Consider The Fetus
The title of this entry is a paraphrase of the title of David Foster Wallace's article 'Consider The Lobster' published in Gourmet Magazine. They don't seem to have the essay on their site, but there is an interesting article about it on The Boston Globe's website. In a similar spirit (but without footnotes) I would like to question the assumptions of those who wish to legislate against abortion. It strikes me that part of the problem with the whole abortion question is the lack of scientific answers to the core questions in the debate. To date we have not yet figured out what consciousness is, nor do we know how to determine whether or not a creature lacking language skill is or is not conscious. We have this strong intuition that there is some continuum from single-cell creatures up to higher primates, but can't assert with any certainty whether we really are more advanced than some number of our fellow creatures here on earth. In fact, it is unclear that attaining consciousness really does make us more advanced. Bruce Sterling has posited in some of his writing that hive minds could actually be more advanced than individual consciousness. So while we have some understanding about what makes one physically homo sapiens we have no clear definition for what makes one human.
If we could answer these questions, then we could perhaps make a determination that at week X a fetus gains consciousness and thus becomes human. Prior to that, things get really interesting. Is it the potential of human life that we are being urged to protect? In that case why is masturbation or failure to conceive in a given month any worse than aborting a fetus at 3 weeks? For that matter, why is it okay to allow the large-scale killing of creatures that we know to have some level of consciousness (such as dolphins)? Why are we willing as a society to accept that it is okay if our pollution kills all of the polar bears (something I am personally very upset about)? I find the arrogant belief that human life is somehow more worth protecting incredibly offensive. I also wish to point out how tortuous I find the argument that it is okay for us to kill off large numbers of creatures in the name of our personal convenience, but it is fine to curtail a woman's control of her own body in the name of protecting something which might eventually become human.
The truth is that any distinction that is made is purely arbitrary. To claim that one knows with certainty what the rule should be for everyone is as dubious a proposition as asserting knowledge regarding the density of celestial beings on heads of pins. To claim moral equivalence between destroying a fetus and killing a teenager is to miss the entire point. While there is general agreement that the teenager is human (despite some dissenting parental voices), the status of the fetus is unknown, and at present unknowable. While it is unclear that answering these questions would sway anyone's mind more towards willingness to curtail women's freedom, arguing for that curtailment in the absence of these answers requires inhabiting a position that is, within our Constitutional framework, untenable.
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