for forum on "Religious Perspectives on Abortion" 1/15/97
In her now classic defense of abortion, Judith Thomson attempted to justify the right of women to terminate their pregnancies, regardless of whether the fetus is a person or not. For Thomson, women have the right to restrict others from using their bodies even when their bodies are needed to insure another's survival. Critics of this defense have pointed out that it depends on problematic notions of bodily ownership and control. Indeed, there may be cases where my right of ownership over something does not give me the right to deny someone else the use of it when doing so would kill that person [See Baruch Brody, *Abortion and the Sanctity of Human Life* (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1975) and John Martin Fischer, "Abortion and Self-Determination," *Journal of Social Philosophy* 22:2 (Fall 1991)]. At least, a conception of property rights that would allow me to deprive someone of something I own in a way that would surely lead to their death is controversial, and Thomson's defense of abortion depends on such a conception being granted without argument. The failure or incompleteness of Thomson's defense of abortion suggests that it is difficult to defend abortion if we grant that the fetus is a person. While Thomson tried to steer the abortion debate away from this seemingly intractable issue, the abortion debate keeps coming back to it.
There are a number of ways to approach the personhood issue. Some have tried to analyze the concept of a person, and establish necessary and sufficient criteria for admission to this category. Some have tried to develop a rational or scientific definition of human life. And some have argued that the very lack of agreement about whether the fetus is a person or a human being prevents us from reaching any agreement about the moral permissibility of abortion. Recently, many defenders of abortion have opted for this third position. Those who take this "pluralist" approach appear to assume that it goes hand in hand with liberal or permissive laws regarding abortion. Yet this is not necessarily so. For while restrictive abortion laws may impose on everyone a single conception of life, permissive abortion laws impose on some the necessity of tolerating what they believe is unjust killing. Is it evident which of these outcomes is worse? If not, then the pluralist view regarding the standing of the fetus is consistent with a conservative approach to regulating abortion as well as a liberal one.
Indeed, which is worse: to force some people to tolerate what they see as human slaughter, or to restrict the liberty of some women to terminate their pregnancies? I do not propose to answer this question, but rather I will acknowledge that both outcomes are bad. Many who take the pluralist approach to questions about personhood and human beings seem to think that restricting the liberty of women to terminate their pregnancies is worse than forcing people to put up with what they see as unnecessary and unjustified killing. But why is this worse? As a feminist, I am well aware of the hardships that unwanted pregnancies and children create for women and girls. I am also aware that the price of unwanted children is paid disproportionately by women and girls, and their other children. But let us try to imagine the implications of imposing on some the necessity of tolerating what they believe is the immoral taking of life. First, we need to get some sense of what it is we are demanding of people in our society who believe abortion is the unjust taking of life. Is it like asking animal-loving vegetarians to tolerate their meat-eating neighbors? Since abortion involves human life in some form, this analogy may not be sufficient. Is it like asking people who oppose racism to tolerate liberal laws that allow people to express in words and actions racial prejudices, preferences, and hatreds? Is it like asking children's rights advocates to tolerate liberal laws regarding the treatment of children by parents or employers? If we compare what many pluralists are demanding of anti-abortionists in an abortion liberal society to the latter two hypothetical expectations, then perhaps the pluralists' expectation seems as unreasonable as preventing women and girls who want abortions from obtaining them.
If permissive abortion laws cannot be defended by a simple appeal to the lack of consensus on the issue fetal personhood, how might they be defended? One might try to make a more complex appeal to the lack of agreement, and try to show why the lack of agreement means it is better to impose on the anti-abortionists the necessity of tolerating abortions than to prevent women and girls who want them from having abortions. Alternatively, one might take up one of the other approaches to the question of fetal personhood and try to develop a conception of human beings or persons that is compatible with permitting abortions. I think the first option is bound to fail because to carry it out means that those who are pluralists when it comes to definitions of persons and human beings cannot remain pluralists when it comes to respecting the ability of different people to live in accordance with different beliefs. That is, genuine pluralists, a category in which I would include myself, will not only acknowledge the diversity of conceptions of pregnancy and fetal life, but should also acknowledge how those conceptions render meaningful and problematic particular practices. Thus I will briefly consider the second option.
I will contend that those who wish to defend liberal and permissive abortion laws need to articulate an understanding of human life, persons, and pregnancy that is compatible with some range of abortion practices. If we tolerate abortions then it is not merely because we value women's lives and freedom but it is also because we have a conception of fetal life that makes it, under certain circumstances, something permissible to sacrifice. In developing a positive account about the nature of persons and pregnancy, we need not present it as the most rational, scientific, or objective. I think we can remain pluralist in our awareness that there are cogent competing conceptions about personhood and pregnancy and still present some ideas about them that capture a world view in which abortion is tolerable and often desirable. Our struggle with anti- abortionists is then to convince them that this world view is reasonable and legitimate, and that in a society in which anti-abortion and abortion-tolerant world views are prevalent, we need to work out ways to allow each world view to express itself while maintaining peaceful and respectful relations between different groups.
In her book *Micro-Politics: Agency in a Postfeminist Era* (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), Patricia Mann presents an account of personhood and pregnancy that is powerful and appealing and may capture the cultural sentiments of many people in industrialized contemporary societies. Mann offers a "cyborgean" view of pregnancy, drawing from the work of Donna Harraway. On this view, children are the products of nurturing acts and decisions--acts that are enabled by biology and technology. Children are not products of supernatural or natural forces but are the result of social forces, especially the efforts of agents who commit to them. Consequently, unwanted children are not children at all but represent organic conditions that can be managed. Similarly, in her article "Redefining Abortion" (in *Ethics in Practice*, H. LaFollette, ed., Blackwell Publishers, 1997), Barbara Katz Rothman suggests that the distinction we make between abortion and contraception is a cultural one, and that abortion is viewed by many women as a type of contraception, one resorted to when other steps to avoid procreation fail. To many women, the developing fetus's status is not all that different than that of a fertilized egg--a life form that is created and destroyed by many contraceptive practices. Given the extraordinary demands and investment that motherhood involves, as well as the demands that additional children place on families and communities, controlling their fertility through many means is a part of life that many women accept. In short, on some world views, tolerance for abortion represents a commitment to care for persons who have already been created and an unwillingness to force people to make children for whom they are unable to provide care.
In this forum on abortion, I am interested the resources different systems of religious belief can contribute to the project of developing a positive, abortion-tolerant account of life, persons, and pregnancy. Since many women who have abortions in our society participate in some religious community, it is important that any abortion-tolerant account be connected to different religious teachings and practices. Can we find within various religious traditions the values and concepts to help us develop not a rational defense of abortion, but a way to make the abortion practices many women accept intelligible to those they offend? If so, then perhaps we can move away from "pro- choice" defenses of abortion, which oppose women's freedom to children's lives, and move toward accounts of abortion practices that tie them to different ways of revering life.
To me the purpose of ethical dialogue is not to win universal assent to a particular view, but to promote the cultural understanding and mutual intelligibility necessary to forge political compromises. I think anti-abortionists have been relatively successful in the last few decades in rendering comprehensible their conceptions of fetal value and personhood. To move the debate over abortion forward, those of us who tolerate some range of abortion practices need to make abortion opponents see the coherent views of life and personhood that inform our attitudes and customs. If we can do this, then we are in a better position to negotiate laws and policies that permit women access to abortion.
Laurie Shrage
Professor and Department Chair, Philosophy
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
http://www.is.csupomona.edu/~ljshrage/
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