The Foetus and Abortion: Problems with Personhood

The question of whether abortion is a morally permissible action is something that has inspired a wide range of debate. Much of the work in this regard has focused upon two concepts. Primarily the rights of the fetus have been the centre of discussion, with a great deal of focus placed upon whether the fetus is either a human and/or a person. More recently, however, a lot of work has focused upon the rights of the mother, particularly exploring the moral status of her decisions relative to the moral status of the fetus that she carries. In the first instance above, the premise sought is whether the fetus is a member of the moral community and, therefore, whether abortion should be considered murder and morally wrong. The second instance explores the moral status of the mother, someone who is already a person, and what moral implications, if any, result from the consequences of her decisions in relation to the fetus she is carrying. I focus in the following paper upon the first case alone. I will show that focusing upon personhood in deciding the moral permissibility of abortions is flawed and leads to the collapse of both arguments for and against abortion that depend upon it.

The issue of whether abortion is a morally wrong act is a complicated matter. Primarily, however, it rests upon a premise that leads to the conclusion of either moral rightness or moral wrongness. The details of this premise focus upon whether the fetus is a member of the moral community. If, as many anti-abortion advocates claim (see Noonan's argument below), the fetus is a member of the moral community then a stronger argument for abortion is needed. If the foetus is not a member of the moral community, however, then abortion is a much easier act to defend. In the following paper I examine the concept of personhood and how this relates to the moral status of both the foetus and the act of abortion.

The Foetus as a Moral Citizen

The question of whether a foetus is a member of the moral community rests upon what we deem to be the characteristics of such a member. Some, such as John Noonan (1967, p. 125), argue that a foetus is such a member because they posses the same genetic make-up as humans. Noonan's argument can be summarised as:

1. It is wrong to kill any and all humans
2. A foetus is a human
∴ It is wrong to kill a foetus

The negand of this conclusion is 'it is not the case that it is wrong to kill a foetus'. The problem is that the premises cannot remain true with this negand, resulting in an invalid argument. Advocates for abortion, those wanting to argue something akin to the negand, need to look for premises that support the negand. This is where the concept of personhood is introduced. Rather than say something like 'you are only morally valuable if you are genetically like me', a position argued as analogous to racism and sexism by some (see below), the above argument may be restructured as follows:

1. It is wrong to kill any and all persons
2. A foetus is a person
∴ It is wrong to kill a foetus

The focus is now shifted to whether a foetus is a person or not. If a foetus is a person then the above argument is valid, if a foetus is not a person, however, then the above argument is invalid. The reason for arguing for a moral system based upon personhood rather than biological likeness is because basing such a system upon biological capacity is arbitrary. We could say that all humans are morally valuable because they all share some physical characteristic, say a genome, but following this line of reasoning it should be valid to replace 'humans' with a variable and 'some physical characteristic' with another variable, so long as the variables are alike enough with those in the first argument. We would be left with 'all x are morally valuable because they all share y'. To see the fault in this argument we can substitute y with something simple like 'y = blue eyes'. There is no more reason to believe the first variant of this argument over the later¹.

So what are the non-arbitrary characteristics that define personhood? Warren (1973, p. 55) suggests five traits that are central to the concept of personhood, or 'humanity in the moral sense'. These are:

1. Consciousness (of objects and events external and/or internal to the being), and in particular the capacity to feel pain;
2. Reasoning (the developed capacity to solve new a relatively complex problems);
3. Self-motivated activity (activity which is relatively independent of either genetic or direct external control);
4. The capacity to communicate, by whatever means, messages of an indefinite variety of types, that is, not just with an indefinite number of possible contents, but on indefinitely many possible topics;
5. The presence of self-concepts, and self awareness, either individual or racial, or both.

Now it's pretty clear that these characteristics are not possessed by foetuses; they are not possessed by many human children and some human adults. Advocating for the above characteristics of personhood, or membership of the moral community, effectively excludes foetuses from any moral equation. But is the above definition of personhood as non-arbitrary as Warren would let us believe? She is, after all, describing characteristics that she possesses herself.

We saw above that assigning moral value based upon species membership (being human) was an exercise in arbitrariness that could lead to arbitrary discrimination such as sexism and racism. But assigning those ideal cognitive characteristics as a basis for morality may be just as arbitrary. Warren admits (although doesn't explore why) that the above characteristics of personhood may be rife with problems (1973, p. 55), and they certainly are. These characteristics are all anthropocentric in quality, simply reflecting the ideal cognitive abilities of humans, those characteristics that we would find valuable in others. There is little difference between discrimination against others based upon their skin colour and discrimination based upon cognitive capacity. There is little doubt that an individual's cognitive capacity and their ability for psychological engagement is a physical characteristic of their body. Whether we accept behaviourism, machine functionalism, some form of connectionsim, or something else our cognitive states are brain processes. It may be more subtle to discriminate against synapses and neurons rather than the amount of melanin in someone's skin, but the two are inherently identical.

While this line of reasoning does not do much to determine the moral status of the foetus it does illustrate that the current trend of assigning moral value based upon personhood is flawed. It follows, therefore, that excluding others, including foetuses, from the moral community is likewise flawed. But there remains one further argument that is sometimes inherent in claims for foetal admission into the moral community and that is the argument for potential.

Will a Foetus become a Person

The issue of whether a foetus is a potential person is a difficult position to solve, and another that is surrounded in much debate. The argument for potential is difficult in many ways, most notably because we can never know what will happen in the future. If, for example, war were to break out between the female citizens of the two Australian States of Queensland and New South Wales then it would be less likely that foetuses would become persons simply because it is less certain that their mothers will survive to carry them to term. But we don't shy from making many everyday life decisions because the future is uncertain so why should we refrain from assigning moral value because of an uncertain future? Consider the following example - I decide to put my daughter through school, like everyone else does, despite not knowing whether there will be a war tomorrow. I do this, not because I'm naive about the future (although I am) but because such a practice will ensure that my daughter flourishes to her full potential. What I don't do, however, is claim, when my daughter is ten years old, that she will be a professor at NYU because she has the potential to be a professor at NYU. That particular future is uncertain and ambiguous. Likewise, it is ambiguous to claim that a foetus is a potential person, particularly the shorter the term the foetus is.

One further argument against a foetus being a potential person was presented by Eric Olsen in his novel paper 'Was I Ever a Fetus? (1997)'. Olson progresses backwards through history looking at whether a person was ever a foetus, rather than whether a foetus will ever be a person. Olson claims that persons have no psychological continuity with a foetus as foetuses, especially early term foetuses, have no cognitive capacity (Olson 1997, p. 95). Since no person was ever a foetus Olson argues that no foetus can be a potential person (ibid.). This argument is quite successful at defeating the argument for potentiality, but only if we are willing to accept the idea that persons are those beings that possess the characteristics outlined above, or characteristics similar to those. Since I've shown the weakness in that particular position, I'm not willing to accept it here. Nevertheless, Olson's argument remains prominent in illustrating that biological life changes through time and what we may deem a moral citizen now may not have been a moral citizen in the past or may no longer be a moral citizen in the future.

While I have not shown whether abortion is either morally right or morally wrong, it was never my intention to do so. I have shown that defending or opposing the moral permissibility of abortion based upon the concept of personhood is a flawed and ambiguous process. The general criteria for personhood is anthropocentric and just as biologically based as if the criteria were some ideal colour of skin. Judging whether abortion is morally permissible based upon the criteria of personhood is little different to judging the moral permissibility of abortion based upon any given biological trait.

Notes

1 For variations of this argument see Singer, P 1993, Practical Ethics, Cambridge University Press.

References

Noonan, J 1967, “Abortion and the Catholic Church: a Summary History”, in Natural Law Forum, Vol. 12, excerpt.
Olson, E. T. 1997, “Was I Ever a Fetus?”, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 57, No. 1, pp. 95 – 110.
Warren, M. A. 1973, “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion”, in The Monist: an International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry, Vol. 57, No. 1, pp. 43 – 61.