EXTRACT ABORTION and PERSONHOOD Simon Blackburn page 54

A good first philosophical question to ask might be whether this black and white may be an illusion. It may be the result of a moral lens that imposes its black and white on a landscape of different shades of grey. After all, the biological fact is that foetal development is gradual.The one-cell starting point or zygote is a different kettle of fish from the baby about to be born. But the complexity arrives gradually, hour by hour, day by day.

And then the reasons for which a woman might seek an abortion are more or less stringent and compelling. The poor, incompetent, frightened, raped fourteen-year-old is a different case from the socialite who would prefer to delay childbirth until after the skiing season, and a different case again is the woman wanting to abort a foetus because prenatal testing has shown it is female.
If it were just a question of finding an appropriate attitude to abortion, we might go along with this gradualism. The woman seeking a late abortion because of the skiing would strike most of us as heartless in a rather disturbing way, just as a woman unperturbed by alate miscarriage would similarly strike us. She may, of course, turn round and say that it is none of our business, and after all there may be hidden fears or needs at work. We might not want to be too judgemental in any such cases, but we can still recognize that some reasons are more compelling than others. Perhaps for many people, especially in the liberal countries of Europe, a fairly tolerant gradualism is therefore the solution. But many cultures, including that of the United States, ratchet up the issue in two ways.

First, it is moralized, becoming not just a question of sympathy or concern, which admit of graduations, but of who has rights, or what justice requires, or what our duty is; it is aquestion of what is permissible and what is wrong. These are called ‘deontological’ notions, after the Greek deontos, meaning duty. They have a coercive edge. They take us beyond what we admire, or regret.

It will seem natural to only one side of the debate to ratchet up the issue. It will seem natural only if we think that the issue is akin to an issue of murder. The foetus, on this view, is a person, and has a person's full rights and protections. Hence, it is a deontological issue and it is an issue for the law. But is this true?

A foetus is a potential person, certainly. But ‘potential’ is a dangerous word. A yellow flower is a sort of flower. But an acorn is a potential oak-tree without itself being an oak tree. My car is potential scrap, but it is not scrap, and its being potential scrap does not justify anybody in treating it as scrap.

Is the foetus not only a potential person but an actual person? What kind of question is that? A possibility is that in describing the foetus as a person, the word ‘person’ is itself functioning to imply a moral category, so by insisting that the foetus is a person the opponent of legal abortion is just repeating himself. Moral conclusions are frequently presupposed in just this way by the very terms in which the question is raised. A person,on this account, is just anything that ought to be treated as a person and afforded protection as a person. But then, whether a foetus is a person is exactly the question that is in doubt. Theway in which moral conclusions are often presupposed by a choice of words was noticed long ago by the Greek historian Thucydides (c. 455—c.400 BC). At a time of civil war, he wrote:

To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usualmeanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression wasnow regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member;to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was acoward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one'sunmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meantthat one was totally unfitted for action.

Returning to abortion, we should note that, equally, the T-shirt slogan of a woman's rightto control her own body begs the question the other way: the ways in which we maycontrol our bodies may well depend on what other persons are dependent upon them. Soif the foetus is a person, that right will be circumscribed. If a murderer is prowling around,my general right to talk is defeated by the fact that your life depends on my silence.

Rights are themselves tricky things, as we shall see further in section 15. In one of the most famous papers in this debate, Judith Jarvis Thomson compares the situation of a pregnant mother to that of someone suddenly waking to find another person plugged into them and dependent on them for life-support. She argues that the dependent person's‘right to life’ does not include a right to unlimited demands on other people, including here the demand that the supporter continues her support. The value of the analogy has been challenged, but it introduces the important distinction between having a right to life,and having a right to the time or labour or energies of others that, as it happens, are necessary to support that life.

To return to the question of whether the foetus is a person, consider the event of a natural miscarriage. Nature is not particularly sparing with these; they are quite common early in pregnancy, and may be very common in the first few days, when they are not necessarily noticed. They can be very distressing, depending on the hopes that had been invested in the pregnancy. But they are not distressing in the same way as the death of a person. A parent who loses a child faces one of the worst experiences anyone can go through. There is someone to mourn, someone who had a life with hopes and dreams. But a prospective mother who suffers an early miscarriage does not have someone to mourn. She can mourn the loss of what might have been, and she can suffer for her own lost hopes and plans.But she has known no actual person who is lost (this may change late in pregnancy, when the child ‘makes itself known’). For this reason, although she may deserve sympathy, she is not in the same category as the mother who loses a child. Hence, too, even cultures that forbid abortion do not insist on a full burial service for a dead foetus. The failure to get all the way to a birth in the family is not a death in the family.