Yesterday I ran across Alexandra DeSanctis’s November 14, 2019, National Review article “An Honest Abortion Debate: A response to
Caitlin Flanagan’s essay in The Atlantic.” I’m late to this discussion, but, since I found DeSanctis’s
discussion to be not optimally “honest,” in a sense, I wrote up this
post.
First, DeSanctis says this:
- “no abortion method — no matter how supposedly modern, sanitary, or safe — is good for women”;
- no life challenges for women are ever “properly solved by extinguishing a life that has already come into being.”
It's worthwhile to notice that she doesn’t give any reasons to believe this though. I don’t suppose there’s a rule on the universe that if you
say something controversial you must provide evidence, but there is a common idea that debatable claims should be supported: this is the "honest" and respectable thing to do. But maybe she just expects her
readers will agree with her on these claims and so there's no need or this just isn’t the place to
support these claims; I don't know.
DeSanctis’s most important discussion, however, is to a part of Flanagan’s
“The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate: Why we need to face the best arguments
from the other side” where Flanagan discusses what she sees in
images of 12 week (= 3 month) old fetuses: “Here
is one of us; here is a baby.”
She expresses concern
about these abortions:
“. . these are human beings, the most vulnerable among us, and we have no care for them. How terrible to know that in the space of an hour, a baby could be alive—his heart beating, his kidneys creating the urine that becomes the amniotic fluid of his safe home—and then be dead, his heart stopped, his body soon to be discarded.”
She then responds to this with, among other things, the observation that abortions
are going to happen anyway: “No matter what the
law says, women will continue to get abortions.”
This might not be a great reaction. In general,
responding that something is going to continue happening in some way, no
matter what, doesn’t much support or excuse doing that thing. A better
response, from the concerns these images raise, might be to urge that abortions happen as early in pregnancy as
possible, before the fetus much resembles what is seen in these images and
that society is structured so this is so.
DeSanctis concludes with this:
The chief strength of Flanagan’s essay is its nod to the power of ultrasound technology, which reveals what our abortion debate so often leaves out: These are human lives. The conflict over abortion is dishonest and unwinnable not because both sides make poor arguments, but because only one side is willing to admit that reality [that these are ‘human lives’].
As someone who teaches how to evaluate arguments and more productively debate, I have some
responses.
First: thoughtful people who
argue that abortion is generally not wrong do recognize that
biologically human fetuses are, “human lives,” in one sense of
that term (but not another, discussed below). Abortion involves taking something biologically
human that’s alive and making it not alive, or killing it. To deny
this is, well, I think just wrongheaded.
Second: however, it appears
that most abortions occur far before 12 weeks or 3 months: around
2/3 occur before 8 weeks. So the fetal images that both DeSanctis and Flanagan
focus on are not representative of most abortions.
One could, and should,
be very concerned about abortions affecting later fetuses, but the best reasons
to be concerned there ‒ concerning fetal consciousness or pain (see this
article by DeSanctis where she reviews some new research on this topic) ‒ just don’t apply to earlier fetuses without
brains or nervous systems developed enough for any form of consciousness. It’s
not “honest” to take concerns motivated by 3-month-old fetuses and extend them
to all fetuses or all, or nearly all, abortions, which is
what I suspect DeSanctis does (at least some people do this, and she doesn’t
clarify that she’s only thinking about abortions of 3 month or older fetuses).
Third: also, appearances can
deceive: images can manipulate. Dolls can really closely resemble human babies,
but dolls don’t have human rights. Fetuses, at “middle” stages, in some ways
resemble babies, yet they might not have what arguably makes us have
rights: consciousness, awareness, feelings, or sentience.
So it’s not quite
“honest” to overlook the possibility that these images might manipulate us away
from what’s relevant. Although a lot of people don’t approach this issue this
way, a core question here is what makes something have rights and
whether (or when) fetuses have that something. As the doll example shows,
“looking like a baby” isn’t what gives something rights: it’s something else
‒ again, consciousness and feelings ‒ which far later fetuses have, but early
fetuses do not.
Finally, there is an
ambiguity in the idea of a “human life” that DeSanctis overlooks when she says of 3-month-old fetuses, “These are human lives.” It’s this: suppose
someone was in a major car crash 10 years ago, they were in a coma for 10 years
and today their body died. When did their “life” end? Their biological life ended
today, but their biographically life ended 10 years ago. Which type of life is what matters? That
question has to be answered to productively engage these issues.
In sum, both these articles had the words ‘debate’ and ‘argument’
in their titles, but really there wasn’t much in the way of arguments or debating or supporting claims with reasons. Attention to clear and carefully-made arguments would only help
future debates on this topic; hopefully, this response will contribute to that.
All other blog posts are available here; here are some:
- Are you part of a cult about abortion, or anything else?
- Trent Horn on "The Problem of Personhood"
- Yes, "a person is a person, no matter how small," but . .
- Thank you notes!
- If abortion is not wrong, then it's OK to kill sleeping people??!
- When does life begin?' and 'Are fetuses human?': Two bad questions to ask about abortion
- Public Philosophy on abortion
