Abortion is Murder

That abortion is murder is proved by a syllogism:

1. Murder is the intentional destruction of an innocent human life.
2. Abortion is the intentional destruction of an innocent human life.
3. Abortion is murder.

Though some proponents of abortion will admit as much, and attempt to argue that in this case murder is justified,¹ most will attempt to refute this syllogism, usually by disputing premise two. Thus one will often hear it asserted that life does not begin until a baby reaches viability, or takes his first breath, for example, or some other point in the process of development. In this, the abortion advocate happens to be making a biological gaffe on a level with the endorsing the theory of balanced humors,² since the fetus is clearly alive by any biological definition of the term.³ But what they really mean is that personhood begins at viability, first breath, etc. After all, something can be "alive" and "human" yet not be a human person (what we commonly call a "human life"), as, for example, individual sperm and ova, phagocytes, and embryonic stem cells. This distinction itself is perfectly valid. However, the question which must be disputed is whether this distinction is properly applied to the unborn, i.e. whether the fetus is merely "living human tissue" like sperm and ova etc., or whether it is a human life, like you and me.

To this end, the first idea that must be obliterated is the contention that the fetus is a part of his mother. The developing life has a complete and unique human DNA code from the moment of conception, which alone proves that it is not a part of its mother's body. It possesses its own immune system, independent cardiovascular and nervous systems (when these develop), and often even a different blood type from that of the mother. The fetus is dependent upon the mother, yes, but it is in no way part of the mother. Clearly, we are dealing with an individual here.

Now, either this individual has always been a person or he becomes a person at some point in time. The pro-lifer asserts the former. The pro-abort asserts the latter. The remainder of this essay will be devoted to exposing the various pro-abortion explanations as to when personhood begins as alternatively monstrous or arbitrary and intellectually vacuous.

Let us begin with a vacuous one: personhood begins at birth. An eight and a half month old baby who has not yet been born is more conscious, intelligent, and self aware than a seven month old baby who was born premature, yet, according to some, the latter is a human life, while the former is not. Suffice to say, there are no scientific or rational grounds for drawing the line between person and tissue at birth. A baby does not change substantially between five minutes prior to birth and five minutes after; all that has changed is his location (and personhood is contingent upon properties intrinsic to the person, not accidentals like location). He is either a human life at both times or a human life at neither.

That the baby only begins to breathe oxygen after birth is irrelevant. To begin, he has been breathing amniotic fluid since week 11 or 12,⁴ and it is absolutely arbitrary and gratuitous to assert that personhood is contingent upon a being expelling one inanimate substance (amniotic fluid) from one of its organs (the lung) and taking in another (air). Persons who have come close to drowning and have breathed in water do not become persons when they revive and cough it out. So, the substance that the baby happens to be breathing is quite clearly irrelevant to the question of his personhood.

If the pro-abort wants to retreat a bit, and make personhood contingent on the action of breathing, he is going to have to admit that the fetus is a human person from week 11 to 12 onwards. But in any case it is likewise arbitrary and gratuitous to make personhood contingent on one particular organ coming online and beginning to go through motions. Why the lungs? Why not the heart (three weeks ⁵), the vascular system (four weeks ⁶), or the brain (six ⁷)?

Another vapid claim: personhood begins at viability, the point where the child becomes capable of surviving outside the womb. In essence, the one claiming such is claiming that one's ability to survive is a necessary condition for personhood. Such an assertion is without precedent. Young children are not capable of surviving without their parents' care until they are several years old. The elderly and the disabled often are not capable of fending for themselves. Yet these groups are no less human persons for their dependency. Why should we consider the unborn less than human for theirs?

There is only one difference between the two types of dependency. The unborn are singularly and uniquely dependant upon the care which their mothers provide, while the newborn, the elderly, and the disabled are not, i.e., whereas if a mother abandons her child, someone else may adopt the child and care for him as her own, if a mother aborts her child he is doomed to certain death. Obviously the latter is the worse of the two crimes; the fact that the victim is in a state of singular and unique dependency makes negligence on the part of the caretaker morally worse, not better.

Now for a monstrous claim: personhood is contingent upon one's level of consciousness, one's ability to think cognitively and be self-aware. Note that these are traits which develop gradually, in degrees, between a fetus's first brain waves and the completion of his mental development during the teenage years; one can draw no clear line as to when the light comes on, so to speak. Thus it would make little sense to speak of personhood as an either/or quality; we would have to posit degrees of personhood. Hence one who endorses this system must necessarily admit that he considers himself as more of a person than the mentally retarded. Note also that frankly, cognitive thought and self-awareness are not traits which newborn infants possess in abundance, any more than adults of the higher species of mammals, really. Thus Princeton ethicist Peter Singer follows the false premise mentioned above, namely that these traits are necessary to human personhood, to its monstrous logical conclusion: "Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living."⁸

As one may see, pro-aborts cannot refute premise two without either making arbitrary and vapid claims which are absolutely impoverished for scientific and rational support, or constructing premises from which monstrous conclusions logically follow: conclusions which most of them, fortunately, reject. Thus pro-aborts either live in fairy tale worlds where sucking in magical potions of nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen (with a touch of argon thrown into the mix) transform human tissue with no moral value, tissue which can be savagely ripped apart and thrown in the dumpster with impunity, into human persons with all the rights and privileges afforded thereto, or they are logically inconsistent, denying the uncomfortable conclusions which follow from the premises they construct in order to justify abortion. Ironic, the one who approves of parents killing their babies is the most intellectually honest of all of them.

Ben Douglass
August 27, Anno Domini MMV

1 cf. Judith Jarvis Thomson, "A Defense of Abortion," in Beauchamp and Walters, Contemporary Issues in Bioethics (Thomson/Wadsworth, 2003) pp. 278-287.

2 This theory posits that the key to health is a proper balance of four bodily fluids, or humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. It is the theory that led physicians to "bleed" their patients.

3 It is organized, its functional unit is the cell, it grows, it carries out metabolism, etc. cf. Villee, Walker, Barnes, Introduction to Animal Biology (W. B. Saunders, 1979) pp. 5-6.

4 "Life Before Birth" pamphlet of the PA Pro-Life Federation. Available HERE

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Singer, Peter. "Frequently Asked Questions." Peter Singer. 2005. (28 August 2005).