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1. Do Unborn Human Beings Become Persons after Birth?
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8 The position examined in this chapter could be called “the no-person argument.” This is the position that, while what is killed in an abortion is a human being, it is not a person and therefore abortion is not morally wrong. Since bearers of rights are called “persons,” the same position could be expressed this way: the right to life is not acquired until after birth. The most developed and detailed defense of this position is by Michael Tooley, and so I will refer frequently to his work. Moreover, Tooley’s arguments for this position have evolved, partly because of criticism, over a period of several years. Following this history is instructive. Nevertheless , my primary concern is not with Tooley himself but with the general position he has examined and defended in more detail than any other philosopher. In section I, I try to clarify the question whether unborn human beings are persons , and in subsequent sections, I examine the arguments for the position that they are not. I. “Personhood” and Language To clarify the question, I first examine what is sometimes put forward as the standard argument in favor of the position that human fetuses are persons. It is an argument based on the similarity between successive stages in the development of the fetus in the womb. Roger Wertheimer, in his 1 • Do Unborn Human Beings Become Persons after Birth? 9 Do unborn human beings become persons after birth? 1972 article “Understanding the Abortion Argument,” is frequently quoted. Summing up the so-called conservative position, that is, the position that human fetuses are persons and therefore abortion is immoral, Wertheimer writes: But I am inclined to suppose that the conservative is right, that going back stage by stage from the infant to the zygote one will not find any differences between successive stages significant enough to bear the enormous moral burden of allowing wholesale slaughter at the earlier stage while categorically denying that permission at the next stage.1 As a species of slippery slope argument, this argument has its difficulties . Opponents of this pro-life position have pointed out that the fact that differences between successive stages in the development of a being are not significant does not show that there are no significant changes at all. There may well be significant differences between non-successive stages in the development of the fetus. Thus, Donald Van De Veer writes More concretely, what impresses many persons who are neither abortionists nor uncomfortably pregnant is that there are substantial differences between the early fetal stages . . . and the neonate. Early on, the embryo is quite indeterminately formed, comparatively speaking; in the early fetal stages there is no heart or brain function and no movement of limbs. The empirical differences between what we may loosely designate as S2 or S3 [stage 2 or stage 3] and the neonate are striking.2 Analogies clarify the point Van De Veer is making. The difference between sanity and insanity is significant, and yet a person can gradually become insane in such a way that the differences between any 1. Roger Wertheimer, “Understanding the Abortion Argument,” in The Problem of Abortion, ed. Joel Feinberg, 2d ed. (Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth, 1984), 43–44. 2. Donald Van De Veer, “Justifying ‘Wholesale Slaughter,’” in Feinberg, The Problem of Abortion, 68. [3.230.1.23] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:34 GMT) 10 Do unborn human beings become persons after birth? two successive changes in that person’s transformation will be slight. This point, however, only sharpens the issue. Granted, there are differences, even significant ones, between the zygote and the newborn , but are those differences morally relevant? That is, are they significant in the way the pro-abortion position needs them to be? Are these differences sufficient to ground the differential treatment accorded to newborn babies on the one hand, and embryos or fetuses , on the other hand? When we compare an embryo in very early stages of development with a newborn infant, the differences are marked; yet, there are also important similarities. Van De Veer focuses on the significant differences, but one could also focus on significant similarities. For example, at all stages these beings are of the same species, have human parents, have the same genetic structure , and so on. The real question is: what differences and what similarities are morally relevant? We need a criterion which distinguishes morally relevant differences and similarities from morally irrelevant differences and similarities. In “On the Moral and Legal...