Fast reminder, since this is a controversial topic: This page posts opinions of individual people, usually in the Mises Caucus. It does not represent the views of the Ohio, or National, Mises Caucus. We would also be happy to publish an article on a different side of this issue if someone wants to submit it.
Abortion has been in the news recently, and with all of the spirited debate, I wanted to add my 2 cents. Because this issue is so confrontational, I wrote it as a conversation. Feel free to leave any thoughts or comments below.
I think the people saying that life begins at conception are correct. However, life is not enough for me to assign property rights; I squash mosquitos, pull up weeds, and eat beef. What I care about is human life and personhood, as vague and nebulous as that is. The rest of this piece is going to be an attempt to define what personhood is, and dissect the arguments across the spectrum that I believe are incorrect.
“Why does personhood matter? Can’t you do whatever you want with your body and property?”
While you can sometimes do what you want with your body, you can create situations where you owe obligations to others. A good example (that I heard first from the Tom Woods podcast) is the hot air balloon analogy. You can kick someone out of your hot air balloon while on the ground, but once you get up in the air, you have made yourself responsible for them until you are both back on the ground.
Thus, through your actions, you can create responsibilities and positive rights for others that wouldn’t otherwise exist.
“Comparing a hot air balloon ride to pregnancy seems unreasonable. You can withdraw consent whenever you want. Also, there are magnitudes to consent; and accidents do happen, whether it’s from drinking or a condom breaking. How can a snap decision or one dumb mistake control the rest of your life? Imagine if you signed a napkin while drunk and gave your friend literally everything you own, that is not a binding contract.”
I think this argument sounds reasonable but is framed incorrectly. This is why I would compare a pregnancy to a car crash, rather than a hot air balloon. Let’s say you were not paying attention for 5 seconds and accidentally hit a pedestrian. They require medical care because of the crash, so you are responsible for their hospital bills until they’re able to get back on their feet. It doesn’t matter that you only looked away for 5 seconds, or had a drink, or you want to withdraw consent later. If you have made a person dependent on you to survive through your actions, you are stuck with the obligations.
“Fine. And I can guess what comes next, what makes a fetus a ‘person’?”
I think the best way to answer this question is to take an adult human and see what you have to do to make them not a person. What do you remove from, or do to a person to remove their “personhood”?
“Sounds reasonable, but I don’t really get it. Give me examples.”
Let’s take being born. If you had an adult human and wrapped them in a sack of meat, or even more extreme, trapped them in the womb of a blue whale, would that stop them from being a person? No, then that is not the line.
Same with an umbilical cord; if someone has an IV-drip feeding them, they don’t stop being a person.
“Ah, so you are drawing the standard pro-life narrative. What will it be: unique DNA, living human cells, pain, or heart beat?”
No, to all of those.
Do you stop being a person if you have an artificial heart? No. It is just like any other organ, though very vital. So, having a heartbeat isn’t the line.
If your DNA changes (which happens all of the time through minor mutations) are you a different person? Then a cancerous tumor is a different person, since it has different DNA. Is an identical twin not a person, or if we managed to make a full clone in a test tube would it not be a real person? As far as I can tell, DNA is not the determinate, or else something like growing a single artificial ear with unique DNA would be a whole, living person. This also covers the living human cells argument.
The same thing applies to pain, nerve damage doesn’t make you not a person.
“So, what about conception?”
What about conception? It is the combination of 3 things (philosophically in this context at least):
Unique DNA
Living human cells
A progression that, if undisturbed, will eventually become a human
I have covered the other 2 above, so I will focus on the third. If, in Back to the Future, Marty’s parents were prevented from getting together, would that be murder? No, because the person that you would be aggressing against never existed. We can’t adjudicate morality against preventing possible futures.
Let’s say that, for example, a man and woman know that if they have sex today, they are 100% guaranteed to have a pregnancy and a child. But they decide not to. Or I buy the man 12 shots and he is too drunk to have sex. Or she gets caught in traffic and they miss each other. Or whatever else. Is any of that murder? Is it even abortion? Every day, everything that you do probably has ripple and butterfly effects preventing massive amounts of potential humans from being born (after all, even if sex just happens differently, it may be a different sperm and egg combo, meaning that a potential child wasn’t born, even if another is born instead).
This is a more extreme version of future crime, but long story short, if the “person” who you are preventing from existing never existed, there is no one to victimize, and no one being aggressed against. Anything else, seems to me, to be circular reasoning.
“So, where is the line? You can’t just say that everyone else is wrong, but then not give an alternative.”
True, and I have a line: the brain. Not just having gray matter, but a functional brain vs brain death.
Why the brain? Because it is what you remove from a person to make them no longer a person. A brain transplant is really a full-body transplant, and a working brain trapped in a vat but still working is still a person, at least in my eyes. When we get to a point where a brain can control a robot body and move around on its own, I will still consider it a human person.
Why brain death? Brain death is irreversible and irrecoverable for someone who is already fully grown, which removes the coma objection made by Ben Shapiro and others. It is considered a final line of death, where something like a heart stopping is reversible with CPR and defibrillators.
While there is still some slight fuzziness there (like everything medically and scientifically) and definitions vary slightly by country, in every instance is it highly rigorous and irreversible when it occurs in someone with a formed brain.
“Ok, but what does that mean for the fetus?”
It means that until a fetus has brain activity that surpasses the definition of brain death, I don’t consider it a person. Not all brain activity applies (for example, your brain sending signals to make your heartbeat can still happen during brain death), but from what I have read with the various definitions and brain development stages, it happens between the middle to late second trimester.
Since there are some blurry lines, and I think that we should have some humility and caution to not accidentally kill a person, I am in favor of allowing abortions in the first trimester, and drawing a pretty hard line afterward. Only the most extreme situations, such as the medical necessity for the safety of the mother, or extreme medical issues for the baby where it would die very shortly after a lot of suffering, would be exceptions.
“That seems fairly reasonable, though if you are going off of personhood, what about the arguments that a certain level of intelligence is required, and that babies don’t reach that till well after being born. Shouldn’t the personhood argument allow for post-birth abortions?”
I respect the consistency of this view, and the “life starts at conception'' view. To me, they are the best 2 lines for cutoff were to allow abortions. However, the reason why I am drawing the line where I am is simple: I don’t want to kill innocent people. I draw the line at brain death because it is the most precise line that I feel completely confident about. After brain death, I am 100% sure you are not a person.
After that line, I don’t know where the cutoff would be, and evaluating based on intelligence sounds like a moral nightmare. Judging someone off of their brain activity is a slippery slope and could allow the killing of the mentally disabled or murdering 2 year olds.
“How about the other vaguer arguments about abortion. For example, one of the slogans of the pro-choice movement was ‘I want abortions to be safe, legal, and rare.’ If you admit that you want as few abortions as possible, doesn’t that mean that you are subconsciously admitting that abortions are morally wrong? Otherwise, why would you want it to be rare?”
I don’t find this to be a strong argument. There are plenty of things that I want to be safe and legal, but rare. For example, reporting a robbery to the cops should be safe, legal, and rare.
That does imply that abortions are a negative, and personally I would agree. I want as few medical procedures to be necessary as possible. I would rather people are healthier and spend less time, stress, and resources on medicine. That doesn’t mean I am anti medicine; I would rather just have fewer of the circumstances that require medicine.
But abortions are negative in some ways. Any medical procedure has risks. The hormones involved in pregnancy, and especially miscarriages, are awful, and it seems that the body isn’t great at differentiating the two. I would rather fewer people had to go through that hormonal roller coaster.
It is also true that there are decisions that are good, but are very difficult emotionally. Cutting a friend out of your life due to toxic behavior doesn’t violate their rights, but it is still a hard decision that I wish had to happen less often. In the same way, an abortion can be a good decision, but an emotionally negative one to make.
All in all, I find this argument very weak, and mostly a red herring.
“Well, you are still a baby murderer, but at least you put a lot of thought into it. Have a nice day.”
You too, I hope you have a lovely day.