One of the primary issues in the debate over abortion, and perhaps the most important one, is whether the unborn child is a person.
There are, of course, many other arguments made in defense of abortion. Some focus on bodily autonomy, health, poverty, crime, or other social concerns. But personhood is a bit more basic than the rest of these questions. If the unborn child is a person, then abortion involves the rights and interests of another human being. If the unborn child is not a person, then the issue looks very different..
It is important to separate being biologically human from being a person. The question here is not whether the unborn are human, but whether there is any good reason to say that some human organisms are persons while others are not.
If the unborn child is not a person from the beginning, then at some point during development they must become one. Something must change that is important enough to make the difference, and that difference should give us a clear and consistent reason for drawing the line there.
Many different points have been suggested. Each of these, however, faces serious problems when we ask whether it can consistently explain why one human organism should be considered a person while another should not.
One of the most common arguments is consciousness. This is hard to define, but for the sake of argument, we’ll treat it as awareness, or the ability to experience the world around us. At first, this may seem like a reasonable dividing line. If a human being cannot think, feel, or experience anything at all, why should we consider them a person?
However, consciousness is not something consistent even in the lives of adult human beings, people who we would likely want to include in a definition of persons. Rather, these attributes are ones that we are frequently bereft of; when anesthetized for surgery, in a coma, or even when just asleep.
One might argue that it is not the present possession of consciousness that matters, but the potential to obtain consciousness in the future. This, however, is equally applicable to the unborn, who are themselves developing toward consciousness as well.
Furthermore, consciousness is not a yes or no state. It develops gradually, and people can possess very different levels of awareness and mental ability. There is an infinite number of degrees in the development and capacity for consciousness and awareness, and some have a higher level of consciousness and awareness than others.
If consciousness is what makes us persons, then how much consciousness is enough? There must be some point where a human organism goes from having too little consciousness to count as a person, to having enough. If not, and our basic rights come from abilities that human beings possess in very different degrees, we need some good reason why those differences should not also affect our moral status. (1)
Without such a reason, or a willingness to do away with concepts of equality, consciousness on any level cannot logically be what makes someone a person.
Another commonly suggested line is viability; The capacity for independent survival. If one is dependent upon another for their survival, they will say, then one cannot be a person.
There are several problems with this. To begin with, viability is not determined by the child alone. It also depends on medical technology, available care, and where the child happens to be born. Not only is the point at which a child is ‘viable’ constantly advancing, in principle, the unborn child may eventually be deliverable at any point, perhaps even from fertilization.(2)
This makes viability a strange basis for personhood. A child at a certain stage of development might be considered viable in a major hospital with advanced neonatal care, but not viable somewhere without that technology. Yet the children themselves may be biologically almost identical. Most people likely would agree that access to advanced medical technology should likely not be the basis for what is and isn’t a person.(3)
Furthermore, viability is something that cannot be easily confined to the direct biological dependence of the child. A newborn still cannot sustain their own life without the care and labor of others. The form of that dependence has changed, but the dependence itself has not, and whether one is reliant upon their mother to feed them from her breast or nourish them within the womb, they are still incapable of sustaining their own life without the labor of some other person.
Indeed, true independence is something many people never fully possess. Infants, children, and many adults depend on others to survive. Dependence alone therefore seems like a poor reason to deny someone personhood.
Implantation is sometimes suggested as another dividing line, shortly after conception. But implantation does not change anything about the organism, it simply connects it with another. Unless implantation actually changes something about the thing being connected, it is difficult to see why attaching to the uterine wall should make the difference between a person and a nonperson.
Birth presents a similar problem. The child does not become a fundamentally different kind of being simply by passing through the birth canal or having the umbilical cord cut. Birth changes the child’s location and the way they receive oxygen and nourishment, but it does not create a new organism or suddenly give them independence.
Quickening, however, says very little about the child’s actual development. It depends largely on when the mother is able to detect movements that have already been happening for some time. As physician Horatio Storer wrote in the nineteenth century:
“Many women never quicken at all, though their children are born living. Others quicken earlier or later than the usual standard of time, or, others again may, in their own persons, have noticed either or all of these peculiarities in different pregnancies”(4)
Fetal movement can also be seen on ultrasound well before the mother is normally able to feel it. Whether that movement has become noticeable to someone else therefore seems like a poor basis for deciding whether the child is a person.
Another argument is that it is the formation of human-like appearances and features that grants personhood. Sometimes this is related to the number of limbs one has, being recognizable as human, or other such features.
While the appearance of humanity is an exceptionally subjective metric, it is quite clear that it doesn’t matter. Defects, deformities, injuries, and diseases can cause adult persons to be so horribly disfigured at times that they at times may no longer appear human at all, but they are still undeniably people..
Like quickening, human appearance may have emotional significance, but it is difficult to see why it should have any real biological or ethical significance when it comes to personhood.
Some, however, will argue that it is this exact sort of emotional attachment that gives people personhood. Often, taking the form of analogies like that of the burning fertility clinic, they will argue that if one does not have a similar emotive response to a fetus being killed as they do to a child being killed, that then demonstrates that the fetus is not a person.
But emotional attachment is always necessarily subjective. Some mothers may feel a connection to their child from the moment they see a positive pregnancy test, while others may struggle to form such a bond even after birth.
Personal emotional attachment to others is a necessarily subjective metric. Some mothers might feel a connection to their child from the moment they see their pregnancy test, while others may struggle to form such a bond even after birth.
When an old and lonely man dies quietly in his home with no one to mourn him, he may not have the same emotional importance to others as a mother, a lover, or a child. This does not make him any less of a person, or make it ok to end his life.
It is often illustrated through analogies like that of the burning fertility clinic that we do not always grant the same level of emotional value to the unborn that we would to an infant. Most would save the life of an infant over an embryo, for example. However, this same comparison is equally applicable when given situations involving the lives of already born individuals who we would certainly consider equal persons as well.
If given a choice between saving your daughter or a stranger, you would probably choose your daughter. If it came down to my sister or your daughter, I would choose my sister every time. Even when given situations of strangers who differ only in their level of development such as with a child and an adult, our emotional attachments and judgment still vary incredibly. Yet we would not conclude from this that one of them is more of a person than the other.(5)
If personhood can be granted or denied based on nothing more than the feelings of others, then it becomes an entirely subjective concept. The same human being could be treated as more or less of a person depending only on who is judging them, which gives us no clear or consistent basis for personhood.
Some will say that if personal emotional attachment does not determine personhood, then perhaps it is the acceptance of society as a whole that grants or denies it.
This creates an obvious problem. Throughout history, certain groups of people have not been recognized as persons by the societies around them, often with horrific results. We recognize those people as persons today, and we would not accept their abuse simply because the majority at the time believed otherwise.
Moreover, if the only reason personhood begins at a certain point is because a majority of people say it does, then there is no real reason for drawing the line there in the first place. Public opinion may tell us what people believe, but it cannot by itself tell us whether that belief is right.
Personhood therefore cannot simply depend on the beliefs of a powerful majority, able to be granted or denied at a whim, and certainly the views of the majority cannot be argued as empirical fact.
While some believe that one’s legal status is what makes a human a person or not, this has many of the same issues as any criteria based upon society, especially seeing as how the law is often little more than a reflection of public opinion.
Furthermore, at this point the law itself is so incredibly inconsistent when it comes to the personhood of the human fetus that it is difficult to use it as a basis for anything.
By the mid-twentieth century, the law in the United States had developed a number of protections and legal interests for the unborn in areas such as property, wrongful death, and criminal law. The introduction of liberalized abortion statutes in the late 1960s and early 1970s created new inconsistencies between these areas of law and the way abortion itself was treated, many of which remain today.(6)
In federal law, for example, it is a separate offense to kill or injure a “child in utero” during certain crimes, defining such a child as a member of the human species at any stage of development. Yet the same law specifically exempts consensual abortion. We deny personhood when it comes to abortion, but grant it when it is convenient. But how can the unborn child be any less a person when instead of being killed by a negligent driver they are killed by doctors in the performance of an abortion? Even in our often admittedly inconsistent legal system, we are rarely confronted with such obvious contradictions.
We see similar problems in almost every area of law that affects the unborn; Criminal, tort, property, and others. We seem willing to recognize and protect the unborn child in some circumstances, while denying them those same protections in others.
Further adding to the confusion here is how significantly laws regarding the personhood of the unborn vary across the United States and the world at large, and how often these laws undergo a drastic change. Is personhood something dependent wholly upon little more than where you live or when you were conceived? This doesn’t seem particularly logical.
If law and public opinion cannot tell us who is a person, we are left looking again at the characteristics of the human being themselves.
Some will declare that it is the heartbeat or the possession of a heart that grants or denies personhood. However, there are those who, due to sickness or injury, possess no heart of their own. They may rely upon artificial hearts to pump their blood, or upon the biological hearts of others to sustain their life, but we would not say they are not people.
Others point to the ability to experience pain. This faces many of the same problems as consciousness. Pain is not something every person is capable of experiencing at every moment, and some people are even born with conditions that prevent them from feeling pain at all, a condition known as congenital analgesia. We would hardly deny that these individuals are persons either.
Still others will suggest that personhood can’t be granted without the ability to reproduce, perhaps based on the seven criteria for the classification of biological life. However, newborn children, the infertile, and many others cannot reproduce, yet still obviously remain persons all the same.
Others will argue that the frequency of miscarriage proves that the unborn are not persons. The fact that so many die, and the inability of certain embryos to grow into an adult for whatever reason, they will say, is grounds for denying them equal status.
However, it seems quite clear that we never view accidental deaths, or deaths resulting from sickness or defect to be reasonable grounds to deny personhood. It is true that some embryos may never reach adulthood, but the same is true for many already born children in our world as well.
Once again, the same problem keeps appearing. These standards do not apply only to the unborn. When applied consistently, they often exclude people whom nearly everyone already agrees are persons.
If we pay attention, we can see that a running theme among these arguments is that they apply not only to the lives of the unborn, but to the lives of already born children as well, and can easily be extended beyond that too. Indeed, such arguments are already being used by many to justify the termination of the lives of newborns and young children.(7)(8)
Some at this point may simply throw up their hands in frustration, and say that if we have established that nothing here can logically determine personhood, then life and personhood must be some continuum, with sperm and egg being persons as well. However, this may be one of the only points we can actually draw a distinction. Sperm and egg are human cells, but they are not whole human organisms. Rather, they are simply parts of the female or male they came from, like hair or skin. After fertilization, however, we have a new whole human organism developing as a separate creature.
Regardless, if that human organism is not a person at fertilization, then something later must make it one. But the various lines that have been proposed do not seem to give us a clear and consistent reason for doing so.
Ultimately the only logical and biological point at which we can reasonably argue personhood begins seems to be fertilization, the creation of a new human organism. Even when tailor-made with the intent to merely exclude the unborn, any other criteria for personhood tends to be inconsistent and nonsensical, generally denying personhood to groups that we would logically consider persons and granting it on factors that don’t appear relevant.(9)(10)(11)(12)
There are many reasons why people support abortion. But, regardless of our opinions on abortion in general, if we cannot point to a clear reason to deny the unborn personhood, this really shouldn’t be one of them.
Sources
- The Wrong of AbortionIn Andrew I. Cohen and Christopher Heath Wellman (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics. Blackwell Publishing, 2005, pp. 13–26.
- Limits of fetal viability and its enhancementEarly Pregnancy (Cherry Hill). January 2001; 5(1):49–50. PMID:11753511.
- Understanding the Abortion ArgumentPhilosophy & Public Affairs. Autumn 1971; 1(1):67–95.Accessible copy of the same article
- Why Not? A Book for Every WomanBoston: Lee and Shepard, 1866. Quoted discussion of quickening: p. 32.1866 edition in the Wellcome Collection
- The burning fertility clinicThe Lifeguard Initiative. Original article; author byline and publication date unverified.The original page could not be recovered during verification. Its original reference is retained; no different essay has been substituted.
- Law and the Unborn Child: The Legal and Logical InconsistenciesNotre Dame Law Review. 1971; 46(2):349. Historical legal analysis.Federal statutory text: 18 U.S.C. § 1841
- After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?Journal of Medical Ethics. May 2013; 39(5):261–263. doi:10.1136/medethics-2011-100411.PubMed bibliographic record and abstract
- Abortion Survivor Protection and Modern Day ApplicabilityThe Lifeguard Initiative. May 21, 2020 (original writing history; current web edition).
- The conception view of personhood: a reviewEthics & Medicine. Spring 2003; 19(1):11–33. PMID:14700043.The original university-hosted PDF is unavailable. This link identifies the same article in PubMed.
- Personhood and the Conception EventIn Michael F. Goodman (ed.), What Is a Person? Humana Press, 1988, pp. 199–211. doi:10.1007/978-1-4612-3950-5_10.
- When do human beings begin? scientific myths and scientific factsInternational Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. March 1999; 19(3/4):22–46. doi:10.1108/01443339910788730.
- Personhood status of the human zygote, embryo, fetusThe Linacre Quarterly. May 2017; 84(2):130–144. doi:10.1080/00243639.2017.1299896.
