Since Roe vs Wade in 1973, abortion has been legal in the United States, and there seems to be little that will change that. Even so, it can be telling to take a look at the arguments and opinions that helped shape the abortion debate, especially from the pro-abortion side of the fence. One of the more widely cited essays on the topic is Jane English’s Abortion and the Concept of a Person, written in 1975. For the most part, English attempts to eschew the entire personhood debate (that is, whether or not a fetus constitutes a person) and proceeds with what has to be one of the worst analogies in the history of academic reasoning. We’ll examine each part of her paper in turn.
In the early part of her essay, English lists many traits which are shared by people (for example, biological factors such as being “descended from humans, having a certain genetic makeup, having a head, hands, arms, eyes, capable of locomotion, breathing, eating, sleeping,” psychological factors like “sentience, perception, having a concept of self and of one’s own interests and desires, the ability to use tools, the ability to use language or symbol systems, the ability to joke” and so on). While her list is extensive, she points out is incomplete, but her point is that “something could exhibit the majority of these features and still fail to be a person, as an advanced robot might be. There is no single core of necessary and sufficient features which we can draw upon with the assurance that they constitute what really makes a person; there are only features which are more or less typical.” She concludes that “a conclusive answer to the question of whether a fetus is a person is unattainable.”
When your angle is terminating babies, asserting your victims aren’t people is helpful. But we’ll return to that in a bit. She does concede that as a fetus nears the time of birth, it begins to acquire more of the traits she listed, presumably becoming more of a person.
The crux of English’s thesis begins to reveal itself when she talks about the ethics of self-defense. She claims that “additional argumentation is needed” to “bridge the gap between the premise that a fetus is an innocent person and the conclusion that killing it is always wrong.” She continues, “to arrive at this conclusion, we would need the additional premise that killing an innocent person is always wrong.” In English’s world, “killing an innocent person is sometimes permissible, most notably in self-defense.” I had a hard time at this moment imagining a scenario where I would kill an innocent person in self-defense. After all, self-defense generally involves defending oneself from aggressors, such as a burglar who has broken into your home or a street mugger who is trying to rob you. But never fear! English realizes “some examples may help draw out our intuitions or ordinary judgments about self defense.”
So what is her powerful example, the one which will serve as the crux of her argument for the rest of the essay? Behold:
Suppose a mad scientist, for instance, hypnotized innocent people to jump out of the bushes and attack innocent passers-by with knives. If you were so attacked, we agree you have a right to kill the attacker in self-defense, if killing him is the only way to protect your life or to save yourself from serious injury. It does not seem to matter here that the attacker is not malicious but himself an innocent pawn, for your killing of him is not done in a spirit of retribution but only in self-defense.
Seriously? Mad scientists and hypnosis is the best hypothetical you could come up with? I guess that’s to be expected, since (as I pointed out before), in the real world, one does not have to defend oneself from an “innocent.” However, because Jane English is going to try to make the argument that it is morally permissible to murder an innocent fetus, she needed to come up with something to make her argument sound sensible. Indeed, she continues by drawing a parallel between this super-likely science fiction scenario and a pregnancy:
Some cases of pregnancy present a parallel situation. Though the fetus is itself innocent, it may pose a threat to the pregnant woman’s well-being, life prospects or health, mental or physical. If the pregnancy presents a slight threat to her interests, it seems self defense cannot justify abortion. But if the threat is on a par with a serious beating or the loss of a finger, she may kill the fetus that poses such a threat, even if it is an innocent person…It is unfortunate that the only way to free the woman from the pregnancy entails the death of the fetus (except in the very late stages of pregnancy).
Don’t worry, English contradicts herself later and justifies abortion in cases where the pregnancy poses only a slight threat. And I hope the irony of a Strong, Independent (TM) woman being threatened by an unborn child – so much so as to justify killing this child in “self-defense” – isn’t lost on you. English concedes that “thanks to modern technology, the cases are rare in which pregnancy poses as clear a threat to a woman’s bodily health as an attacker brandishing a switchblade.” She muses, “how does self-defense fare when more subtle, complex and long-range harms are involved?” Spoiler alert: not well! Here’s her argument:
To consider a somewhat fanciful example, suppose you are a highly trained surgeon when you are kidnapped by the hypnotic attacker. He says he does not intend to harm you but to take you back to the mad scientist who, it turns out, plans to hypnotize you to have a permanent mental block against all your knowledge of medicine. This would automatically destroy your career which would in turn have a serious adverse impact on your family, your personal relationships and your happiness. It seems to me that if the only way you can avoid this outcome is to shoot the innocent attacker, you are justified in so doing. You are defending yourself from a drastic injury to your life prospects. I think it is no exaggeration to claim that unwanted pregnancies (most obviously among teenagers) often have such adverse life-long consequences as the surgeon’s loss of livelihood.
Wow. Where to begin? This example is so over the top ridiculous that English has to disclaim it before she even gets into it (“somewhat fanciful” being only somewhat understated). She says it would be permissible to kill the innocent hypnotized pawn in order to avoid the calamity described, except one problem with doing that is that there would be no way to have the foreknowledge that said innocent hypnotized pawn was going to drag you away to the mad scientist who was then going to permanently mindblock you. (Unless the attacker spills the beans of his plan BEFORE he has successfully kidnapped you – but who does that?) I think it is a gross exaggeration to claim that unwanted pregnancies “often” have such adverse life-long consequences – and moreover, we’ve been ignoring a crucial point to consider that unravels this whole ridiculous self-defense concept.
Except for an extremely small minority of specialized and highly unlikely cases, pregnancies are completely avoidable. Women have the regular pill, the morning after pill, the power to discriminate among their sexual partners, the power to insist upon condoms only when having sex, or the power to not have sex altogether if pregnancy is so scary and life-threatening. (The highly unlikely cases include instances where both the condom AND the pill fail – almost statistically impossible – or in instances of ACTUAL rape which end in pregnancy, which is also highly unlikely, unless you’re one of those rape culture zealots.) Of course, Jane English, being a true woman and truer feminist, doesn’t want to have anything to do with personal accountability:
Let’s suppose further that these hypnotized attackers only operate at night, so that it is well known that they can be avoided completely by the considerable inconvenience of never leaving your house after dark. One view is that since you could stay home at night, therefore if you go out and are selected by one of these hypnotized people, you have no right to defend yourself. This parallels the view that abstinence is the only acceptable way to avoid pregnancy. Others might hold that you ought to take along some defense such as Mace which will deter the hypnotized person without killing him, but if this defense fails, you are obliged to submit to the resulting injury, no matter how severe it is. This parallels the view that contraception is all right but abortion is always wrong, even in cases of contraceptive failure. A third view is that you may kill the hypnotized person only if he will actually kill you, but not if he will only injure you. This is like the position that abortion is only permissible if it is required to save a woman’s life.
I think we’ve beaten into the ground how silly her analogy is, so I’m just going to point out the obvious – entirely missing from her analysis is the option of putting the child up for adoption instead of, you know, killing it. Moreover, her sense of “morality” seems to follow the contemporary trend of being thinly veiled hedonism. Having sex is certainly not an inalienable human right (which is why feminists and women so often balk at legalized prostitution), and it is an activity which often carries consequences (such as pregnancies or STDs). Suggesting that abstinence would help you avoid pregnancy is nowhere even near in the same ballpark as suggesting “you shouldn’t leave your house after dark because there are people who could attack you after dark and if you get attacked because you left after dark well then you’re just stupid.” I could make a soup out of all the solipsism on display here – mmm, solipsism soup!
Let’s fast forward to English’s conclusion:
In the early months of pregnancy, when the fetus hardly resembles a baby at all, then, abortion is permissible whenever it is in the interests of the pregnant woman or her family. The reasons would only need to outweigh the pain and inconvenience of the abortion itself. In the middle months, when the fetus comes to resemble a person, abortion would be justifiable only when the continuation of the pregnancy or the birth of the child would cause harms – physical, psychological, economic or social – to the woman. In the late months of the pregnancy, even on our current assumption that a fetus is not a person, abortion seems to be wrong except to save a woman from significant injury or death.
The logic that it is more permissible to kill something which, in the present moment, “may or may not be human” even though we know that in a few more weeks or months it most certainly will be human is hard for me to follow (and harder still to swallow). Oh, female morality. Of course, I wouldn’t want someone who can’t even take accountability for their own sexual proclivities to be raising children, but that doesn’t mean they get a free pass to murder them either (and certainly not out of some warped sense of “self-defense.”) Again, that’s what adoption exists for. Or, and I’m going to whisper this in hushed tones, maybe you could give custody over to the father. I hear they’re pretty good at raising children.
J. Durden aka Dr. Deezee is the Chief Architect of the Internet Hate Machine. J. Durden’s brother recently won sole custody of J. Durden’s nephew.
