OPINION: The Moral Argument For Abortion

OPINION: The Moral Argument For Abortion

Abortion is a highly emotional issue that is once again on the front pages of newspapers across the country as conservative states enact more and more restrictive laws directed at a woman’s right to choose. 

By Ezekiel Gracee

Talking Past One Another

Too often in the abortion debate, proponents for each side just seem to be talking past each other, as opposed to actually engaging. The reason? A failure to define the question(s). In this emotionally charged discussion it is important to try to step back, and attempt to place some of the stated arguments into a single conceptual framework concerning the moral permissibility of abortion.

Two Central Questions

There are two central questions at the heart of the debate over the morality of abortion.

• The first is, who or what constitutes a “moral person”? (That is, a “person”, within the context of moral decision making, defined, depending on your theory of morality, variously as an entity deserving of rights, membership in society, or entry into the utilitarian calculus.)
• The second is, how do we balance the right of self-determination and autonomy of one moral person against the right to life of another, when the two are in conflict? Obviously this question, weighing the rights of the mother and the fetus against each other, is only relevant if we answer the previous question by saying that the fetus is a moral person.

The argument that abortion is impermissible, to my knowledge, necessarily entails the following answers. (1) The embryo/fetus does constitute a moral person and (2) the right of any moral person to live outweighs the right to self-determination, autonomy, or privacy, of the mother.

Permissibility

The argument that abortion is permissible, on the other hand, can take two routes. The first route is asserting that the embryo/fetus is not a moral person, and thus abortion is prima facie permissible. The second route is to concede the first point; the fetus is a moral person, but challenge on the second point, arguing that the right to self-determination of the mother supersedes the rights of the fetus when they conflict.

Both of these questions are difficult.  The first is, I think, the most interesting. It’s also one that is often avoided by pro-choice people. Prima facie, it looks easy. During our daily life, we generally equate the concept of “moral personhood” with simply looking like a fully formed human being.

The common argument is that a fertilized egg is rendered a moral person via its potential to develop into something that looks like an obvious person. Whether this argument holds water is a whole other can of worms. (I personally think it’s weak.) It is nonetheless one of the arguments used to explain why a fertilized egg has the “moral person” status, which as I said above, is essential to the anti-abortion (ProLife) argument.

The second major question — how we balance the right of self-determination against the right to life — is also a doozy. I think this is an argument that’s often not grappled with as strongly as it deserves to be, especially by political conservatives who generally value autonomy and self-determination extremely high among the “pantheon of rights”.

My Take 

Having outlined how I view the whole debate, it is suffice to say that abortion stands as permissible based on the second — that self-determination trumps life.