The Moral Uneasiness of Abortion

Abortion is usually discussed as if there are only two choices: either you care about women, or you care about unborn children. I do not think that is a fair way to frame the issue. A woman facing an unwanted pregnancy can be in an incredibly difficult situation, and that deserves compassion. But compassion for the mother does not answer the most important moral question: what exactly is the unborn child, and what do we owe it?

The more I think about abortion, the harder it is for me to accept the idea that it is simply a matter of personal choice. Pregnancy involves another developing human life. That life is dependent on the mother, but dependency does not make someone less human. Every newborn baby is completely dependent on other people too. The fact that an unborn child cannot live independently does not seem like a strong enough reason to say that its life can simply be ended.

Biologically, there is also something important about conception. Once fertilization occurs, a new organism exists with its own DNA and its own internal process of development. It is not just another part of the woman's body. If nothing interrupts its development, that embryo does not become a different species or suddenly turn into a human being later. It develops continuously from embryo to fetus to infant to child.

This does not prove by itself that abortion is always morally wrong, but it creates a serious problem for the argument that an early fetus has almost no moral value. If the same individual is developing throughout pregnancy, then it seems arbitrary to say that its life matters greatly at one point but hardly at all a few weeks earlier.

The philosopher Don Marquis makes an argument against abortion that I find particularly convincing. Instead of arguing about whether a fetus should technically be called a “person,” he asks why killing any human being is wrong in the first place. His answer is that killing is wrong largely because it takes away a person's future. When someone dies, they lose everything they would otherwise have experienced: friendships, family, achievements, ordinary pleasures, and all the possibilities of a life not yet lived.

An unborn child also has that kind of future.

This matters because sometimes abortion is discussed as though the fetus loses almost nothing. But that seems backwards. In one sense, the unborn child loses more than almost anyone else could lose because nearly its entire life is still ahead of it. It will never know its parents, fall in love, make friends, go to school, have a career, or experience any of the countless ordinary things that make up a human life.

Of course, defenders of abortion rights have serious arguments too. Judith Jarvis Thomson famously asks us to imagine waking up connected to a famous violinist who needs to use your body for nine months in order to survive. She argues that even if the violinist has a right to life, that does not automatically mean he has a right to use your body.

This is probably one of the strongest arguments for abortion because pregnancy undeniably requires enormous physical sacrifice. No one should pretend pregnancy is easy or insignificant.

Still, the analogy has always seemed incomplete to me. The unborn child is not a random stranger who has been attached to a woman by force in most pregnancies. Pregnancy usually results from an act that is known to have the possibility of creating a child. That does not mean that someone who becomes pregnant deserves punishment or that consenting to sex is exactly the same thing as consenting to pregnancy. But it does mean there is a relationship of responsibility that does not exist in Thomson's example.

Parents have obligations to their children that they do not have to strangers.

If a newborn baby needs to be fed every few hours, the parents cannot simply argue that caring for the baby interferes with their freedom. Society recognizes that creating or becoming responsible for a vulnerable human being can generate obligations. Pregnancy is unusual because those obligations begin before birth and require the mother's body, but that does not necessarily mean the obligations do not exist.

Another common argument for abortion is that a fetus is not yet a person because it cannot think, reason, communicate, or understand itself. Philosopher Mary Anne Warren, for example, emphasizes characteristics like consciousness, reasoning, and self-awareness when discussing personhood.

The problem with this standard is where it leads.

Newborn babies are not rational or self-aware in anything like the way adults are. People with severe disabilities may also lack some of these abilities. Someone under anesthesia temporarily has no consciousness at all. Yet we do not think their lives become disposable.

It seems dangerous to make human worth depend completely on what someone can currently do.

A more convincing principle is that human beings have value because of what they are, not because of how intelligent, independent, useful, or self-aware they happen to be at a particular moment. Otherwise, the strongest and most capable people would logically have greater moral value than the weakest, which is almost the opposite of how we normally think morality should work.

This is also why viability seems like a strange moral dividing line. A premature baby might be able to survive outside the womb in a modern hospital but not in a poorer country without advanced neonatal care. It would be odd if the moral value of the exact same child depended on what medical technology happened to be available nearby.

Birth is also an imperfect dividing line. A baby ten minutes before birth and the same baby ten minutes after birth are almost biologically identical. Location cannot reasonably be what creates human worth.

The more difficult question is whether conception should therefore be the point at which full moral protection begins. I understand why some people hesitate here. A microscopic embryo obviously does not look or behave like a newborn baby, and emotionally the two can feel completely different.

But appearances are not normally how we decide whether a human life matters. A teenager looks different from an infant, and an elderly person looks different from both. What connects them is not appearance but continuity. They are the same living individual at different stages of development. That idea has changed how I think about abortion.

If I look at a photograph of myself as a newborn, I do not say that was something that eventually became me. I say that was me. The same is true of an ultrasound taken months before birth. There was never a moment when one creature disappeared and another suddenly appeared. Development was continuous. For this reason, I think abortion is generally morally wrong because it intentionally ends the life of a developing human being who has done nothing to deserve death.

That conclusion does not mean every pregnancy is simple. Some cases are genuinely tragic. A pregnancy can threaten a mother's life. A child can be conceived through rape. Doctors can discover devastating fetal abnormalities. These situations deserve far more seriousness than political slogans usually give them.

I also think being pro-life creates obligations that extend beyond simply opposing abortion. It is easy to say that an unborn child should be protected and then lose interest once that child is born. If society expects a frightened nineteen-year-old woman to continue a pregnancy, then society should also care about whether she can afford medical care, finish college, find childcare, or raise the child safely. Adoption should be easier. Fathers should be expected to take responsibility. Pregnant women should not be treated with shame, rather, a serious pro-life position should be concerned with both lives.

That is one reason I dislike the harshness that sometimes surrounds the abortion debate. Women who have abortions are not necessarily selfish or immoral people. Many are frightened, pressured, financially desperate, abandoned by the father, or convinced that abortion is their only realistic option. Understanding those circumstances does not require agreeing that abortion is morally right. There is a difference between judging an action and judging a person.

Ultimately, the question I keep returning to is surprisingly simple: if there is serious uncertainty about whether the fetus is a human being with moral value, which mistake should we be more afraid of making?

If abortion opponents are wrong, then society may sometimes require women to continue pregnancies that impose enormous burdens on them. That is a serious cost and should never be minimized.

But if abortion supporters are wrong, then abortion does something much more permanent. It ends the lives of human beings who cannot speak for themselves. When the stakes are that high, I think morality should lean toward protecting life. Human rights mean the most when they protect people who are powerless, inconvenient, dependent, or unable to argue for their own interests. An unborn child is almost the perfect example of that kind of vulnerability. It has no money, no political influence, no independence, and no voice.

That does not make the moral problem of abortion easy. It is exactly what makes it so important.