After Morality

In December 2015, Toronto’s most influential newspaper, The Globe and Mail, published a lengthy article by avowed pro-choice advocate Alexandra Kimball that described her miscarriage and the lack of response by her fellow feminists. After she miscarried recalls that, “Feminism had nothing to say to me.” She explains, “How could I grieve a thing that didn’t exist? If a fetus is not meaningfully alive, is it just a collection of cells–the cornerstone claim of the pro-choice movement – what does it mean to miscarry one?” Taking Kimball’s question a step further we may ask, is a fetus a human being? And what rights, if any, does it have? Answering these questions will not only help us solve Kimball’s dilemma, but also decide the morality of abortion.

Firstly, medical textbooks like Dr. Ronan O’ Rahilly and Dr. Fabiola Muller’s “Human Embryology and Teratology” and prominent scientists consistently agree that human life begins at conception. The textbook says, “Fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed.” Famed geneticist Jerome LeJeune reaffirms this truth, maintaining, “To accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of opinion.” Dr. Micheline Matthews-Roth, a principal research associate at Harvard Medical School, explains, noting that “each member of the human species indeed starts his or her existence as one cell, the zygote: and that this fact applies whether the zygote was formed by the union of egg and sperm in the mother's body or in a petri dish.” The scientific support behind this claim is why pro-choice advocates like David Boonin, the author of “A Defense of Abortion,” readily acknowledge that at conception, a human being comes into existence, because a “human fetus after all is simply a human being at a very early stage in his or her development.”

The main point of debate is then whether a human person comes into being at conception. A human being is an organism that is a member of the species Homo sapiens, while a person has dignity and legal rights. A slave in the Antebellum South was a human being, but was not treated as a person. Pro-life advocates contend that all human beings are endowed with personhood. On the other hand, pro-choice advocates argue that receiving personhood requires certain qualities, but have not reached consensus on what exactly these qualities are. Some like Peter Singer believe that self-awareness confers personhood, while others like feminist philosopher Susan Sherwin place the burden of personhood on to what extent the fetus is wanted by their mother.

The problem is that such characteristics like intelligence and awareness across each person. Some beings are more intelligent than others, more sentient, more desired, etc. If a quality confers personhood, then it is only fair that some humans are valued more than others. For example, suppose self-consciousness determines personhood. Some people are more self-conscious than others and then logically, those more self-conscious are worth more than others. In other words, this view suffers from the problem of under-inclusiveness: some human beings are not deemed persons even though our intuitions says otherwise.

Even if one tries to mitigate this problem by only making a binary distinction between characteristics, the problem of over-inclusiveness is still apparent: some organisms are deemed persons when intuition says otherwise. For example, if self-consciousness determined personhood, dogs and locusts are also persons since they are also self-conscious. Establishing human being-hood and self-consciousness as requirements for personhood implies there is something important about being human that determines personhood. Why does being human make any difference if having certain characteristics determines personhood?

In contrast to the shaky and frightening merit model, the endowment view resolves our moral quarries by making personhood a characteristic not dependent on merit. . The endowment view of personhood not only solves the problems of under/over inclusiveness but also deems all human beings equal. This endowment view also makes sense of our deepest longings for equality. Equality is the fundamental axiom of not only the U.S., but also all of movements for justice and freedom. That humanity does not depend on human choice or social recognition is why Jews in anti-Semitic societies, slaves dominated by slaveholders, and women in patriarchal societies are still persons with inherent worth. Do we really have reason to believe that for the first time, we are justified in saying that some human beings are worth more than others?

Despite the coherence of the endowment view of personhood, some people would still permit abortion, Kimball points out in her article, “Some feminist thinkers have posited a way out of this paradox, by admitting the personhood of the fetus as they champion a woman’s right to abort it.” This alternative view champions the women’s bodily rights over the rights of the fetus, but this would mean that the right to life, the most important and the foundation of all rights, can be infringed. Moreover, I know many people who would agree that the fetus is indeed a person with rights and would for that reason not get an abortion, but would not force that ethic on everyone else. This commonly held view regards the personhood of the fetus as trivial as it leaves the value of the fetus to the will of the mother. If the fetus truly is a person, then aborting it truly is murder, regardless of the mother’s beliefs about it. If the value of a person is dependent on a person’s subjective view, then the moral foundation of our society rests on shaky grounds.

If we are to make the right decision, then the U.S. should prohibit abortion. As a community, Stuyvesant’s political and social justice clubs need to publicly denounce abortion, and get students to participate in the political process to end abortion. Shall we choose to acknowledge and fight for human rights? Or, shall we idolize human choice and succumb to a world of moral nihilism?