One of the primary claims of the anti-abortion brigade is that “life begins at conception”, and because it is wrong to take a life, therefore it is wrong to abort a fetus (and perhaps wrong even to prevent a zygote from implanting by use of a UTI). However, this claim is not merely wrong, but ludicrously wrong.
Let me make an aside here. If you are of a religious bent, and if you believe in the existance of a soul, and if you believe that this soul is created, implanted, magicked into being, or otherwise attached to a developing human at some particular point in development, then of course that provides a logical point whereafter abortion may be seen as a crime against said soul. I think you are dead wrong about the existance of souls, but granted that premise, this objection to anti-abortionism does not apply to you. To you, all I have to say is this: Remember that your arguments are inherently non-secular and cannot carry force in a secular judicial system; and please remember that your arguments hold no force with those of us who are not religious.
With that out of the way, let’s restate the obvoius: Life does not begin at conception. Conception, in us sexually reproducing animals, consists of the fusion of gametes—the sperm fertilises the ovum. But, and this should be painfully obvious to everyone, the gametes are alive. You are the product of a living spermatozoon and a living ovum. Fertilisation did not mark the creation of life, only the fusion of two living cells into a single living cell.
This fusion is certainly a defining moment in your life. Barring mutation so unlikely that I expect it can be discounted, and excepting rare conditions like chimerism and mosaicism, it is the last event that defines your genetic makeup, when the chromosomes you inherit from your parents merge. It is, in a very real sense, a defining moment. It is not, however, the defining moment, because there are many. Even after fusion, not every zygote goes on to successfully implant, and early pregnancies often terminate spontaneously. The biologist Lewis Wolpert famously said that “It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life”.
But before conception, a startling number of things had to happen in order to make you who you are. Before the fertilisation event was to matter at all, the specifics of meiosis in the germ line of each of your parents played as big a role in determining your genetic specifics as did the fertilisation itself: Meiosis, the process where a germ line cell divides into (haploid) gametes with half the chromosomal complement of a normal cell, is when the genetic contribution of each parent is determined. And of course any number of things had to happen very specifically in order to make you who you are, on this basis: Your parents had to have sex at just the right time when the spermatozoon and ovum each carrying half of your genes were alive and active. If they’d waited until next month, things would have been different…
But this is only the beginning (or the end, depending on your view). Those haploid cells, after all, were alive, each of them a living cell from one of your parents, whence they were produced by meiosis from diploid germ line cells. Each of those cells was the unlikely product of very specific meiosis, reproductive timing, and fertilisation by the (most likely four) people who were their parents…and the same goes for all of their parents…and that lineage goes back, centuries, millennia, millions of years, hundreds of millions of years. You are the product of a lineage of living cells that stretches back to the very dawn of sexual reproduction. Looking back further, you’re still the product of living cells, though the processes are different and lateral gene transfer makes the family tree a bit harder to draw…but ultimately, you are the scion of a family of cells—living cell to living cell to living cell—reaching back some 3.6 billion years—3,600,000,000 years—at a ballpark estimate.
That is when life began, and that is, in a sense, when your life began, too: It started then, and it hasn’t died since. Every single intermediary between you and the first primordial, primitive, living cell that serves as ancestor to all life on earth was alive. It started then, and in a sense, you’re just a heavily modified offshoot—3,600,000,000 years down the living line.
I find this an awesome fact to contemplate.
What, then, is so magical about conception? Nothing, really. It’s a defining moment in making you who you are, but it’s really just one of billions upon billions of defining moments. Causing the death of a zygote does exactly as much in preventing a particular potential person from coming about as does causing the death of a spermatozoon (e.g. by masturbating, by ejaculating outside a woman, by using a condom, or by doing nothing and letting the spermatozoon die and get reabsorbed into the body); as does wasting the life of an ovum (by menstruating, in the luteal or ischemic phase). But removing the possibility of a specific human being is even more ubiquitous; after all, every human alive represents millions of potential people lost, as the ones produced by the spermatozoa who lost the race would undoubtedly have been different.
My own opinions on abortion are not very well-defined. I am, of course, pro-choice, but since I’ve never been in a position where I’ve had to make a hard choice, I’ve never needed to figure out exactly what I think the hard lines are. What I do think, however, is that it is in no way wrong to destroy human tissue, while it is definitely wrong to destroy a moral human person.
The question, then, is what constitutes moral personhood. I will not pretend to have a clearcut answer. If I had to sit down and develop one, it would combine concepts like having thoughts, dreams, hopes, fears, and desires; taking part in emotional relationships (a reciprocal relationship); interacting (in some way) with people; acting as a moral agent, rather than merely being acted upon as a ‘moral object’.
It seems abundantly clear to me that no lump of human tissue can possibly meet my criteria unless it has a mind, which requires a working brain. After the brain works in some sense, I believe there is a window, a grey area, where I would in all likelihood agree that abortion may very well be morally acceptable—but this is beside the point I wish to make here, which is that until brain activity begins, I regard it as “no context”: Abortion prior to this is absolutely acceptable. (This may be around week 25 or so of a pregnancy; research shows that sustained EEG activity first appears in bursts around week 20, become sustained around week 22, and bilaterally synchronous around weeks 26–27.)
Once the position is taken that an early abortion does not, in fact, destroy a moral person, we are back to the notion of destroying “potential” persons. The problem is that we destroy potential persons all the time, no matter what we do. If we have sex, we destroy lots of potential persons (since most of the potential ones will never be, even if we do have children); whenever we don’t have sex even though we could, we are passively murdering potential persons, because we aren’t making children at all.
Modern biotechnology allows us to stretch this argument to a reductio ad absurdum without leaving the realm of the possible. In recent experiments (documented in some very nice articles in Nature), scientists have induced pluripotency in mouse cells and produced viable mice (fully viable, as some of them went on to reproduce). While cloning humans is likely to be much more difficult than cloning mice even on purely technical considerations, and it may well be impossible right now, it seems obvious that the technology is if not in our grasp, then certainly close to it, to produce viable humans from induced pluripotent stem cells. Taking things just a bit further, it may become possible to extract genetic material and inject it into pluripotent cells and so produce clones from any cell with intact genetic material.
Once the technology exists for doing this, the loss of any viable genetic material is, in a sense, the destruction of a potential human life. Scratching your head, cutting your hair or your nails, losing scrapings of epithelial material from your mouth, bleeding…every such act will prevent humans from being who might otherwise have been.
Unless you are willing to condemn this as murder, then any argument that boils down to “You are destroying potential life!” loses all force.
Labels: biases, definitions, ethics, fallacies, morality, Petter, pro-choice
