Learning Not To Kill
I have been teaching the abortion controversy to college students for about fifteen years. Most of my students defend abortion.What’s rather worrisome is how weak are the reasons they give for killing another human being. Nearly all the considerations given in favor of abortion turn out to support infanticide as well. My students have made up their minds before they have studied even any of the stronger abortion defenses, not to mention any pro-life philosophers. One would have hoped that they would have reflected longer and read far more widely before advocating killing anybody. I would like offer a “Modest Proposal” that before one undergoes or defends abortion to prevent a particular child from being a burden to parents or country that one reads at least onepaper by a prominent pro-life philosopher. And before one advocates that a right to destroy embryos in the womb or the freezer be the law of the land in order to prevent millions of babies from being burdens to their parents and country or to reap medical benefits from their remains, mysecond modest proposal is that one reads either three articles or one book by prominent pro-life philosophers.
Below are ten of the worse “arguments”in defense of abortion that I have encountered.I had thought of claiming that I was listing them from worst to best but it was often indeterminate which position was worse. Furthermore, some of the “defenses” of abortion may charitably be best described as having been intended as personal reasons to exercise an independently established right to abort rather than grounds for that right.
I have included some of my actual classroom responses and some that I was tempted to make but didn’t.I hope it will be instructive and if it is entertaining as well, that the black humor is not inappropriate. I trust that one can briefly laugh at the absurdity of some pro-choice positions without detracting from the gravity of the issue. We surely wouldn’t want to tell anyone at the next March for Life that they can’t carry witty signs. I remember more vividly than any speech at the 2017 March for Life a sign that stated Hillary’s slogan “I’m with her” but added an arrow pointing from those words to a fetus in the womb.
The equal right to break the law: My students find it very unprincipled that it is easier for rich women to have illegal abortions than poor women. This implies that legitimate laws are those that everyone can break with impunity. Now while I’m not sure if I have ever read the Magna Carta, and I can’t remember when I last perused the American Constitution’s Bill of Rights, and I generally don’t keep up with the various proclamations of rights from the United Nations or other international organizations, I’m still rather confident that I haven’t missed a powerful defense of the equal right to break the law.
Like most, I admire the grand old principle of equal treatment under the law. I’m proud to be a citizen of a country that has enshrined in law an equal right to speech, vote, practice religion,and so on. My passion for equality before the law is nearly rivaled by my students’ anger at the absence in our nation of an equal right to break abortion law. They vehemently denounce any abortion ban that wealthy, educated, and well connected women will be able to evade while poorerwomen with less schooling and networking will find it harder to circumvent.
Taken back, I challenge my students to list a single law that is not easier for some to violate than others. Surely they wouldn’t strike all the other laws from the books. Some inequality in breaking the law is certainly better than the equal or unequal harms of anarchy. To make matters more concrete, I might share with them Frances Beckwith’s analogy that only the wealthiest can afford to hire hit men but that is not any reason to legalize hired assassins so an increased supply with bring down prices.
2. Pro-lifers only care about the unborn: It is rather common to hear students criticize pro-lifers for not being concerned with the welfare of human beings at other stages of life. My initial response is just to note that American troops on their way to liberate Nazi concentrate camps may have passed many kosher soup kitchens and foodbanks but did not stop to volunteer or make a donation. I might add that even if they didn’t have time to offer a hand or any right to share their army-issuedrations, surely they did not have to go AWOL nor would it upset any MPs for them to condemn the Nazis’ unprogressive tax code. Yet they did not. They had more important things to do.
However, a more charitable reading of my students is that they believe pro-lifers are hypocrites driven by concerns other than respect for fetal life. I reply that some of the soldiers liberating the death camps and encouraging others to do so as well werethemselves just following ordersin order to earn a paycheck and did little before or after the war to save livesand combat anti-Semitism. So we can separate the morality of their actions from our evaluation of their motives..
Although a little further discussion is sometimes needed, I am usually able to get a good number of my studentsto understand that pro-life motives areirrelevant in a theoretical discussion of the morality of abortion and are also beside the point in the practical pursuit of the appropriate legal implementation.
3.The inability of men to become pregnant: Some students sincerely suggest that since men cannot get pregnant they shouldn’t enter the abortion debate. Since their bodies won’t be subject to any laws enacted, they have no right to weigh in on the matter. My wife is fond of responding to this position that it renders illegitimate the decision of the nine men on the Supreme Court who made Roe v. Wadethe law of the land. But maybe the envisioned role of men is that they can speak out about abortion as long as their doing so serves to allow women to make the choice for themselves. Thus, alas, we may need to find other arguments for overturning Roev. Wadethan those nine men shouldn’t have spoken on that subject since their judicial robes could never cover pregnant bellies.
Since the students seeking to keep men from weighing in on abortion tend to forget that there are pro-life women, I remind them that their restrictive speech policy will not eliminate their opposition but just render the abortion debate a contest between pro-life women and pro-choice women. I inform them that even if they are right and can convince me that they are, I will not let them leave class early nor remove the subject from my syllabus,but will just teach about abortion by quoting the many pro-life women I know or have read. I really wanted to be able to start off my defense of various pro-life positonsby saying with attitude that “MY MAMA SAYS …” but, alas, my mother is pro-choice. Fortunately, my wife has written a dozen articles on abortion and we have had hundreds of conversations so I can lecture a long time about the immorality of abortion so long as I preface each remark with “My wife says…”
It is no surprise that those opposed to men “pontificating” on the abortion debate direct some of their harshest condemnations towards the Catholic pro-life male. I was once a participant in a debate sponsored by a studentpro-life organization. Four of the six debaters were men. Upset that men were debating what women can do with their bodies, dozens of women protestors showed up carrying signs. Oneplacard that caught my eye was “Keep your crucifix out of my uterus.” I was tempted to respond “keep your uterus off my crucifix” but I took the high road.
I point out to my students seeking to restrictthe abortion debate to the fertile that a general principle limiting debate to those who could be harmed by the policy in question would prevent any budding eco-feminists from speaking out about the evils of meat eating - unless they fear becoming a meal in our factory farming patriarchy. Worried that my smile might be misinterpreted as a smirk and micro-aggression, I don’t always express my concern that the position will sideline sterile or menopausal women. At least the latter had the opportunity to earlier enter the debate. But now that postmenopausal women like Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards and her supporters such as Gloria Steinem and Hilary Clinton can no more become pregnant than I, they too will be relegated to the debate audience. However, in the future, men as well as postmenopausal women may return to the abortion debate if scientists invent womb transplants.
4. The hypothetical ability of men to get pregnant: While my inability to be impregnated was wrongly thought to silence me but instead just limited me to quoting my wife’s pro-life views, the possibility of men’s future pregnanciesactually has dire consequences for my pro-choice feminist students seeking to keep abortion legal on the basis of egalitarian considerations.Their view is that since only women can become pregnant, they suffer inequities because of their biology. Men are free from the physical burdens and dangers of pregnancy, as well as the loss of employment, educational and social opportunities due to unwanted pregnancies and child-raising. If women aren’t allowed to choose to be free from a pregnancy that men naturally avoid, they will bear unequal burdens and be permanently relegated to second class citizenship.
I suspect that few abortion defenders will, upon reflection, insist that the injustice of an abortion ban lies in it involving an unequal distribution of burdens and opportunities.This suspicion is partially based upon my belief that if men could also get pregnant and consequently experienced equal limitations, the before-mentioned egalitarian defenders of abortion would still endorse abortion rights. Such rights would also not likely be endangered if our society was one in which motherhood increased a woman’s status or power above that of men. Nor would egalitarian abortion defenders accept that abortion rights should vanish if men were legally required to take on more childcare burdens so women would not lag behind in social and economic opportunities.
This inequality argument even provides a defense of infanticide. Consider a hypothetical scenario where women come to so strongly bond with their children around a week after childbirth that they can’t afterwards give them up for adoption or let anyone else provide for their daily care. I think even the most ardent egalitarian would be unwilling to endorse infanticide in the week between birth and the unbreakable bonds set in. And they would be reluctant even if abortion had not been earlier available to prevent such bonds from arising.
Sometime my students find hypothesizing about such altered desires to be too farfetched to be informative, so I ask them to imagine a woman giving birth in an isolated community where there isn’t any formula, breast pumps, wet nurses, or other substitutes for her nursing. Thus the mother must breastfeed around the clock and this limits her social, educational and professional opportunities more than it limits the father’s opportunities. Nevertheless, the mother surely can’t bring about the death of the nursing child despite these considerable burdens being unequally distributed.
5. The Holy Spirit inspires nearly every secular pro-lifer: Abortion opponents are frequently accused of legislating their religious views.The amazing thing is that this accusation will surface even when the pro-life argument is devoid of religious reference. I nearly always assign my class Don Marquis’s essay “Why Abortion is Immoral.” Inevitably, students accuse him - and his sympathizers amongst their classmates – of having religious motivations. Marquis is an atheist and in the assigned article attacks abortion defenses premised on the sanctity of life. When pro-choicers accuse pro-life atheists of having religious motivations when they don’t rely upon any religious doctrines, I’m at a loss and left conjecturing that pro-choicers believe that the Holy Spirit’s influence is pervasive.
I have heard students exclaim that there are no good non-religious arguments against abortion. I wonder if that is an admission that there are good religious arguments against abortion or just that there are no good secular arguments against abortion. I suspect the latter. The seemingly secular arguments are smoke screens, religious views cloaked in naturalist camouflage.
Is it really good news for pro-choicers that all anti-abortion views are ultimately religious in nature? Surely atheism isn’t so easy to defend that it makes the pro-choicers’ job a walk in the park. If I was a pro-choicer, I wouldn’t think refuting Aquinas or Plantinga’s arguments for God’s existence a promising strategy for winning the abortion debate. Maybe the accusation that the pro-life position is a disguised religious belief is intended to suggest that there are illicit assumptions in play rather than the activity of the Holy Spirit.Perhaps a religious affiliation serves to disqualify the idea, even if it is true, from being enacted into public policy.
But why does it matter if the pro-life positon emerges from religious doctrines? Having a religious objection to abortion doesn’t preclude one from also giving good pro-life arguments on secular grounds. I am reminded of the response of the David Oderberg to a student of mine who claimed that Oderberg’s lectures (which weren’t on abortion) were motivated by his prior religious belief in God and designed to just provide philosophical support for his theistic beliefs. Oderberg memorably quipped that Whitehead and Russell spent the first hundred pages of their book Principia Mathematica proving that one plus one equals two but he is pretty sure that they already believed that proposition.
6. The Botched Illegal Back-Alley Abortion: With considerable indignation, students frequently protest that if abortion is banned, then women will die in back alley abortions. These deaths are tragic. In fact, they are double tragedies for they take two lives. Yet I try to convince my pro-choice students that pro-lifers might not and should not be persuaded that such tragedies provide a compelling reason to keep abortion legal. Abortion defenders need to realize that pro-lifers view fetuses and newborns as having comparable metaphysical and moral status, thus rendering their deaths more or less equally harmful. Infants have not manifested impressive mental abilitieslacking in fetuses so there isn’t an intrinsic morally significant mental feature that infants possess and fetuses lack that can morally distinguish abortion from infanticide. If need be, abortion and infanticide can be extrinsically equalized by stipulating adoption services aren’t available so neither the burdens of supporting fetuses or newborns can be transferred.
Once this fetus/infant equivalence has been recognized, then it can be argued that if parents were accidentally killing themselves in attempts to commit back alley infanticides, society shouldn’t respond to such tragedies by legalizing infanticide and providing trained personnel to enable the killings to be undertaken in a manner that is safer to the parents. Thus if the dangers of self-inflicted wounds would not warrant legalizing back-alley infanticide, why would life endangering botched back alley abortions?
7. Killing to avoid burdens.My studentsfrequently defend abortion on the grounds that it spares children from being born into poverty, broken homes, troubled neighborhoods, stigma, handicaps, or some other adversity. Sometimes concerns about adoption, foster care, overpopulation and exhausting the environment are thrown into the mix.
`Even if abortion defenders conceive of the above considerations as sufficient reasons for some women in some places and times to abort, they also provide the basis of a justification for infanticide in similar situations. Yet I doubt anyone will argue that it would be just if poor or unwed mothers in deprived neighborhoods authorized maternity ward staffers to kill their newborns given that they will otherwise face considerable hardships and the world is overpopulated and the environment under stress. Since we have already noted the lack of any morally significant intrinsic difference between newborns and fetuses, if such considerations about hardships and shortages justify abortion, then they would justify infanticide. But they don’t. Thus such burdens aren’t sufficient to justify abortion.
I suspect that the prospect of burdens befalling the child after birth only play a role in whether a woman chooses to exercise a right to abort that has been independently justified. That independent justification is most likely to be the woman’s right to avoid unwanted bodily burdens. The basis for my suspicion is that abortion defenders would not prohibit abortion even in cases where the mothers were always wedded and wealthy and the world is not overpopulated, resources are plentiful, and orphanages are empty. So such considerations are evidently not taken to be necessary conditions for the permissibility of abortion.