.

Stated generally: the state may not commandeer its citizens bodies for its own purposes. Douthat focuses on the question of when the state should begin to care about the rights of the fetus, but he never balances the fetus’ rights relative to the rights of the woman to not have her womb commandeered by the state. Viability may increase the state’s interest, but the importance of the state’s ends do not change the fact that the means are impermissible. That is the sense, unrecognized by Douthat, in which post-viability abortions are no different from pre-viability abortions.

The pro-choice position is just the principle that a person’s bodily integrity is a very, very strong right. The state cannot force you to give up your blood, your kidney, your bone marrow, though those too could easily be used to save lives. That isn’t the point. Your body is yours, and the state can’t take it from you, or force you to use it against your will. The same goes for a woman’s womb. The question isn’t whether or when the fetus has rights, it is that the rights of the woman to the use of her own body for her own purposes does not change between pre- and post-viability.

There are plenty of difficult policy questions that follow from this line of argument, and ways in which the state can intervene on behalf of its interest without diminishing the woman’s rights to bodily integrity and control. There are many pro-life gains to be made, e.g. requiring that late-term abortions deliver rather than deliberately destroy the fetus, and provide it reasonable medical care. There are plenty of non-abortion policies that implicated by this, e.g. the draft, or mandatory vaccination.

But Douthat doesn’t grapple with them. Though he rejects that the anti-abortion movement is about controlling women, he clearly discounts a woman’s full ownership of her own body (which he never mentions).

As for his mystification about why IVF is so sacred that otherwise pro-life politicians violate their ostensible principles to protect it, one explanation is suggested by his own source on why people seek late term abortions: “Bans on abortion after 20 weeks will disproportionately affect young women and women with limited financial resources.” Compare that with who bans on IVF will disproportionately affect: older and wealthier individuals, i.e. the donor class.

Douthat wants the pro-choice position to be as inconsistent as the pro-life, pro-IVF position, but the latter is actually about a conflict between two competing political interests (moral beliefs and the need to fund a campaign), while the former is just a consistent application of a single principle. Any apparent cognitive dissonance is Douthat’s, due to his not being able to fully grok that women are really, truly, fully the owners of their own bodies.

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Why is a mother able to commandeer the baby for her own purposes, but the state is not? Is death a better purpose than life?

What if the state determines that the baby about to be murdered is being imprisoned illegally in the house of a murderer (granted the murderer is brainwashed in a death cult and may not even be competent to stand trial—exhibit A: the pussy hat) and decides to liberate it from its potential murder?

Isn’t that what it does when it determines that parents are depriving their children from medical attention due to delusional religious purposes?

Why does this change when the child is up inside of a womb?

What if the state determines that post-viability it has the right to save the life of the child and deliver it to one/two of the many parents waiting to adopt? You don’t want to be pregnant anymore? The state says that’s fine. There is someone who wants your baby. Why kill it? “To harvest the organs to the highest bidding researcher” is an UNACCEPTABLE answer, but THE STATE does this!!! DISGUSTING!!!

Precisely. The rights of the woman’s body end where the rights of the child’s body begin (and vice versa).

Let’s talk about the Ground of rights (personhood). The above disgustingness is exhibit B that the Ground is NOT the state (the death cult)!

True power empowers the most vulnerable. The state is a pussy.

I yield back.

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In what way is the mother commandeering the baby?

When the state forces a woman to continue a pregnancy, it uses her body for the benefit of someone else, the baby. When a woman ends her pregnancy, she doesn’t use the baby’s body for anything, she evicts it and refuses to let her body be used for its benefit.

This sounds a lot like “what if the state let women terminate their pregnancies”, which, yeah, that’s the goal.

Right:

But like I said, it’s a difficult policy question. Before viability, no amount of medical care is reasonable (at least not yet, some day soon there will be artificial wombs that can take over). In early viability, even with heroic efforts almost all babies are going to die (again, for now).

My point is that Douthat never gets there, because the woman’s right to her own bodily autonomy doesn’t occur to him (control-f for “woman”, “body”, or “autonomy” in his essay).

This sounds a lot like we agree: a woman can evict the baby from her womb so long as she does it in the least fatal way possible. Is that your position?

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Right.

I said:

The same way the state used to (& will likely again, as some still do) draft poor soldiers to die in its wars. A failure to recognize personhood is due to one’s focus being inordinately drawn to one’s own imbalanced impulses/interests. Her failure to fight her own personal battles is causing “casualties” that bring death to her conscience and anything that threatens to reawaken it.

And if she thinks “at least it is being used for advances in medical research” she has basically drank the Kool-Aid. That is commandeering on steroids—her conscience, her body, and her child’s body. But did she really think of it that way? Or is she just trying to make herself feel better without really thinking of the horrific, horrendous implications?

What SS physician Josef Mengele accomplished under Hitler pales in comparison to the NIH’s use of baby organs procured from late term infants delivered as whole and alive as possible for the purpose of medical research.

Actually… no it doesn’t sound like that. Your ears are broken… tuned to the death channel. Seen also here:

Again, your death cult brainwashed ears are broken. If the mother is putting the baby’s life at risk, can the mother be evicted from reality in the least fatal way possible? Seems like death is not the only way out, here. In fact… death is a door, not an end… to resolving the unresolved.

What do you want to bet they are used to have more research organs to harvest, rather than babies for adoptive parents? That IS the current vomitous sitch.

Perhaps it is just balanced out by the bodily autonomy of the baby? I couldn’t read it because it is behind a pay wall. Anyway. Medical researchers don’t care about the woman’s bodily autonomy. Neither does anyone in the very profitable abortion industry. They genuinely care about women as much as pimps genuinely care about their prostitutes. In fact they help pimps hide their sex trafficking, including child sex trafficking.

So that people like P Diddy and the dude with the jet that every muckety muck flew on can get off scot-free… or die trying.

walks away smh

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Adding to my last post.

Abortion where I’m at is legal up until full development (birth) — if it was about merely ending pregnancy, the baby would be allowed to live, rather than being kept whole enough to part it out for profit.

If that were to change…

If terminating a pregnancy (birth) leads to eventual live delivery to adoptive parent(s), we agree.

If it leads to organ donation, or any other end that treats the baby as a means, we disagree.

If it hides sex trafficking, including child sex trafficking, we disagree.

There is zero accountability of the abortion industry. Their goal is profit by death & organ harvesting—not merely changing the way the baby develops or grows up because the woman doesn’t want to be part of that.

They would argue tracking down the fathers of babies aborted from minors would discourage the minors from… that procedure. As if not getting an abortion is the bad thing being faced by the minor.

Freaking twilight zone bizarro world!

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(re: paywall, I was able to see it by googling the title and clicking through from the search results. You might need to delete the cookies for NYT for it to work).

As a preliminary issue, I think we need to be more precise in the language we’re using. When I use the word ‘abortion’, I mean something like “the termination of a pregnancy prior to full development”. I’m not talking about any particular mechanism or any particular outcome for the fetus. While what follows after that is important and should be part of the analysis, I think it’s important to make the distinction between

  1. removing the fetus from a woman,
  2. intentionally killing a fetus, and
  3. the use of fetal tissue for medical research.

And, as you say:

If we do develop the technology to continue to incubate fetuses when their mothers no longer want to do it, then (1) should always be permissible, even if (2) and (3) are strictly prohibited.

I agree the draft impacts the same right, but (for questions around (1) rather than (3)) it is the woman who is in the parallel position to the soldier: her body is being used to the states ends. As with the soldier whose body is used as an instrument of war, the woman’s body is a used as an instrument of reproduction.

The balance of rights in (1) is between a woman’s right to use her body as she see fit, and the right to life of a distinct individual who happens to need that woman’s body in order to continue living. Douthat acts as though the disagreement between pro-choice and pro-life is entirely about how much weight they give to the fetus’ right to life. But it’s also about how much weight they give to the woman’s right to her body.

Given that he doesn’t even seem to notice that there’s a different right implicated in the question, he probably doesn’t think women have a very strong right to bodily autonomy. And that’s how a lot of the pro-life movement looks from the outside.

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This doesn’t come up in the article (right?), but feels opposed to the thread title.

But, I would switch out “even” with “only”.

:+1:

Both abortion and war commandeer the body, and often lead to its death—always, in the case of abortion. The abortion industry fights legislation that saves babies born alive. The babies have no equivalent to the Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners of war.

Both the woman and the baby have the same rights. You can’t have bodily autonomy if someone kills your body.

We haven’t talked about the Ground of rights. The state cannot establish personhood—it can only recognize, or fail.

It chooses fail.

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Side note… what “equipment” does AI use to operate/function, which composes its body? Just out of curiosity. Depends on the kind of AI, I s’pose? (In the case of human AI…human DNA & its products.)

If we grant the pro-choice position, if there is a mind (say… OI) whose body is the universe… abort us at will no problem?

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No, that was just meant to illustrate the importance of keeping the distinction between (1) and (2) or (3).

A further clarification to be made is on the meaning of ‘commandeering’, because the violation of rights is different for the woman and the terminated fetus (setting aside whether and to what extent either actually has the rights being claimed).

By ‘commandeering’ someone’s body, I’m talking about the forced use of someone’s body as a means to someone else’s end. In a forced pregnancy, the woman’s body is being used as an incubator for the fetus. On the other hand, the death of the fetus is not a means towards its removal from the mother’s body, but a consequence of it.

The distinction is subtle, but matters a great deal when we try to make our moral intuitions consistent. In other situations where the state might use a person’s body against their wishes to save another person’s life, I don’t think we have the intuition that a right to continue living overrides a right to bodily autonomy. Consider enforced extraction of blood or bone marrow or organs. Or consider a situation where a pregnant woman dies and the fetus is forcibly transferred into another woman. All of these seem like obvious overreaches to me, and I wonder if you agree.

By contrast, consider a military draft or a required vaccination, where the state violates that right. To the extent that those violations are even permissible, they are cases where a much greater cost than a single life is on the line, i.e. a particularly all-encompassing war and an epidemic disease.

There are at least two important differences in the case of (1) that might change the outcome:

First, in the examples the state would intervene to change the status quo. In the case of a pregnancy, the state intervenes to prevent an action. There seems to be some relevant difference in the impact on rights between forcing an act and prohibiting an act, though I’m not sure how big.

Second, and probably crucial for many though I seldom hear it said: pregnant woman are considered responsible for being pregnant. If someone initiates a chain of events, and stopping the chain of events before a certain point would cause someone’s death, then maybe they cannot stop it even if they otherwise would have the right to (compare the legal concept of estoppel). We can see the significance of this in the common practice of excluding rape and incest from otherwise general prohibitions on abortion, presumably because those relieve the woman of any responsibility, and so the sanctity of bodily integrity prevails.

By all means, present your position. But we should also talk about what to do when people disagree in good faith about the “Ground of rights” (and I’m pretty confident we do). People are killed every day over the insistence that someone else’s personal ground truth must be the basis of policy, so if there is a right to life, we should have a contingency plan.

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Restating this, as the above was already addressed:

Next…

And restating again:

It seems like the overreaching is seen in the kind of examples that you’re trying ridiculously hard to come up with—none of which kill the body (not that saving the body justifies forcible organ removal, or the draft, or another “global public health” forced flu/cold vax/branding/triaged culling of the herd…) as does abortion… and forcibly extracting the baby’s organs to sell to the highest bidding researcher…. which the state does.

Is it possible for a developing fetus (I’m not talking about a zygote) to be transferred into the body of another woman—perhaps her baby died and must be removed, and so while her uterus is open, they could transplant another fetus into her womb in order to save its life? That is a fascinating idea. As long as all stakeholders were willing. I would love to see that movie!

It would never be one in which you would find the abortion industry to be a willing participant. No babies leave their wombs alive (except as freshly donated), as previously mentioned. They legally, and in the field, fight it. For profit.

They do not provide counseling or escape for rape & incest victims, they hide the evidence, and retraumatize the victims they exploit. It’s not just bodily integrity they don’t care about (except to keep organs whole—-don’t everyone vomit simultaneously). Again…for profit.

If you don’t want unjust double standards in the law, they must treat every person as a person. The contingency plan when personhood is violated… still treats person as person. How would you want to be treated if you violated personhood?

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You are back to conflating (1), (2), and (3). Selling fetal tissue is a separate question from removing a fetus from a woman’s body.

I responded to both of these, summarized here:

Remember, (1), (2), and (3) are distinct things. Causing or permitting a death is not the same as commandeering, they are morally different and have different exceptions. Even granting that the woman and the fetus have the same rights in general, (1) does not implicate identical rights for the woman and the fetus.

Your last quote is misleading to the point of dishonesty. I did not say and do not believe that ‘“ground of rights” must be the basis of policy’. What I said was:

My point was almost the opposite of what you made it out to be: I’m skeptical of basing policy in what I think you mean by “ground of rights”, because there is no agreement on it, and it does not admit of the compromise required in a pluralist society.

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Your fictional definition of abortion does not always end in the death of the body. But that is not the world we live in. Your argument does not go through in our current reality.

To restate again, the body does not have bodily autonomy if you kill the body—a living body is essential to maintaining bodily autonomy. Abortion always kills the body. Even if the pregnancy could have been ended with a live birth. If only your fictional definition of abortion were true, it would be on the same level as adoption.

Maybe if death wasn’t its goal, they’d rescue females from rape and incest rather than just donating the hidden evidence to the highest bidder.

If personhood is not the ground of law… What is the ground? It isn’t that you have no ground. Rather, you fail to recognize it. The law is made for (of, and by) persons, not persons for the law. A groundless, personless law is no law at all.

Personhood. Don’t violate it. Recognize it.

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Nor does yours, as we’ve previously discussed (1,2).

But my argument is about the principles driving the pro-choice position, and in that sense it reflects the current reality. Your argument on that point seems to be that the pro-choice position is motivated by the love of death or something, and that does not reflect the current reality.

If you kill the body it doesn’t have the right to speech and assembly either, but that’s not what we’re talking about.

You oppose abortion because you think fetuses are persons and that killing a person is wrong. Others support abortion because they think women should get to decide what happens to their own bodies. Those are claims about different rights.

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Just to back up one more time.

I mentioned that maybe his balancing the right to bodily autonomy of both woman and infant is the reason why he doesn’t bring it up. That’s not the same as discounting the pregnant woman’s (or pregnant minor’s). And it would explain why he doesn’t see a difference in pre-viability and post-viability abortions. He would probably also save the life of a person on life-support, even if not a single soul claimed it as family or friend.

What do you think would be worse for a woman’s bodily autonomy? To kill her, or to help her finish the pregnancy safely? Of those options, what do you think is going to be worse for the baby who has the same rights? Who actually willfully decides to not only harm someone else’s body, but end their life? Not the baby. Anytime a woman is at risk due to a pregnancy, the baby is already developed enough to be viable.

It doesn’t make sense to me that you would think that there is no moral difference between a pre-viability abortion, and a post-viability abortion. A baby born after viability should be saved. Granted, you shouldn’t abort a pre-viability baby, because that’s going to kill it, and saving it would be to leave it alone. Saving the baby’s life once it is outside her womb has nothing to do with her own bodily autonomy. The baby’s body is not her body, whether the baby is in her womb or outside of it.

Why does the abortion industry fight so hard to avoid accountability for trafficking in harvested baby organs instead of saving viable babies? Because they hate death more than they hate profiting off it? Because they hold the life of every tiny person sacred…wanted by their mother or not?

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There’s no moral difference with respect to (1). If a woman has the right to control her body, and the state doesn’t have the right to commandeer her body for its own purposes, then the woman has the right to remove the fetus from her body at any stage of pregnancy. Nothing changes with respect to (1) post-viability.

I will grant that things change with respect to (2): since (1) no longer entails the death of the baby, a broader set of acts and omissions start to look like (2) post-viability.

Do you think the woman’s right to (1) increases post-viability? If the fetus’ moral worth doesn’t change after conception, and viability means that it no longer needs the woman’s body to live, why can’t she remove it non-destructively and surrender it to the state? (Edit: I can only assume I’m missing something with this line of argument, but I honestly don’t know what it could be.)

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Then hands off a female OR male’s body, inside the womb, or out!

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I suggested that already. See above.

As long as the state delivers it to adoptive parents, not the highest bidding researcher.

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Thank you Ichthus, this has been an enlightening conversation for me. When I use the word ‘abortion’, I don’t mean the destruction of a fetus, I mean the removal of a fetus from the woman, and I think that fits with the way pro-choice advocates talk about it. It’s clear to me that that is not what you (and probably Douthat and most people who oppose abortion) use it to mean. Rather, to you it means the intentional killing of a baby.

That difference in meaning seems central to the policy discussion. Partly it embeds the different moral status that each camp affords a developing human being, so recognizing the difference doesn’t resolve the conflict, but it does present opportunities where both sides can get what they want, e.g. non-destructive late-term removal of a fetus from a woman in a way that treats it as a baby and tries to ensure its safe delivery.

As I said in the other thread where we talked about abortion, I think everyone who gets an abortion would prefer to have avoided being in that position. I also think creating people is good, and the state has a real interest in turning pregnancies into healthy births into loving families.

But I don’t think that interest overrides an individual’s interest in not being used as a baby incubating machine against her will. For me (though perhaps not for everyone who is pro-choice), I don’t think this is a question of the moral worth of the fetus. A person owns her body, it is hers to do with as she chooses, and the fact that someone else needs it to live does not give them any right to it. So the state can do its best to keep the fetus alive after it is removed, but they cannot prevent its removal – again, separating removal from intentional destruction.

In terms of policy, this conversation moves me towards thinking late-term pregnancies should only be terminated in an environment where the fetus can get medical care with the goal of keeping it alive. I’m sensitive to the pro-choice position that such a requirement adds a hurdle to a woman’s exercise of her bodily autonomy, but I don’t think it’s compelling. Late term abortions are relatively rare, the procedure is actually different, and many already take place in a hospital setting. And such a law could expand access on net, if it very clearly states that such a procedure is legal, and protects the woman and the doctors from criminal or civil penalties if the baby can’t be saved despite their efforts.

I think a more productive policy debate on abortion should probably avoid the word “abortion”, in favor of more specific descriptions. I’d also like to see more focus on policies that seem to accord with both positions, e.g. financial support during pregnancy and well-run adoption services. My impression is that pro-choice people don’t want those because they stigmatize abortion and pressure women on the exercise of their right to bodily autonomy, and pro-life people don’t want them because they favor a smaller government and traditional families. Both of those strike me as inadequate on their own terms when compared to the benefits.

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“Abortion” (a distracting and muddying the waters euphemism if ever there was one) is quite simple to understand.

A mother chooses to kill her own developing child within her. That’s it.

Arguing over personhood or consciousness or when does life begin or does it feel pain or am I just a clump of cells, none of that matters. This is about meaning and value, we are attempting to engage in philosophy here. If you want mere biology go some where else.

Philosophically speaking which is to say in terms of meaning and truth, a mother killing her own growing child inside of her is what we mean by “abortion”. You can cloak that in “muh womans rights” or “my body” however much you want, and keep ignoring the real issue: a developing growing unique human being is dependent on its mother for its life and further growth to be born, and that same mother is like “naw, kill that bitch” to her own developing child.

Anyone who isn’t automatically repulsed by such a notion, is probably already sociopathic or psychopathic or narcissistic enough to not even be able to follow and understand this entire post. So feel free to keep ignoring it, in that case. And pretending that you’re actually human.

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When removing a baby inside an abortion facility does not always end in death, as it currently does (unless kept temporarily alive to donate fresh organs to the highest bidder…), you and whoever pro-choice individuals agree with you will have thoughts which are a lot more representative of actual reality than they are currently.

When that happens, I’ll read the rest of your very long reply. Let me know.