Recently on VP I examined some arguments frequently employed in defense of a woman's right to abort a pregnancy and gave some reasons why I felt those arguments were inadequate.
As a young man I myself was pro-choice for a time, but was persuaded that there were no very good arguments for that position, or, more precisely, the arguments adduced on behalf of the right to choose were, when placed on the scales of reason, outweighed by the arguments made by pro-lifers on behalf of the "weakest among us."
In fact, I couldn't understand why liberals, who always took the side of the weak and defenseless, nevertheless abandoned the weakest and most defenseless when it came to this issue. It seemed both odd and hypocritical.
Anyway, I want to examine one more argument today.
It's often conceded that although the unborn fetus is indeed a human being (a claim that was the topic of the previous post) it's nevertheless not a person until it's born, and since it's a person which has rights, including the right to life, an individual's right to life does not outweigh the mother's right to bodily autonomy until the moment of birth when the individual then becomes, somehow, a person.
This may seem at first hearing to be a sensible argument, but it's fraught with pitfalls. The argument hinges, obviously, upon what we mean by a "person." We cannot simply define "person" as a human being who has been born since that begs the question. It assumes as settled the very matter that's under debate.
A better definition sometimes embraced by philosophers goes something like this: A person is a living human being which has the capacity to engage in acts of intellect, emotion and will.
This seems to capture what we normally think of when we think of persons, but there are cases which are troubling. Does a newborn infant possess these capacities? If not, does the infant's lack of personhood provide a basis for legalizing infanticide?
What of human beings who are in a reversible coma? They lack the capacity to engage in acts of intellect, emotion and will. Do they cease to be persons as long as they're disabled? Would someone not still be guilty of murder if they killed a reversibly comatose human being?
Of course they would, so perhaps we need to amend our definition to say something like: A person is a living human being who has the capacity, or potential capacity, to engage in acts of intellect, emotion and will. This definition would confer personhood on both newborns and the reversibly comatose, but it would also confer personhood on the individual at every stage of her development all the way back to when she was a tiny conceptus.
Adopting this definition would therefore pose a perplexing difficulty for the pro-choice advocate who seeks to base his position on reason rather than emotion.
I argued in the last post that the contention that the unborn fetus is not a living human being is biological nonsense, and if the foregoing definition of "person" is reasonable, the claim that the unborn are not persons is simply false. That is, unless one can come up with a more plausible definition of person which doesn't beg the question.
But what of those tragic individuals who are irreversibly comatose? It could be argued, although I don't make the case here, that the definition of person could be amended one more time as follows: A person is a living human being who has the capacity, potential capacity or former capacity to engage in acts of intellect, emotion and will.
If that is a reasonable definition of a person, and I would suggest that it's incumbent upon the one who denies that it's reasonable to explain why they think so, then it follows that a person just is a living human being and has a presumptive right to life from the time of conception.
This is not to say that no circumstances could ever supercede that right, but it is to say that whatever such circumstances might be, they should certainly be more compelling than that the child just isn't wanted.