McArdle on Abortion
June 2, 2009 8 Comments
I love Megan McArdle. She’s one of my favorite bloggers and she articulates things in a way that proves why she is paid to blog for The Atlantic and why I blog for free. Megan normally covers mostly economic issues so it was rather brave of her today to wade into the resurgent abortion debate in the wake of George Tiller’s murder.
Megan has four posts covering the topic (1, 2, 3, 4). Post #2 is the longest and by far the best, although all are definitely worth a read. In this post Megan draws an analogy between slavery and abortion for the purposes of explaining ‘personhood’ and its central role in the abortion debate. She talks about the constantly evolving definition of ‘personhood’ and how it took a step backwards for the first time with Roe:
But of course, those criteria are socially constructed. The definition of personhood (and, related, of citizenship) changes over time. It generally expands–as we get richer, we can, or at least do, grant full personhood to wider categories. Except in the case of fetuses. We expanded “persons” to include fetuses in the 19th century, as we learned more about gestation. Then in the late 1960s, for the first time I can think of, western civilization started to contract the group “persons” in order to exclude fetuses.
Personhood is the key premise in the abortion debate and should really be the primary focus. As Mark Thompson mentions in his own response to Megan’s posts, the Supreme Court drew an admittedly arbitrary line in the sand with Roe with no guidance from the Constitution. As he also points out, the fact that a large majority of Americans believes third term abortions are wrong suggests that Roe drew the line in the wrong place (assuming the line should reflect a cultural majority). I must say I don’t know what opinions polls said pre-Roe but I would find it incredibly hard to believe they preferred universal access, which is essentially what we have today.
McArdle shifts into another gear, putting her economist hat on (sort of) and examining the way cost-benefits shape our opinions.
But I am also aware that a lot of very fine thinkers were seduced into reasoning that Africans weren’t people. Whatever evidence they thought they had, we’re pretty sure how they arrived at their conclusions: African personhood would have caused enormous personal and social upheaval. Thousands of their friends and family would have personally suffered enormously without their slave wealth. Ergo, slaves weren’t people!
My intuition seems to basically be that if a fetus couldn’t survive outside the womb, aborting that fetus isn’t that different from skinning your knee. Sure, those cells were “alive” before, but that doesn’t make them human, deserving the rights of personhood. Yeast cells divide and grow, but that doesn’t make bread murder. If you’re performing an abortion on a woman who would have given birth to a healthy baby tomorrow, my intuition says that you’re killing a person. That baby was capable of living on its own. But very early on, my intuition is that it’s more analogous to having a mole removed.
This obviously hits tricky territory as technology develops, which changes the likelihood of survival. I suspect that most people object to third-term abortions because we’re familiar with cases in which babies are born a month or two prematurely but survive in NICUs. What happens if/when we can do that earlier and earlier? What would the law about abortion be if we had Brave New World-esque technology to grow babies in bottles? Surely, as Dr. Seuss said, a person’s a person, no matter how small… but then what to make of this intuition?
So personhood is defined by the ability to survive outside the womb? How long do you think a 6-month old would survive without adult intervention?
Well, that’s a bit of a strawman. I’m assuming in all cases that the born child has regular medical and parental care; that’s why I wrote that whole second paragraph about why changing medical standards make this move earlier and earlier.
That’s why I find the ‘viability’ arguement to be flawed. We would constantly have to keep moving the line backwards. When artificial wombs are finally an option, do we then declare personhood to start at implantation of the fertilized egg? Then what will that say about the millions of fetuses that were aborted after that mark in the past? Do we retroactively declare them persons as well or do we say, “Sorry, if only we had the technology to make you a person way back in 2009,”?
Right, yeah, I realize it’s weird in that way. Nevertheless, that’s what my intuition says (though moral intuition is self-contradictory tons of times, in lots of cases).
On the other hand I could say to you, is anything that’s potentially viable in the future to be considered life? Why stop at fertilized eggs—why not consider menstruation and ejaculation to be murder? That egg or that sperm could someday be a person, so it should be considered a person now!
I pretty much go with a positive pregnancy test onward.
As he also points out, the fact that a large majority of Americans believes third term abortions are wrong suggests that Roe drew the line in the wrong place (assuming the line should reflect a cultural majority).
Your interpretation of Thompson’s point here is wrong: he says the two people he’s responding to misunderstand Roe by arguing for unrestricted late-term abortions based on it. Because Roe allowed states to ban late-term abortions, the popular opinion on this practice suggests the line was right, not wrong.
From Mark:
“Worse, late-term abortion – as opposed to earlier-term abortions – is something that an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose, not just ardent movement pro-lifers, on the grounds that a majority of Americans view late-term fetuses as something approaching fully human.”
…
“No, at root, the trouble with Roe and its progeny has always been that it drew an arbitrary line as to where personhood begins – a line that Justice Blackmun himself admitted was necessarily arbitrary. “