Late- vs. Early-term Abortion: A Thomistic Analysis

The Thomist 71 (2007): 113-41 LATE- VS. EARLY-TERM ABORTION: A THOMISTIC ANALYSIS ANDREW J. PEACH Providence College Providence, Rhode Island I. INTRODUCTION 'What is said by many cannot be altogether false. "1 PERHAPS THE GREATEST intellectual stumbling block facing critics of abortion is the fact that, by and large, the general public regards late-term abortions as more seriously wrong than early-term ones. Evidence for this fact can be seen in the contrast between the American public's consistent condemnation of the late-term procedure known as "partial-birth abortion" (dilation and extraction) and their general toleration or even approval of abortion in the first trimester.2 Polls consistently show significant majority support for both the banning of lateterm abortions and the continued legalization of abortions in the first trimester. This "moral intuition," as philosophers would put it, regarding early- and late-term abortions is routinely cited by defenders of abortion as evidence that human life at its earliest stages is less than a full "person" and, hence, has less than full moral standing. 1 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 5, a. 3, obj. 3. All translations from the Summa Theologiae are taken from the translation of the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Bros., 1948). 2 It should be noted at the outset that the present paper will deal exclusively with the question of the morality of abortion, not its legal status, though the repercussions of late-term abortions on society as a whole will be discussed below. 113 114 ANDREW J. PEACH If it is less seriously wrong, if indeed wrong at all, to abort in the early stages of fetal development and more seriously wrong to do so in the later states, then it would seem to follow that the moral status of a fetus changes along with that development. More specifically, abortion apologists have marshaled this "later is worse than earlier" intuition as evidence in support of two related, though distinct, positions in regard to the moral status of the life in the womb: (1) a gradualist account of "personhood," such as that advocated by Margaret Olivia Little or Mary Anne Warren,3 in which the rights of a fetus are proportional to his level of development, or (2) the much more prevalent "achievement view"4 of personhood, such as that advanced by L. W. Sumner or David Boonin,5 in which the attainment of some specific trait or quality, such as sentience or the possession of some type of desire, transforms the unborn human into a being with rights. In the past, critics of abortion have responded to this moral intuition by aggressively attacking both of these philosophical positions, not by directly responding to the intuition itself. For example, in response to gradualism, Patrick Lee has persuasively argued that substances, such as persons, cannot admit of degrees or grades.6 In a similar vein, Stephen Schwarz has attacked the 3 See Margaret Olivia Little, "The Moral Permissibility of Abortion," in Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics, ed. Andrew I. Cohen and Christopher Wellman (New York: Blackwell Publishers, 2005), 28-29; and Mary Anne Warren, "On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion," in The Problem ofAbortion, ed. Susan Dwyer and Joel Feinberg (Belmont: Wadsworth Group, 2001), 69. Cf. also Sissela Bok, "Who Shall Count as a Human Being? A Treacherous Question in the Abortion Discussion," in What is a Person?, ed. Michael F. Goodman (Clifton, N.J.: Humana Press, 1988), 213-28. Additionally, Jane English, in "Abortion and the Concept of a Person," Canadian Journal ofPhilosophy, 5 (1975): 151-60, makes comments that suggest her position might fall under or at least be sympathetic to this categorization. 4 The phrase "achievement view" of personhood is that of Stephen Schwarz in his The Moral Question ofAbortion (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1990), 103££. 5 See L. W. Sumner, "A Third Way," in Dwyer and Feinberg, eds., The Problem of Abortion, 98-117; and David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chap. 2, esp. sect. 2.8. 6 See Patrick Lee, Abortion and Unborn Human Life (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), esp...