THBT: On balance, abortion is immoral [for @Bones]

Harm: To adversely affect

Modus ponens: A logical argument form

Person: An individual with inherent moral value

Prima facie: True under default circumstances

This debate should be judged on the basis of natural rights—rights that individuals are due, whether or not anyone else acknowledges them. Furthermore, the importance of a prima facie right is proportional to the loss in utility caused by violating it. A teenager’s right not to be stabbed, for example, is more important than their right to borrow a book from a library. We should default to prioritizing more important rights unless there is a very compelling reason to do otherwise.

There are two ways in which someone can behave in an immoral manner:

Note that both of these things are immoral prima facie. If abortion involves either of these (or, as I will argue, risks doing either of these), then abortion is immoral prima facie. Further, I will argue that avoiding the burden of pregnancy is not a sufficient justification for abortion, making it wrong all things considered.

I will make frequent use of analogies. I think that abortion is best discussed by starting with more obvious moral statements (such as “stabbing people is wrong”), and then remaining consistent with these ideals. Note that rights of equal importance merit equal weighting in equal situations. If the necessity of taxes outweighs my right to $50 of gold, then it would also outweigh my right to own $50 of silver, all things being equal, if I had silver instead.

I argue that an unborn child is a person with rights, but suppose there’s only a 2% chance that is the case. This would be akin to drunk driving, where the risk of killing a person is low but not negligible.

To determine the significance of this risk, I will use risk exposure, which calculates the expected harm from a particular risk. To give an example, we should be equally wary of killing 1 person and running a 10% chance of killing 10 people, all things being equal, as the expected (i.e. average) harm from each of these is equal.

With regard to abortion, the average lifespan is 73 years, and 2% of that is 1.46 years. Hence, even if there’s only a 2% chance that the unborn child has a right not to be aborted, the average expected rights violation from abortion would be depriving a person of over a year of their life. The ends (avoiding the burden of pregnancy) cannot justify the means, since the expected burden of pregnancy lasts less than a year.

Hence, for abortion to be morally permissible, Con must either establish that the risk of abortion violating someone’s rights is entirely negligible or provide a method superior to risk exposure for evaluating the morality of risking a person’s life.

Arguments 1-3 will deal with establishing the personhood of the unborn. Arguments 4-5 will show that as a result, abortion is immoral.

I hold that any human being who can be harmed is a person. Furthermore, having one’s lifespan reduced is a harm. Someone with CIPA may not physically suffer when they are killed, but they have been harmed nonetheless. The burden of a disease, for example, is often measured in “life years,” which includes both the reduction in quality of life and the reduction in the amount of life lived. Per this metric, unborn children can be harmed significantly by abortion. Prima facie, we ought to follow the non-aggression principle—if a human being can be harmed, we should avoid harming them without a sufficient justification. Hence, my criteria for personhood follows.

I will distinguish here between (1) impeding bodily functions and (2) not adding bodily functions. I hold that the first is a harm, while the latter is not. A bodily function is something an organism is in the process of doing via internal processes like mitosis that could potentially be impeded through nutritional imbalances or outside intervention.

For example, (1) removing one of someone’s limbs is harming them. Furthermore, if someone is in danger of having one of their limbs removed by a hostile third party or some other threat, we should try to protect them. However, if someone requests an operation which would add a third arm to their body, (2) refusing to perform this operation is not harming them.

Furthermore, starvation, suffocation, and hormone deficiency fall under (1) as well. Despite the fact that starvation results from a lack of resources, it results in direct adverse effects on the body, as can hormonal deficiency. If your child is starving, for example, that is a direct harm which you ought to prevent. Furthermore, if a child is suffering from hormonal deficiencies, this causes direct bodily harms such as elevated blood sugar levels; hence, their parents ought to treat them with medicine in order to mitigate this harm.

These examples are not exhaustive, but per Occam’s razor, we should accept the simplest definition of harm (i.e. the one I provided) that can explain these examples, unless Con can provide a competing definition of harm that explains them better.

Moral statutes only make sense in practice. To say that an action is wrong is to say that the effect of that action is undesirable; hence, the importance and existence of rights is predicated on the objective of preventing undesirable effects. (And even if unconscious people don’t literally express desires, we know that most humans wouldn’t want to be killed, which means that killing is harmful.) Murder prevents someone from living a human life—a life as it is experienced by the human mind. If removing someone’s ability to live part of a human life is a grave evil, then removing someone’s capacity to live an entire human life must be immoral as well. Rights of equal importance merit equal weighting in equal situations; if reducing a human lifespan is an undesirable effect, then we ought to attribute personhood to all humans with lifespans.

I bring this up to distinguish between (1) abortion and (2) contraception. An unborn child will keep growing and develop the capacity for consciousness unless directly harmed (if their bodily functions are impeded through starvation or losing oxygen or hormonal deficiency). The zygote is already growing and will become a newborn unless this process of growth is impeded, much like a newborn is in the process of growing into later stages of development.

But sperm will not develop into a person unless combined with an egg (if bodily functions are added). Growth into a later stage of human development requires it to become an entirely new organism with entirely new bodily functions. Conception is categorically different from pregnancy in that an entire gamete is being added to merge with, rather than nutrients which prevent nutritional deficiency, or direct harm, in an existing organism. Again, this is not a comprehensive description of pregnancy, but this should establish that abortion causes direct harm that contraception does not cause.

My position here is actually a very modest one. As the examples above show, we already distinguish between (1) and (2) when it comes to born humans; hence, granting that abortion is immoral does not imply that contraception is immoral. Contrapositively, granting that contraception is not immoral does not imply that abortion is not immoral.

This is more of a preemptive rebuttal to a common objection, but with this out of the way, I will argue for why (1) is wrong.

The overwhelming scientific consensus holds that a human being is formed at conception. An unborn child is its own individual organism with unique DNA. As one source puts it, “A Chinese zygote implanted in a Swedish woman will always be Chinese, not Swedish, because his identity is based on his genetic code, not that of the body in which he resides.”

Note that a human being has the right not to have their lifespan reduced, regardless of their stage of development (infant, teenager, adult). We extend similar rights to teengers, adults, and infants not based on their stage of development (which vary between them) but because they can be harmed in similar ways. It hardly makes a difference to someone whether they are aborted as an embryo or killed painlessly in their sleep minutes after their birth. Hence, per Occam’s razor, the most straightforward conclusion is that both killings are immoral.

An alternate view holds that moral value should come from intelligence, past experiences, ability to feel pain, level of dependency, or level of development. But a few obvious counterexamples show this view to be flawed:

Suppose there is someone in a deep coma who will awaken in nine months without their memories. Killing them is still murder. (We’d save on social security by killing dementia patients in their sleep, but doing so would clearly be evil.) Note that any argument that the comatose individual has personhood can also be used to show that unborn children are persons.

Per the harm principle, actions should generally be considered moral unless they cause some kind of harm to someone else. Therefore, if the action of killing the comatose person is wrong, it must be because it has one or several harmful effects. I can think of several:

These harms also occur when an unborn child is killed. Hence, unless Con can provide some harms that occur to the comatose individual but not to the unborn child, we should naturally conclude that killing the unborn child is as harmful as killing the person in the coma. And even if Con can provide harms that occur solely to the person in the coma, the harms listed above establish that killing an unborn child is still significantly harmful.

Suppose there is an operation that can be performed on an unborn child that will hinder their eyesight in the future with no medical benefit. This operation would clearly be harmful, even though it removes potential experiences, rather than ones that the unborn child is currently capable of.

Removing more potential experiences (hearing, taste, etc.) would be worse, not better.

It is sometimes argued that abortion is simply “letting someone die” in early stages of pregnancy when the unborn child depends on the mother. However, refusal of bodily support can still equate to direct killing in some circumstances. To understand why, consider the following scenario:

A woman carries a child deep into a forest on a camping trip. For whatever reason, she leaves the child there, where it is eaten by wild beasts. Clearly, this is immoral.

I argue that abortion is morally comparable to this. Despite the fact that carrying the child into the forest puts the child in a state of physical dependency, carrying the child into the forest alone is not a direct harm. Parents bring their children to all sorts of places, but harm does not occur until the child is abandoned. Similarly, when a woman aborts a child she conceived, removing bodily support is a direct harm to the child.

Modus Ponens

The forest analogy establishes P1, and P2 is true under usual circumstances, as the vast majority of abortions arise from consensual sex. P1 follows even if the pregnancy is not the intended consequence of sex—the woman from our earlier analogy might have gotten lost in the forest by accident, yet bringing the child there is still a result of her actions. Hence, abandoning the child would still be a direct killing.

Hence, the question that matters is whether a justification exists in the case of abortion for directly killing one’s child. For the ends to justify the means, the good achieved from an action would have to at least outweigh the bad. But being killed as a child prevents one from experiencing their entire life, while pregnancy burdens someone for only nine months. Therefore, the former is a greater harm, and the ends cannot justify the means.

Even if abortion were simply “letting someone die,” I argue that supporting the fetus that one directly created would still be a moral obligation.

I argue that parents have specific responsibilities to children, based on their familial relationship and the responsibility to help those whom one has directly put in a dangerous situation.

Infanticide through abandonment was common in ancient times. These killings were clearly unjust, so it stands to reason that parents have a moral obligation to prevent their children from dying. In ancient times, this would include carrying a child around, feeding them, housing them, and in many cases, breastfeeding.

The infanticide example establishes P1. Hence, I will argue for P2. It is simply the case that raising a child in ancient times would require physical labor, which can lead to all sorts of health conditions. The loss in utility from raising a child through adolescence is greater than that lost from pregnancy, but infanticide in Ancient Rome was still immoral. Recall that rights of equal importance merit equal weighting in equal situations. By similar logic, the child’s right to live outweighs the parent’s right to abandon them, so it certainly outweighs the parent’s right to avoid pregnancy.