Bioethics, healthcare policy, and related issues.
Every day is freedom day, autonomy day, self-determination day, choice day, as far as I’m concerned. Reproductive choice is one part of the freedom and autonomy we all enjoy throughout our lives – the birthright of every moral person, the foundation of morality in both its constraining and its liberating guises. That pervasive freedom, and the moral responsibility it brings, must remain inviolate if we are to be moral persons at all, and to act from that stance of moral agency in any and every part of our lives. In that sense, every threat to the moral dignity of the individual is equally a threat to freedom in all its aspects and manifestations.
If you are pro-freedom, you must be pro-choice – and pro-free-speech, and pro-marry-whom-you-want, and pro-fuck-whom-you-want-and-how-and-when-and-why, and pro-feminist, and pro-speak-truth-to-power, and pro-read-what-you-like, and pro-write-what-you-like, and pro-vegetarian, and pro-wear-leather, and pro-wear-makeup, and pro-hate-makeup, and pro-piercing, and pro-no-piercings, and pro-disability-righs, and pro-lift-up-every-voice-and-sing, and pro-hip, and pro-square, and pro-people-in-all-their-crazy-ways – for freedom enables all of these, and freedom is lost when any of these is banned. That’s good enough reason – a reason that makes a necessity – for being pro-choice and all the rest, every single day you value freedom.
But the relentless assault on women, in the US and around the world, requires moments of special notice as well as a persistent and thoroughgoing daily commitment. Today, the 34th anniversary of the day the Roe v. Wade decision gave back to American women their own bodies and lives, is Blog for Choice day, and this is one of those moments. The theme for today is “why I am pro-choice.” As I say above, I’m pro-choice because abortion rights are no more, and in no way less, than part of the most basic moral right of all persons, and that right must be defended in all its aspects. There are other good reasons to be pro-choice, though. Maia, from “Alas, a Blog”, gives some of them better than I could:
I’m pro-choice because I believe women are people, I’m pro-choice because I want to decide when I have a child, I’m pro-choice because I have two younger sisters, I’m pro-choice because I trust other women to make choices about their own lives, I’m pro-choice because sex should be awesome, I’m pro-choice because of all the women who have died and are dying from illegal abortions, I’m pro-choice because of all the women who have died and are dying because they couldn’t get an illegal abortion, I’m pro-choice because parenting is a hard important job and must be voluntary, I’m pro-choice because I know how hard women fought . . . to ensure women would have access to abortion.
(Read the whole thing.)
I will add just a bit more. As a man, I’m pro-choice because half my world lives their lives subject to the constant threat of having their freedom, their desires, their ownership of their own intentions, plans, and projects, their agency as persons, taken from them at any moment by an accident of circumstance coupled with the misogyny that comes from men like me. Half the human race makes every decision, undertakes every plan or project, too frequently gambles their very lives, in the uncertainty that any such action on their part can be negated, if they are pregnant, by men who make it illegal for them to continue to pursue their own lives, plans, and projects because they are pregnant, or prohibit them from exercising their own decisions about the matter even when they have the legal right to do so. The female majority of humanity in its entirety – including every woman I know or love – live the majority of their lives on a contingency basis: nothing they want, seek, choose, or commit to is ever secure; everything about their lives is provisional, subject to purely temporary and tentative decisions they may make about whether and when to get pregnant, or to mere chance events they did not choose at all, or to the violence men do to them. Pregnancy, when it occurs, however it occurs, and whether or not it is wanted, whether or not it is a threat to any woman’s lifeplans and chosen path, whether or not it disrupts her home, steals too-desperately-needed resources from her other children, strains her marriage, or merely threatens her life, trumps everything she herself may have brought into her own life, chosen, endorsed, and valued.
Men have decided that women’s lives are to be given over to pregnancy when pregnancy occurs or is even possible; men have decided that women may not choose anything in their lives, not even their lives themselves, over pregnancy, and increasingly even over the decision to try to retain their lives by preventing pregnancies that have not yet occurred. They have decided this for more than half of humanity, including all the women in my life, and all the women in every man’s life. Not I, but other men have negated the moral agency and moral standing of the women I respect and value. Other men have stolen the autonomy, the self-determination, the freedom, and the physical safety of every woman I know and care for. They have done this to my mother and my aunt, who lived their prime reproductive years with no legal right to choose how their reproductive lives would be lived, and have lived since in the limbo of contingency every woman now faces but that I, son and nephew, can ignore if I choose. They have done this to my sister, who opposes abortion but has lived her whole life with the nominal right to make her own decision on the matter, but stands to lose at any time even that simulacrum of an autonomy that her brothers can take for granted. They have done this to every female friend I have, whose lives are subject to disruption at any moment in ways I need never fear. They’ve done it to my female fellow-students from grad school, whose careers and creative work those men have declared are no reason for my friends to retain the freedom and independence that are an unquestioned accompaniment to my own career. They have done this to my young cousin, who’s working two jobs she likes while writing a brilliant Master’s thesis on Galileo, who goes to an archeology dig every summer that she really loves; none of that matters – if she should become pregnant those men have already decided what her ranking of time and priorities must be, and what she must give up to live her life by their values while I live mine, unquestioned, by my own. They have done it to my female professors, many of them now also friends, who taught me ethics and feminism and much more, who made me want to follow in their professional footsteps, and who led exemplary lives and brilliant careers always on a contingency basis that didn’t apply to me, their student.
I would fight any many who tried to harm a woman I loved in this way. Any decent man would do so. But there is no one man to fight. The women I love live in a hostile world shaped by a hostile patriarchy, many of whose members are ugly, childish, selfish men who can only assert themselves by hurting someone else; many more are the bitter and deranged misogynists of the religious right; others are simply “traditionalists” who are happy to claim the privileges of membership in that expansive, self-justifying community and who lack the education and empathy to see themselves and their actions for what they are. (I say this with contempt but not condescension; I was one of them, at one time, but luckily I got my education reasonably early, from women who, possibly, saw in me more potential than I had demonstrated.)
No man can fight all men, but every man has a responsibility to take a stance against those many men who would hurt and harry all women. This is partly simply a question of political endorsement: every man can claim patriarchal privilege, and all men have it to some degree thrust upon them; it is an act of minimum decency, not even to renounce it, but simply to refrain from employing it to ruin the lives of others out of whim or greed. To refuse to repudiate those men who make war on women is implicitly to condone them. But there is also a question of personal responsibility: responsibility to the particular women in one’s life. No decent man would treat the women in his life the way women in general are treated; any decent man must respect and support the women he loves by honoring them as free and independent persons, only one part of which comprises their reproductive lives.
If you are a man who loves any woman, you must make yourself her ally in winning and securing her own moral agency, and her place in a world that has a place for women. If you do not, you stand complacent in the face of the assault on her life by other men who do not love women. If you are a man who loves any woman, you must oppose the men who put women’s capacity for pregnancy above women themselves. If you do not, you consign the women you love to contingent status in their own lives. If you are a man who loves any woman, you must be an advocate for her right of choice over whatever matters most to her, and whatever might interfere with it. If you are not, you say to every woman you love that you do not value their freedom, their moral agency, their interests, desires, plans, projects, their living in their own lives. If you are a man who loves any woman (and if you are a man who does not, you are lost already), you must be pro-choice.
I’m pro-choice because there are women I love, and any man who loves any woman must be pro-choice.
I’m pro-choice for this reason, too:
And I’m pro-choice for this reason:
And for this reason:
ABORTION DEATH RATE
PRE- AND POST-ROE
Finally, I have a specialized reason for being pro-choice. Reproductive choice is a vital liberty for every woman, and support for choice is an obligation of every decent man. But as a bioethicist, choice is something of a professional issue for me as well. And in that respect, and not to make a long story longer, choice falls squarely into the theoretical nexus of moral personhood, moral agency, and the fact of and nature of interpersonal obligations that drives ethical reasoning, particularly in the healthcare setting. So, being pro-choice is not merely an obligation for me as a person, but it is central to understanding what I need to understand to work in my field; it is a logically necessary component of competence as a moral philosopher whose theoretical standpoint takes persons seriously. There are intelligent and sincere ethicists who are anti-choice, but almost always because they hold a mythological view of moral theory that cannot be defended on rational grounds. There are non-religious moral philosophers who are also anti-choice, but in their cases for reasons that do not withstand scrutiny. I am convinced one cannot be a competent, rational moral philosopher and be anti-choice, any more than one can be a competent, rational scientist who is a creationist, or a competent, rational physician who employs prayer therapy. Personal inclination is not justification for faulty reasoning or false beliefs, in ethics as in any other rational field. The pro-choice position flows directly from an understanding of what moral agency consists in and what moral persons are. It is not difficult to reach that conclusion, and not difficult to defend it. I am competent in my field, and I have a reasonable understanding of moral personhood (acknowledging the grave, but in no way fatal, complexities from which that concept suffers); I am pro-choice for that reason in addition to the others above.
UPDATE: This, from Lindsay Beyerstein, also says it well:
didn’t feel any explanation should be necessary. To me, it’s just obvious that fetuses aren’t people and that real-live people who have become hosts to unwanted pre-people should be able to take the necessary steps not to become the parents of actual people. Who the hell gave anyone the idea that this choice is a view that needs defending, as opposed to common sense?
I don’t write posts explaining why you shouldn’t kidnap people, or give them tattoos without their consent. Shouldn’t it be obvious why you must not force an innocent person to incubate a hunk of protoplasm until it becomes a baby?
Perfect.
7 Responses to “Blog for Choice Day”
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January 23rd, 2007 at 3:54 AM
“I am convinced one cannot be a competent, rational moral philosopher and be anti-choice”
How about my evil twin’s argument? I ultimately disagree with it, but it certainly strikes me as reasonable enough.
N.B. most of the reasons discussed in this post beg the question entirely. Just imagine that fetuses really were persons (say they had the mental age of a school-aged child). Then obviously the “freedom” to kill them would be nothing to celebrate — and your suggestions to the contrary begin to sound monstrous.
Of course, fetuses aren’t schoolkids. But the dialectical point remains: your reasons presuppose the pro-choice position, and so can’t very well provide support for it, to any who were not already convinced. The real issue is moral personhood, pure and simple. The rest doesn’t even begin to touch on the debate.
(Or do you really think that reproductive freedom is such a “vital right” that it would be okay to abort enwombed schoolchildren in my hypothetical case?)
January 23rd, 2007 at 5:24 AM
Excellent post. I am moved by your obvious passion for abortion rights. Thanks, KTK. (BTW, I expected nothing less from you!)
January 23rd, 2007 at 3:05 PM
I think Richard is right to point out that for the pro-lifer, abortion is like killing a school-aged child in the womb. Indeed, as someone who thinks it wrong to kill any conscious being (even if not a full person) I can sympathise with them here (although not in the early stages of pregnancy before any consciousness forms).
My response to Richard would be this: Yes, I would accept abortion of a full person, done as humanely as possible. I think it is a logical outgrowth of self-defence doctrine that permits one to prevent harm to oneself or another by using the minimum harm necessary to stop the agent responsible. I do not think this requires that the one doing the harm be morally culpable for his or her actions (so we can use just as much force against a sleepwalking killer as against an intentional murderer).
Therefore the freedom being protected in the pro-choice position is the freedom of self-defence.
January 24th, 2007 at 2:48 AM
“Who the hell gave anyone the idea that this choice is a view that needs defending, as opposed to common sense?”
The people who are criminalising abortion, the people who are gunning down doctors providing sexual health services, the people who are inventing false medical evidence; the massive, organised, oppressive campaign to make this choice unavailable to as many women as possible.
That’s why choice needs defending, loudly and vigorously, until such times as abortion is safe, legal and accessible everywhere for all women.
It’s a nice dreamworld the speaker lives in. The one where all the people in the world, especially those in power, possess common sense and respect for women. I want to live there too.
January 26th, 2007 at 2:03 PM
Richard:
most of the reasons discussed in this post beg the question entirely.
The theme was to explain why you are pro-choice, not offer a complete argument for that position. My points above are mostly reasons why defending choice is important, not why choice itself is morally justified. Some pro-choice arguments are hinted at: women’s liberty and autonomy is more important than whatever value may be attached to embryos or fetuses, and the non-personhood of the fetus largely moots any argument to the contrary. But the post was not intended to reproduce those arguments, so in that sense they were presupposed.
Just imagine that fetuses really were persons (say they had the mental age of a school-aged child). Then obviously the “freedom” to kill them would be nothing to celebrate
Imagine that they were banana trees. Then we could pick fruit off them and eat it. But they’re not, so we can’t, so there’s no point discussing it. (By the way, there’s nothing “obvious” about your conclusion, but it doesn’t matter anyway.)
Of course, fetuses aren’t schoolkids. But the dialectical point remains: your reasons presuppose the pro-choice position, and so can’t very well provide support for it, to any who were not already convinced. The real issue is moral personhood, pure and simple. The rest doesn’t even begin to touch on the debate.
As I suggest above, the lack of moral personhood of the fetus is decisive in favor of the pro-choice position, but even the putative personhood of the fetus would not be decisive against it. J.J. Thomson’s famous article to that effect is a cogent statement why.
But my post has other purposes: the opening section asserts the link between abortion rights and all other forms of liberty; the longer section on men’s attitudes toward abortion will hopefully encourage other men to see that they have something of value at risk in this struggle as well (namely, the freedom and interests of women they care about), and that they are morally in the wrong by failing to support choice, let alone opposing it; the final passage notes that support for abortion rights is an immediate logical consequence of basic and inescapable principles and concepts of medical ethics. These are important issues aside from the basic defense of abortion rights itself, and they both add to that defense and provide motivation for embracing it, or so I intended.
Or do you really think that reproductive freedom is such a “vital right” that it would be okay to abort enwombed schoolchildren in my hypothetical case?)
Of course I do! Do you really think that if you had a 1st-grader living inside your body, wearing you down, distorting your body, demanding its substance as nourishment, and imposing on you a real and grave risk of death that increased week by week, you would be prohibited from removing it?! Thomson’s article – widely influential for decades now – posits only a forced blood transfusion as the degree of bodily invasion it would be permissible to reject by way of one’s right of autonomy. To be forced to have someone live inside you without your permission for most of a year, irrespective of consequences, would be unthinkable. It is the more so when that being has no personhood, no interests or experiences, to lose, and yet the consequences to one’s liberty, health, and safety remain. That is precisely the case in unwanted pregnancy.
How about my evil twin’s argument?
The gist of it is:
“All humans are created equal. From the highest genius to the severely mentally disabled, all are equally members of the human kind. It is membership in this kind, rather than one’s peculiar individual characteristics, that bestow[s] moral worth. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, if you’re a human being, then your life matters. Your life matters because you’re a human being, not because of your contingent cognitive abilities. There’s no good reason to refrain from extending this to unborn human beings. An individual human life begins at conception. That’s a natural fact. All human beings have moral worth in virtue of their kind. That’s a moral fact. Put the two together and you reach the pro-life conclusion that fetuses have moral worth, just like you and me. They may yet lack our cognitive capabilities. But we’ve seen that such superficial individual differences are morally irrelevant. What matters is our underlying commonality, or shared human essence. . . . I am not arguing that fetuses have moral worth just because they could (“potentially”) be turned into persons. Rather, they have worth in virtue of what they already are.”
In turn, the heart of that argument (the place where moral claims enter, rather than observations about science or logic) is this:
“It is membership in [the human] kind, rather than one’s peculiar individual characteristics, that bestow[s] moral worth. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, if you’re a human being, then your life matters. Your life matters because you’re a human being, not because of your contingent cognitive abilities. . . . All human beings have moral worth in virtue of their kind. That’s a moral fact.”
This is a fairly standard anti-choice position, but there’s no reason to think it’s true. I mean that literally: there is no reason to accept the assertion that membership in a particular species coveys moral standing. Occasionally, anti-choicers implicitly recognize this through their fumbling attempts to link species membership to something recognizably moral (by arguments about degrees of humanity, developmental pathways from fetus to person, God’s special designation of humans, or what have you). These are uniformly unavailing, but at least they’re arguments – attempts to give a reason to accept the claim you make. But you do not give any such reasons. You state that claim as a “moral fact”. But moral facts are notoriously unlike natural facts – they’re not directly observable from the environment. If you believe what you say, you’ve got to explain why anyone else should believe it (and, as I say, no convincing argument of that type is known).
Without the claim that mere species membership conveys moral standing, the entire argument fails; without some reason to believe that mere species membership conveys moral standing, there is no reason to accept that claim. And nothing about species membership itself can be adduced as evidence of the moral implications of that membership – natural facts do not establish moral facts. The claim is purely arbitrary – and quite implausible, at that.
On the other hand, one can make a both plausible and convincing argument that cognitive personhood does convey moral status. The reason is simple enough: minimal cognitive capacity is a pre-requisite to participation in the aspects of life that unquestionably have moral significance in themselves – for instance, having relationships, having and acting on desires or goals, acting on, responding to, and being held accountable for one’s actions under moral rules, and so forth. Those things clearly have moral significance, not because anybody in particular thinks so but because, in practical and logical terms, they are inescapable parts of a life that conforms to and reflects moral concepts and rules (such as right living, the good in life, fairness, justice, obligation to others, etc.). In short, to live a (good or even bad) moral life, one must live with some sensitivity and responsiveness to moral rules and concepts; to live that kind of life, one must understand those rules and concepts and be capable of acting in response to them; to think and act in such a way, one must have certain minimal cognitive capacities. Animals are not moral persons precisely because they cannot comprehend or act on moral concepts. It is absurd to hold animals morally responsible for their actions (we may punish them to train them not to do harmful things, but we do not say they are “immoral” for doing them); it is absurd because they cannot understand the relevant concepts. Similarly, we do not regard individuals who lack all capacity for moral responsiveness – fetuses, perhaps infants, the brain-dead – as moral persons, and for some who have a basic cognitive capacity, such as small children or the mentally handicapped, we may acknowledge them as persons, but only in a diminished sense – we do not hold them morally responsible for their actions. So moral personhood is already an operative concept in most people’s understanding of moral status – it distinguishes humans from animals, and humans who are full moral persons from non-persons or those with “diminished capacity”. And it is so, again, not because some people think so, or their religion tells them so, or even because it makes intuitive sense. It is so because it is a logically inescapable consequence of understanding what a moral life entails.
Pippa:
Thanks so much for your kind remarks!
Pejar:
Many people have adopted your position, and it makes basic sense. It may be problematic to take the “self-defense” analogy too literally, however. Although abortion is safer than pregnancy, still in most cases of abortion we can be confident that one’s life is not literally in grave danger. Abortion is still justified in those cases, but it has to be understood as a right of self-determination, or of control over one’s own body, not as literal self-defense.
Lara:
Good to hear from you.
I don’t think Amanda was really suggesting abortion rights had never been called into question. The “who the hell . . .?” idiom simply expresses shock that they should have done so. I think she’s not saying abortion rights do not, in fact, need defending, but that they should not.
January 31st, 2007 at 3:40 AM
KTK, while I’m unreservedly pro-choice in actuality, I do think that if (counterfactually) fetuses were moral persons, then abortion would be much more morally problematic. Granted, there’s no obligation to protect another’s life “irrespective of consequences” for oneself. But all things considered, there certainly *can* be such obligations in some cases. (I’m not a Randian egoist, and wouldn’t expect many other leftists to be either!) It’s not something that can be ruled out in principle.
In short, I don’t think reproductive rights (or, indeed, any rights) are absolute. So I guess it was that implication of your rhetoric that I found most off-putting.
Regarding Ricardo’s argument, I agree that it’s ultimately flawed (as discussed in the post’s comments). But it is certainly reasonable enough — endorsing it wouldn’t make one an “incompetent” or “irrational” moral philosopher. That claim of yours is, I think, simply unreasonable.
Re: your claim that the post offers “no reasons” for the claim that species-membership matters — are you sure you read the whole thing? The principle is inferred by generalization over familiar cases. (The ethicist’s version of “inference to the best explanation”.) Ricardo was pretty explicit about this: “we all typically recognize that moral status accrues to individuals in virtue of their kind, or what they (fundamentally) are, rather than their individual characteristics, or how they (superficially) happen to be. This is reflected in our respect for the mentally disabled, and in the truism that ‘all humans are created equal’.” How else do you explain these cases?
Anyway, I don’t mean to get into the argument’s details here, because that’s what the other comment thread is for. My point here is simply that the argument is obviously reasonable. It rests on premises that anyone could reasonably accept. That is:
1) moral worth derives from the kind of being one is, rather than the contingent way in which one happens to instantiate this form.
and
2) biological ‘human’ is the kind of being that we fundamentally are.
As it happens, I think premise 2 is false, as I argue in the post’s comments. I was never a fetus. But this is not a wholly obvious or uncontroversial metaphysical claim, and I appreciate that reasonable people could disagree. I wish you would recognize this too.
January 10th, 2009 at 2:28 PM
Came upon this almost a year after the fact…but in response to “Ricardo,” yes, it damn well is unreasonable to say “moral worth derives from the kind of being one is” if you define “kind” as species-membership. It is wholly and obviously unreasonable to place that kind of value on a mere DNA sequence.
Obviously a brain-dead human doesn’t have the same worth as a healthy one, or a sentient alien life form–why on earth would it, barring some mystical/religious attachment to the human genetic code? Obviously we should give sentient robots/aliens/newly-discovered apes with human or near-human levels of intelligence respect for “human rights,” which really ought to be called “personhood rights.”
We don’t need to place some quasi-mystical value on DNA sequences to value the mentally disabled. They are far more cognitively capable than any fetus. So that analogy fails.
The distinction between “fundamentally are” and “superficial instantiation” also seems vacuous to me. There’s nothing superficial about lacking consciousness, and nothing so ‘fundamental” about species-membership. In fact I fail to see how that distinction would work in any case. I don’t think there’s a difference between “fundamental” and “superficial” being.
As for obligations to persons, nobody is obligated to carry around anyone else inside them for nine months (or donate blood, or bone marrow, or organs). At least, the state cannot enforce such obligations.