Essays and Notes

Dealing with Teleology Again

2024-03-07T19:49:00.003-07:00

I recently came across an interesting Honors thesis by Nicholas Masferrer Ramirez, The Limping Violinist: Why Thomson’s Defense of Abortion Does Not Establish the Conclusion that Abortion is Morally Permissible. As the title suggests, it is yet another attempt to refute Judith Jarvis Thomson’s "A Defense of Abortion." Like other attempts, it fails. However, it is an eighty page pdf file, and even skipping over arguments I’ve already engaged, it would still take about forty pages to thoroughly debunk.

Instead, I’m opting to focus on Part IV: The Teleological Objection (55-68). This is the only section where Ramirez is arguing abortion is morally impermissible, rather than simply attempting to prove Thomson’s “Defense” doesn’t show abortion is permissible. Nothing in this part depends of Parts I-III being true, so we’re not missing anything important.

The interesting part of this argument is that it attempts to use teleological reasoning to show that abortion is impermissible. However, he is almost immediately reduced to admitting his argument “would only apply to those who accept a teleological metaphysical view” (55). This in itself seems odd. Ramirez is clear he finds abortion generally impermissible. Making a case only for those who accept a certain worldview will not get to general impermissibility. That would still leave open the question of why abortion would be impermissible to anyone who does not accept that worldview.

This is a problem that affects Ramirez's entire paper. He is attempting to show that Thomson's violinist scenario does not show abortion is permissible even if one is allowed to disconnect from the violinist. As reliant on teleological considerations as his arguments are, they can only find purchase with those who accept his worldview. Thus he fails in his task generally even if he is successful among those who hold to teleological metaphysics.

Nevertheless, Ramirez holds that pro-choice philosophers would do well to “grant an Aristotelian teleology” (56). But why should they? Typically a philosopher arguing for the permissibility of abortion aims to show that abortion is generally permissible, not that it is permissible for a certain subset of the population. If one accepts teleological metaphysics and believes Ramirez's arguments are sound, one is certainly free not to have an abortion.

While I do not fully accept Aristotelian metaphysics, as I mentioned elsewhere, I am inclined to accept as true statements such as “the purpose of uteruses is to gestate prenates.” However, I have serious doubts that such statements can be parleyed into moral obligations. While this may not precisely make me part of the audience Ramirez is addressing, there is enough common ground for Ramirez to work with.

The question before us is this: Even if one accepts uteruses are for gestation, does Ramirez’s argument defeat bodily rights?

Preliminary Clarifications

Ramirez perpetuates some misconceptions about pregnancy. Since the actual facts will have some bearing on my response, I will begin by clarifying those misconceptions.

Ramirez places great emphasis on the fact that uterus bearers can live without their uterus, but fetuses cannot live without them. This is true insofar as it goes, but it is radically incomplete. The uterus is not the only organ that the fetus needs to stay alive. It also needs the mother's circulatory system, respiratory system, digestive system and kidneys to stay alive. Cut off the blood flow to the placenta, and the fetus will not be able to obtain nutrients and oxygen and cannot dispose of carbon dioxide and urea. Therefore it will surely die.

Ramirez heavily relies on an argument by Jim Stone¹ and attempts to rebut criticisms made by David Boonin.² Ramierez responds to only two of Boonin's objections, going so far as to modify Stone's argument to clear the argument from the charge of begging the question. However, Boonin offered other, perhaps more substantial, criticisms of Stone’s argument. As we shall see, Ramirez's modified argument is still subject to the criticisms he ignored.

The Nucleus of the Argument

The basis of Ramirez’s argument is pointing out a disanalogy between Thomson’s violinist and pregnancy. The purpose of filtering kidneys is to filter blood, whereas the purpose of uteruses is to gestate fetusus, i.e., to provide for another person. “Thus, the violinist does not have a right to your kidneys in the same way an unborn child has a right to her mother’s uterus” (55).

The first thing we should notice is that, formulated this way, the argument is invalid. Just because something is meant to benefit someone other than oneself does not by itself give anyone a right to that thing. Apartment complexes are meant to shelter people other than the owner, but that does not mean I have the right to take up residence in a given apartment without the owner’s permission.

There is a missing middle, as it were. Ramirez is attempting to fill the gap.

Filling the Gap

To fill the gap, Ramirez draws upon a thought experiment proposed by Jim Stone. To briefly recapitulate, Stone proposes we imagine an alien species. At the age of seventy, a member of this species splits into two distinct entities and ceases to exist. Both newly formed individuals have an unambiguous right to life. However, the fissioning is not quite complete for an additional nine months. During this time, one of the individuals has fully developed and functioning organs, whereas the other has vital organs still in development. The two are connected by a band of flesh through which a common bloodstream allows the incompletely formed split to use the organs of the other.

Supposing Stone himself is the individual with fully formed organs, would he be entitled to separate himself from the needy offshoot, George? Stone (and Ramirez) say no, using this reasoning:

The principle which justifies such a claim seems to be this: An organism with a strong right to life has a right to the continued use of the biological equipment, the use of which it acquires through the normal process of biological creation typical to its species, upon which its life depends. (qtd at 57)

Having stated the case, Ramirez now turns to respond to two of Boonin’s objections. Remember these are not the only objections Boonin had to Stone’s argument. However, we will leave those other objections aside for the time being and deal with Ramirez’s responses.

Responding to Ramirez’s Argumentum Ad Absurdum

Assuming that it would be morally impermissible for Stone to unplug himself from George, Boonin argues there is a relevant difference between the fissioned individuals and a fetus making use of its mothers body. In the case of Stone and George, they both began using Stone’s organs at the same time. By contrast, pregnant people clearly had prior ownership of their uteruses well before a fetus took up residence in it (DoA 245).

Ramirez responds if we accept this argument, we would have to accept that living organ donors can reclaim their organs even at the cost of the recipient’s life. I am unclear how Ramirez gets this. Possibly the argument is inspired by Boonin's language showing the pregnant people have prior ownership of their uteruses: "The organs inside her body were provided to her by nature well before the fetus began to make use of them" (DoA 245). Ramirez is apparently equating prior ownership with original ownership.

If so, we need only make a slight modification that will have the same result without the implication Ramirez asserts.

Consider Jack and Jill. Jack is a transgender man who for obvious reasons has no desire to be pregnant. Jill does want to have children some day, but her uterus is defective and will not carry any pregnancy. Jack, nice guy that he is, decides to donate his uterus to Jill. Although Jill's uterus was provided to her by Jack rather than nature, nothing has changed. Jill can still claim prior ownership vis a vis the fetus, unlike the case of Stone and George. Even if we were forced to conclude Stone could not disconnect from George, that still wouldn't mean Jill couldn't have an abortion on Thomsonian grounds.

Presumably Boonin never had any intention to imply organ donors could reclaim their donations and would agree with this modification. Regardless, with this modification, Ramirez’s response fails.

Nevertheless, we’re not going to leave things here. The real concern is that Ramirez is trying to assert “prior ownership of an organ is irrelevant in regards to who is entitled to that organ” (59). But even if his counterargument against Boonin could be sustained, this conclusion would still be jumping the gun.

Consider Ramirez’s case of Mary and John. Presumably Ramirez would agree that Mary, the kidney recipient, could be unplugged from Thomson’s violinist. The fact that she is the prior owner of the kidney certainly would be a factor in that judgment.

Indeed, prior ownership certainly plays a role in judgments about who is entitled to what—and usually it is the decisive factor. If Stone and George jointly inherited a house, it is clear Stone could not deny George’s use of it. However, if Stone alone inherited the house, it is just as clear George can claim no entitlement to use it.

It is certainly possible that the pregnant person’s ownership of their uterus is in fact irrelevant to whether the fetus is entitled to that organ. But Ramirez would actually have to make that case.

Reformulating Stone’s Thought Experiment

In response to Boonin’s charge Stone was begging the question, Ramirez reformulates Stone’s argument as a syllogism:

(1) A person is entitled to use any organ whose natural function is to keep him alive.

(2) A fetus is a person. (Assumption granted by Boonin and Thomson for the sake of argument.)

(3) A fetus is entitled to use any organ whose natural function is to keep him alive. (Follows from 1 and 2)

(4) The uterus of a fetus’s mother is an organ whose natural function is to keep him alive.

Therefore,

(5) A fetus is entitled to use the uterus of his mother. (Follows from 3 and 4). (59-60)

Ramirez claims if Boonin denied premise (1), it would have unsavory implications, such as the state claiming the use of people’s vital organs. But it seems to me that premise (1) as it stands allows that anyway. It would give the violinist a claim to your kidneys because the natural function of a kidney is to keep someone alive. The key point of Ramirez’s formulation is left unstated in premise (1): it is irrelevant whether that organ is internal or external to the person in need of it. Indeed, he asserts that distinguishing internal and external organs is an ad hoc one. So if the fetus is entitled to the pregnant person’s uterus because he needs it to keep him alive, then Thomson’s violinist is entitled to your kidneys because he needs them to keep him alive.

Also remember that the uterus is not the only external organ the fetus needs to keep it alive. It also needs, at a minimum, the pregnant person’s heart, lungs, stomach, intestines and kidneys to keep it alive. Presumably, Ramirez would affirm that the fetus is also entitled to the use of these organs. Otherwise, he would have to agree that an abortion could be performed by a method that cuts off the fetus’ access to nutrients, oxygen, and waste disposal. But if he is unwilling to do this, then it becomes difficult to deny the violinist has a right to your kidneys.

Ramirez also says that if Boonin denied premise (1), he would also have to deny George has any right to use Stone’s organs. Here, it should be pointed out that is exactly what Boonin did. Now we turn to an objection made by Boonin but ignored by Ramirez.

Boonin pointed out that Stone’s principle contains two distinct claims. First, George acquired the use of Stone’s organs through a natural process. Second, that natural process was the normal means of reproducing for his species. Boonin rejects the first claim. It does not follow from the fact that George acquired the use of Stone’s organs through the function of the common band of flesh they happen to have means he has a right to use those organs. Thus, Stone can detach himself from George (DoA 243-244).

To illustrate, let us extend our earlier metaphor of Stone and George jointly inheriting a house. Suppose that instead of jointly inheriting the entire house, Stone only inherits one half the house and George the other. As it so happens, the air conditioning unit is on Stone’s side of the house. Thus, George receives heating and cooling because of the preexisting duct work. George will be able to install an air conditioner, but it will take nine months. Does it follow from these facts that George has a right to use the air conditioner that is clearly on Stone’s side of the property? No. Absent any compelling reason to the contrary, Stone is within his rights to cut off heating and cooling to George’s part of the house.

It is only if the first claim is vindicated that the objection Ramirez is addressing, that Stone is begging the question, comes into play. This means even if Ramirez has successfully reformulated the argument to avoid begging the question, Boonin’s rejection of the first claim still stands. And Ramirez doesn’t even try offering a rebuttal to Boonin’s rejection of the first claim.

Surrogate Mothers and Spaceships

Ramirez can escape the conclusion that you must remain hooked to the violinist by insisting on another unstated part of premise (1), that the use of the organs are acquired through the normal reproductive process. So now premise (1) will look like this:

(1)^c A person is entitled to use any organ, internal or external to himself, whose natural function is to keep him alive if he acquired the use of the organ through normal reproductive processes.

Even Ramirez sees an immediate problem with this formulation: it does not cover cases he wants it to cover. It is at best unclear whether rape is part of the normal reproductive process. And artificial methods of becoming pregnant certainly are not part of the normal reproductive process. Indeed, Ramirez agrees that, at least in the artificially achieved pregnancy, the fetus would not have a right to the pregnant person’s uterus.

Ramirez turns to another argument to establish that even if the fetus has no right to the pregnant person’s uterus, that still wouldn’t necessarily justify an abortion:

Let us return to our spaceship case. Recall in this example, I have a spaceship stocked with enough food for two people on this nine month voyage and I fully own the rights to the spaceship and everything on it. After taking off for my nine month voyage, I discover that my two-year-old son has snuck on board. Let us now ask a similar question that we asked in the original version: do I have the right to kick my son off the spaceship, thereby killing him, since he does not have any right to the spaceship? [cite]

Before getting to my substantial objections, the are a couple things to notice about this argument. First, if this argument is enough to prohibit someone who became pregnant through artificial means from having an abortion, then it is also enough to prohibit you from being unhooked from the violinist. After all, if not having a right to one’s uterus is not a sufficient condition for having an abortion, then the fact that the unconscious violinist has no right to your kidneys is not sufficient reason to demand unhooking. Second, if this argument is enough to prohibit someone from having an abortion, then it no longer matters whether uteruses are for gestating prenates. We are out of the realm of teleological metaphysics entirely.

Now on to more substantial objections. There is a huge difference between Ramirez’s stowaway son and an unwanted fetus using a pregnant person’s body. The stowaway son is violating Ramirez’s property rights, whereas the unwanted fetus is violating the pregnant person’s right to bodily integrity. So it would not follow that agreeing Ramirez may not eject his son means a pregnant person may not have an abortion. Indeed, the right to bodily integrity is so fundamental that we regard killing someone trying to rape or kidnap you as justified self-defense. By parity of reasoning, pregnant people may kill the fetus to end the violation of their bodily integrity.

But suppose Ramirez is willing to concede cases where the fetus did not obtain the use of the pregnant persons organs through the normal reproductive process. We are now confronted with another Boonin objection Ramirez ignored. Boonin asks why it should matter that the use of the organ was acquired through the normal reproductive process (DoA 244-245). Once again, Ramirez doesn’t even attempt to answer that question.

The provision that the organ usage be acquired through the normal reproductive process can only serve one purpose: accommodate the intuition you are allowed to unplug yourself from Thomson’s violinist. But without any reason to believe acquirement through the normal reproductive process makes any difference, we can only conclude it is an attempt to give the fetus special rights. This serves as another piece of evidence that the abortion debate is really about who gets to control the bodies of uterus bearers.

NOTES

1Ramirez cites Jim Stone, “Abortion and the Control of Human Bodies,” The Journal of Value Inquiry 17, no. 1 (1983): 77-85.

2In A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge: Cambridgue University Press, 2005): 245-246. Hereafter, A Defense of Abortion will be cited in text as (DoA x), where x is the page number. Boonin also cites the same article as Ramirez. I currently have no access to Stone’s article, and therefore cannot properly evaluate whether Ramirez and/or Boonin have adequately captured Stone’s argument. However, since Ramirez does not allege Boonin misinterprets or misrepresents Stone’s argument, the point is moot.

Appreciating Judith Jarvis Thomson: Revisiting the Responsibility Argument

2024-03-07T09:20:00.002-07:00

Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion” is the seminal essay on abortion. Whatever your position on abortion, no one can reasonably argue about it without having some familiarity with this essay. Personally speaking, this was the essay that made me truly understand what is meant by “my body, my choice.” Before reading this essay, I accepted the saying without truly understanding what it meant. I’ve been pro-choice since I first heard there was such a thing as abortion and that there was a massive political debate about it. I was around thirteen years old at the time, and it was my first instinct to side with women in the supposed conflict between their rights and the fetus’ rights. As I would have put it in those days, I can point at a woman; I can’t point at a fetus without a woman getting in the way. It was a somewhat simplistic way of looking at it. At that time I did not have the knowledge I needed to adjudicate the rights claimed for both women and fetuses. Thomson’s essay gave me the knowledge I needed and I haven’t looked back since.

However, it was not a matter of accepting Thomson’s argument because her essay adhered to my already existing bias in favor of women. I thought her argument was so devastating that I searched out counterarguments. The counterarguments did not have to convince me that Thomson was wrong, per se. They only needed to convince me that her resolution of that conflict didn’t fully solve the issue. This would have thrown me back to the fact I could point at a woman and not a fetus, while still acknowledging a genuine conflict was going on.

But none of the counterarguments could even do this much. Not that they tried. But even Beckwith, who I thought of as the premier voice of the anti-abortion movement, couldn’t touch her. So, whereas once upon a time I could have flipped to the pro-slavery side of the abortion debate, it has since became so unlikely that I wound up getting a pro-choice tattoo:

So if Thomson’s argument was so brilliant and so decisive, why did I write “Why Abortion is Permissible”?¹ Obviously I wouldn’t have taken the time and trouble I didn’t at least think I could improve on what she wrote (not to mention all the other pro-choice works I had read to that point). Also, there were some ways that my thinking about abortion evolved beyond Thomson while I was heavily debating the topic in various Internet forums. However, none of that means that I think Thomson’s essay is necessarily flawed. The slavers still have not managed to decisively defeat Thomson’s basic argument more than fifty years after its initial publication. That alone says something about the strength of the essay.

Moreover, my essay benefited from fifty years of people throwing shit at it to see what sticks. I don’t think any of it does, but when I wrote “Why Abortion is Permissible,” one of my goals was to construct an argument that would be immune to the criticisms hurled at Thomson. Object to the weirdness of the violinist scenario? Unfortunately, there is nothing weird or fantastic about rape, kidnapping, and slavery. Hold to the intending vs. foreseeing objection? My argument holds that (within certain limits) even if the death of the fetus is intended, it would still be permissible. Like Thomson, I don’t think that the distinction between direct and indirect killing makes a moral difference. If you feel that way, my argument makes the case that even if abortion is direct killing, it is still permissible.

In short, my essay stands on top of Thomson’s, and would not be possible without it. My argument shifts more to a self-defense model in contrast to Thomson’s right-to-refuse model. Even so, my argument is still rooted in her basic insight that one cannot use a person’s body without consent—even for life itself.

Since writing “Why Abortion is Permissible,” the argument I presented there has been the basis of almost everything else I’ve written on the topic. And I will admit that I derived a certain satisfaction when I could show that standard anti-Thomson arguments won’t fly against my argument.

A few years ago, I learned that Thomson had died. I wondered how well Thomson’s arguments still stood on their own terms. So I pursued anti-Thomson arguments and defended them as much as possible on Thomsonian terms while holding my argument as a backup. I found that I rarely had to use the backup. In fact, I’ve found that more often than not, I could defend Thomson’s work on her terms precisely because her opponents ignored what she said. Mind you, what she had to say may or may not be the best or strongest argument about a given objection. Even pro-choice philosophers have found some of her arguments inadequate if not outright flawed. The problem is that slavers ignore what she said entirely. You can see examples in my responses to Wagner and Lu.

Typically, the anti-Thomson argument focuses on the violinist scenario. They will make their argument that abortion is disanalogous to the violinist scenario for reasons X, Y, or Z. But they ignore the fact that Thomson had something to say about counterarguments X, Y, and Z. In these cases, all I have to do is point out what she did say about those counterarguments. I don’t even have to agree with those arguments (though I usually do). The point is that she said something about it, and ignoring what she said means, at best, the slaver’s argument is intellectually questionable.

In some cases, this might plausibly be attributed to ignorance. If all you’ve heard about Thomson’s argument is the violinist scenario, you may well think pointing out disanalogies is enough to defeat the argument. But let’s face it, Thomson’s essay has been easily accessible on the Internet since at least the 1990s when I first encountered it. To be ignorant of what Thomson said about counterarguments X, Y, and Z is to be willfully ignorant and says you really have nothing to say about her argument. If you know she said something about your argument and fail to address it, then you are just plain dishonest.

This brings me to the so-called Responsibility Argument. I have already done a post on the Responsibility Argument, but I’ve never been totally satisfied with it. Indeed, even after this post, I probably will still have more to say about it. But for this post, I want to focus on Thomson’s remarks about it. A fairly common argument against the violinist scenario is that, while it might apply to cases of rape, it does not apply in cases where the pregnant person had voluntarily engaged in sexual intercourse.

There are some who take the violinist scenario to justify the rape exception, while holding to the Responsibility Argument in all other cases. And they might even cite Thomson herself in this respect. “Can those who oppose abortion on the ground I mentioned make an exception for a pregnancy due to rape? Certainly.”

But Thomson does not really give you that option. If you only take the violinist scenario to justify the rape exception, then you are fundamentally missing the point. The point of the violinist example is not to justify the rape exception (though it does that). The point is to bring out the problem of the entire anti-abortion argument. And the problem with the anti-abortion argument is that the right to life does not grant anyone the right to use someone’s body to keep themselves alive.

Those who oppose the rape exception grasp this point. So, for example, Wagner and Lu argue against the rape exception. It is not just a matter of being particularly cruel (though they are). It’s a matter of realizing that the rape exception cracks open the entire anti-abortion argument. In my case against Wagner, I argued that if we could defeat his argument before the “this looks a lot like pregnancy” stage, we’ve defeated his entire argument. Similarly, if the slaver can stop the rape exception, they have defeated Thomson’s argument.

Thus, the Responsibility argument can only come into play if the rape exception is granted.² Thomson herself notes this:

But it might be argued that there are other ways one can have acquired the right to use of another person’s body than by having been invited to use it by that person. Suppose a woman voluntarily indulges in intercourse, knowing of the chance it will issue in pregnancy, and then she does become pregnant; is she not in part responsible for the presence, in fact the very existence, of the unborn person inside her? No doubt she did not invite it in. But doesn’t her partial responsibility for its being there itself give it a right to the use of her body? If so, then her aborting it would be more like the boy’s taking away the chocolates, and less like your unplugging yourself from the violinist—doing so would be depriving it of what it does have a right to, and thus would be doing it an injustice.

…

On the other hand, this argument would give the unborn person a right to its mother’s body only if her pregnancy resulted from a voluntary act, undertaken in full knowledge of the chance a pregnancy might result from it. It would leave out entirely the unborn person whose existence is due to rape. Pending the availability of some further argument, then, we would be left with the conclusion that unborn persons whose existence is due to rape have no right to the use of their mothers’ bodies, and thus that aborting them is not depriving of anything they have a right to and hence is not unjust killing.

Then follows a series of arguments that ultimately Boonin finds unsatisfactory.³ It strikes me that when pro-choice philosophers identify inadequate arguments Thomson made, they fail to appreciate how radically new Thomson’s argument was even when they note it. It must be remembered that when Thomson’s article was published, the abortion debate centered almost solely around whether the fetus was a person that had the right to life. If the fetus had the right to life, then the abortion argument was effectively over. Indeed, even today most slavers and even some pro-choice philosophers argue as if the abortion issue should be decided solely on the personhood of the fetus. Thomson was changing the basis of the debate entirely. Expecting her to have anticipated and responded adequately to all the shit that would be thrown against her thesis would be too much to expect of anyone in her position.

Indeed, the only reason Thomson said anything at all about the Responsibility Argument is because of responses to earlier presentations of her argument before her paper was published. And the first thing she said was “that it is something new.” It wasn’t something she anticipated when she first formulated her argument. She would have had very little idea how the Responsibility Argument would develop, and thus could only speak to it in relatively general terms. In the past, I myself thought she was merely content to muddy the waters as it were. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to realize I was wrong. Thomson was not trying to muddy the waters. She was throwing down a gauntlet. And it’s a gauntlet the slavers have refused to take up ever since. She was basically saying that we can discuss a person’s responsibility in becoming pregnant, but it needs to be a reasonable discussion. Here are the parameters.

Thomson’s response to the Responsibility Argument comes in two parts. In the first part, she writes, “And we should also notice that it is not at all plain that this argument really does go even as far as it purports to. For there are cases and cases, and the details make a difference.” She argues that if you open a window to let some air in, it would be absurd to say that this gives a burglar the right to be in your home—even if you open the window in full knowledge of the fact that burglars exist and are liable to enter your house through an open window. And it would even be more absurd to say that the burglar has a right to your home if you had bars installed on the windows and the burglar got in because of a defect.⁴ And it would remain absurd to say an innocent person who blunders into your home has a right to be there because you opened the window.

You might look at this and echo Lt. Elliott in Knives Out: Weak sauce. I am sure it is all too easy to come up with alternative cases where someone does something that leads to someone else having a bona fide claim to your care. Admittedly, this is the reason I thought Thomson was contenting herself with muddying the waters of the Responsibility Argument. Sure, there are cases, and then there are cases. But the problem for the person arguing the Responsibility Argument is not coming up with alternate cases. The problem is that they also have to show what they’re proposing is more like a person having intercourse knowing they might become pregnant, with or without using precautions, than Thomson’s burglar example. That’s not so easy, and partly explains why many of the alternative cases that are offered rely on some form of strict liability. However, Thomson excludes strict liability in the second part with her people seeds analogy and with the argumentum ad abusrdum that even those who have been raped could be held responsible for their pregnancy because they could have gotten a hysterectomy or never left home “without a (reliable!) army.”

Why does the Responsibility Argument almost always come down to some form of strict liability? As Ann Garry pointed out, it is the only model that “has the scope deemed appropriate by many opponents of abortion.” Someone pressing the case that voluntary sex creates the obligation to carry any resulting pregnancy to term needs to be able to accomplish two things. First, they need to explain exactly how having sex creates the obligation. Second, the explanation needs to cover everything except outright rape. Only strict liability models can do this.

Models that rely on some sort of fault cannot cover the scope necessary for the typical anti-abortion proponent. Setting aside all the other problems associated with fault models, they simply can’t cover all the cases the abortion opponent wants to include. For example, it is difficult if not impossible to argue people properly using birth control are being negligent or reckless. Few people who deliberately conceive subsequently seek abortions except for reasons that are more generally found permissible, such as endangerment of the pregnant person’s life or health. So even if it were granted that a person who deliberately conceived has an obligation to carry the pregnancy to term under normal conditions, it would cover far too few cases to satisfy abortion opponents.

With some form of strict liability, all that really matters is the pregnant person consented to sex. The precautions the person takes does not matter. Factors that would otherwise mitigate or absolve a person in a fault model, such as birth control sabotage, do not matter. With some forms of strict liability, one need not even know there is a connection between sex and pregnancy.

Using a strict liability standard has its own problems, but I am going to focus here on just one. Strict liability leaves uterus bearers with only a few ways of escaping the loss of their bodily rights: complete abstinence or having a hysterectomy or bilateral oophorectomy. This is a steep price to pay. No one else under any circumstances would ever have to pay such a high price to avoid losing a fundamental right. That abortion opponents pressing the Responsibility Argument are so willing to impose that price speaks volumes about what they really want—to control the lives of people with uteruses.

NOTES

1I developed the argument presented in that essay through several years of online debate about abortion in various forums. As I mentioned in the essay, my reading on the topic was not comprehensive. Some time after writing that essay, I found references to and finally obtained a copy of Eileen L. McDonagh’s Breaking the Abortion Deadlock: From Choice to Consent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). McDonagh’s book-length treatment contains far more detail than my essay, but her central point is the same: in an unwanted pregnancy, the fetus is the aggressor and abortion can be seen as an act of self-defense. So my essay should not be seen as completely original. That we came to a similar argument independently speaks to the strength of McDonagh’s argument.

2I have encountered slavers who oppose the rape exception yet also push some variation of the Responsibility Argument. While arguing any version of the Responsibility Argument amounts to slut-shaming, when done by those who oppose abortion even in cases of rape, the slut-shaming is especially egregious. Here is the question I would pose to those who oppose abortion in cases of rape yet still want to push the Responsibility Argument: If you don’t care how the person became pregnant, why should I? If you oppose abortion in cases of rape, you simply have nothing to say about any supposed responsibility a pregnant person has about their situation.

3David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion (New York: Cambridge University Press), 150-152.

4This is an obvious analogy to using contraception. Occasionally, a slaver brings up the point that if a person doesn’t want to get pregnant, they can use birth control. I immediately ask if they allow abortions in cases where birth control fails. To a person, the slaver says no. This raises the same kind of question as in note 2: If the use of birth control doesn’t matter to you, why should it matter to me?

I Have Cancer

2024-03-06T15:24:00.005-07:00

I have been ill for some time. This week, I was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer with known spread to the adrenal glands and brain. I was told my condition is "treatable, but not curable." I am interpreting this to me that, if treatment goes well, I could still live for a long time. However, it is ultimately going to be a losing battle. Until we see how treatment will go, an actual prognosis is up in the air.

Given the uncertainty and the fact that I still have a lot I want to say, the plan is to put up as many posts about different topics as I can get banged out. There will be more reflection, a little less "pure" scholarship.

I already have two articles on abortion that only needs final edits before posting. Look for those in the next couple days. I have another project, a defense of my belief in the so-called Inspired Fiction Theory for the Book of Mormon and its meaningfulness to believers who hold to it. My friend Trevor Luke reviewed a draft and made several suggestions for improvement. I have not actually finished this project. Nevertheless, I will be posting it soon more-or-less as it is now. The essay as it is already basically says what I want to say about it. So while I'm not completely happy with it, and intend to revisit it if/when I can, I want to get that message out.

After this, I want to write primarily about what my Mormonism means to me. There will be some scholarship, but these essays are meant to be more reflective about how Mormonism has affected me and is bringing me some comfort in this time of trouble. Here are some things you can expect in the upcoming days.

I want to talk about the genius of the Israelite religion, even though that original genius has been somewhat obscured because of modern conflicts with "secular" knowledge. The genius is precisely in historicizing its mythology. That is to say, the Israelites took the myths and legends they told each other to make sense of their world and incorporated it into a history encompassing a saga that begins with Creation and leading to the Babylonian exile. Obviously by modern scientific and historical standards, we cannot judge it to be accurate history. However, I will argue asking whether the Bible is accurate history largely misses the point. In historicizing their mythology, the Israelites weren't really trying to say something about history--they were saying something about God and his relationship to humanity.

This in turn is going is lead to some reflections on the nature of Scripture itself. Historicizing mythology and the process of canonizing the result has certainly led to problems down the road. Once canonized, the point the Israelites were making got lost and believers came to see Scripture as the Word of God to humanity. This seems to be the genesis of the problems of literalism, the conflicts between creation and evolution, and so on. Also, since Scripture is now a diverse set of different writings over time that is particularly given to cherrypicking, there is the problem picking and choosing the things that still appeal while ignoring the things we don't like. Even I would just as soon leave aside the genocide, rape, cannibalism and all the other ugliness we find in Scripture and focus on the higher ideals we find in Scripture and can still inspire us to this day.

But that wouldn't really be taking Scripture seriously. The problem, I think, is that we are now conditioned to see Scripture as the Word of God containing God's record of his dealings with us. Would I would like to do is flip this around. Instead of being God's record of dealing with us, what happens if we recognize Scripture is actually humanity's record of our dealing with God? Whereas it is hard to reconcile the highs and lows of Scripture from a God's eye; recognizing Scripture as humanity's dealings with God may help us make more sense of the ugliness.

Getting closer to modern Mormonism and its effect on me, I have three topics I especially want to explore. The first is the Mormon concept of Zion. Anybody who knows me well enough knows I am a political leftist, no matter what label I choose for myself at a given time. For example, some of my political stances could make Bernie Sanders look like a raving reactionary conservative. While the basic trajectory of my life and personality perhaps made it inevitable that I would fall on the left end of the political spectrum even before I became a Mormon, it is hard to escape the possibility that I may not have become quite as liberal as I am were it not for the fact that, as a Mormon, it is my duty to do my best to help bring about Zion. So unlike Sanders, who is still working within the broad world of capitalism, it is my goal to overthrow capitalism altogether. This is at least partly due to the fact that the more I grasped the implications of Mormon Zion the more I realized that Zion is simply incompatible with capitalism. You can have one, or you can have the other, but you can't have both.

However much waffling the modern LDS Church does around the subject, I think that the ultimate culmination of Joseph Smith's Mormonism can be encapsulated in the Snow couplet: "As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become.” For conservative Christianity, this is Smith's ultimate heresy. And indeed, it is a very radical statement. Coupled with the doctrine of eternal progression, this gives Mormonism a basically optimistic view of humanity that is lacking in much of traditional Christianity, and especially in Calvinistic forms which declare mankind is utterly depraved.

It also has implications. In the Bible, we are told, "Whoever does not love does not love God, for God is love" (1 John 4:8, NRSV). John goes so far as to say that he who declares if you do not love, you are still in the darkness (2:9) and are in fact murderers (3:19). It is fair to say that the ultimate ethic in Christianity is to love others as God loves us. But the Snow couplet actually demands a little more than this. In Mormonism, every single human being is a potential god. As such, each and every single human being needs to be looked at with a bit of the awe and wonder we ascribe to God himself. Don't get me wrong. I'm not there--not by a long shot. Hell, even the "simpler" goal of loving everyone with the love of God often proves elusive to me. But as a Mormon, that is what I strive for.

The fact that in Mormonism God is an exalted man has its own implications. Arguably restoring one of the original insights of Israelite religion, Mormonism puts God in our space/time continuum. Crucially, God did not create the world out of nothing; he worked with and organized eternally existent matter which he neither created nor can destroy. In other words, God is not omnipotent in the classic Christian sense. This too has implications, especially for the problem of evil. While I had seen hints in other places, the implication for the problem of evil was most forcefully brought to my attention reading chapter 33 of B. H. Roberts' The Truth, The Way, The Life. I will delve into this further, but the basic thought is that God must deal with two things: the intractableness of the laws of physics and the inability to interfere with man's free moral agency.

Thus, it is quite possible that we have the best possible world, given the constraints that God himself must act under. When we add chaos theory to the mix, we also have to face the possibility that God has to be very careful about what he does. This is where it becomes very personal. Even a really small act by God can have effects that not even he cannot fully predict. Plunking an asteroid onto the dinosaurs might give room for humanity to evolve, but it certainly did not guarantee we would. So every time God performs a "miracle," this includes the risk that things could go horribly, terribly wrong in the long run.

For this reason, I have no reasonable expectation that God will miraculously cure my cancer, and I'm not going to bother asking him to do so. I am simply not that important in the overall scheme of things and I certainly don't want God to wind up destroying life, the universe, and everything on my account. But if God is so constrained that he cannot help me with my illness, what can he do? Immanuel--God is with us. I have been thinking along these lines since I read Roberts some twenty-five years or so ago. But here, today, knowing what my likely fate is going to be, it is a thought that has become especially comforting.

So these are the kinds I of projects I have in mind in the immediate future. Let's see how far I can get with them.

David and the Book of Mormon

2022-11-24T15:29:00.011-07:00

I’ve been a student of religious studies since I was twelve years old. In fact, I had intended to get a degree in this field, but was unable to complete my formal education. I never lost my interest in the subject. Since I’m also a Mormon, I have a special interest in Mormonism. So, as a member of Academia.edu I frequently get reading suggestions on the topic of Mormonism.

This is how I came to read “Davidic References in the Book of Mormon as Evidence Against Its Historicity” by Kyle Robert Beshears.¹ There is really no way to sugarcoat this. It is a bad argument. It is a really bad argument. In fact, it is such an exceedingly bad argument that I wonder if a thesis like this would be accepted anywhere other than a place like SBTS.

I felt the thesis needed some kind of response. But I didn’t want to duplicate any other efforts, so I inquired if there were any existing responses to the thesis at the Mormon dialogue and discussion board. A fellow board member, Gary Jacobson, referred me to “Too Little or Too Much Like the Bible? A Novel Critique of the Book of Mormon Involving David and the Psalms” by Jeff Lindsay.²

I considered “Too Little or Too Much Like the Bible?” a fairly good response. My thoughts about the thesis tracked so well with Lindsay’s response that I wondered if should still write my own response. Ultimately, I decided that I can still contribute to the discussion. So, here we go.

In contrast to Lindsay, I am going to be tackling Beshears from an environmentalist perspective. That is to say that I agree with Beshears that the Book of Mormon is not an ancient document. So what am I doing “defending Book of Mormon historicity?”

There are a couple reasons. First, as I discussed in my “Environmental Theory” essay, environmentalists, especially religious environmentalists like myself, have a special duty to show our approach to the Book of Mormon is basically positive. Among other things, this means that religious environmentalists should be at the forefront of calling out and disposing of bad arguments, even from those we are in nominal agreement with. This is why I wrote “How Not to Do Book of Mormon Studies” and that is partly why I am responding to Beshears now. In a sense, I feel like I have an even bigger dog in this fight than Lindsay.

Second, I am not defending Book of Mormon historicity as such. While historicists could use the arguments I am going to make, ultimately my conclusion is Beshears’ evidence is not evidence of anything. This is as much an experiment in Book of Mormon interpretation as it is a response to Beshears. Beshears is correct that there are relatively few direct references to David in the Book of Mormon. But rather than being evidence against historicity, the lack of references is an important part of the picture the Book of Mormon paints for itself. As an environmentalist, I would say it contributes to the Book’s verisimilitude. A historicist might rather say that this picture points to historicity. If so, I would not complain.

Lindsay (32) and I are in complete agreement that Beshears neologism mormonic (2 n.2) is too close to “demonic” or especially “moronic” to be seen as anything other than pejorative.³ Beshears uses the excuse that the term “does away with the cumbersome phrasing of ‘Book of Mormon’ to describe its people, narrative, events, theology.” But if “Book of Mormon” is too cumbersome to use every time, there are perfectly good abbreviations that can be used instead. Indeed, Beshears uses one himself: BofM. I’m going to stick with that abbreviation throughout this essay.

Lindsay (32) gives a brief discussion dealing with Beshears’ repeated accusation of plagiarism, to which I have nothing to add.

Lindsay also gives a devastating critique to Beshears’ methodology by, among other things, pointing out that most biblical references to David are clustered in books telling David’s story, and that many books in the Bible don’t mention him at all (37-41). While this is good work, I have an even more fundamental problem with Beshears’ argument. The real problem is that even if the methodology weren’t so flawed, the entire approach is not evidence of anything.

Consider the structure of Beshears’ argument:

If the Book of Mormon has numerous references to David, this would be evidence for its historicity.
If the Book of Mormon does not have numerous references to David, this would be evidence against its historicity.
The Book of Mormon does not have numerous references to David.
Therefore, the evidence points against historicity.

Premise 1 is wrong. To demonstrate this, let’s look at Beshears’ own example of how historicists use thematic similarities in the Bible to “corroborate the anticipated continuity between Old and New World Jewish cultures”: Noel B. Reynolds’ “The Israelite Background of Moses Typology in the Book of Mormon.”⁴ First, notice Reynolds never said that the Moses typology was evidence of BofM historicity. The closest he came was to say that if Joseph Smith did it based on what was understood in the 1820s, “he probably would have gotten it wrong” (5). Also note that saying “it would make sense to criticize the Book of Mormon” for not having the typology is an entirely different thing than saying that would be evidence against historicity. Beshears is already trying to prove too much.

If you are a storyteller, and you are going to tell a story about, well, an exodus, you’re not going to go wrong by modeling the story on the Exodus. Regardless of the state of biblical scholarship at the time, it can’t be denied that the material was available to Joseph Smith. If Reynolds said the Exodus typology pointed to the historicity of the Book of Mormon, it would be all too easy to simply respond Joseph Smith drew it from the Bible.

Likewise, even if the Book of Mormon bristled with Davidic references, and those references reflected everything Beshears said it should, it still would not be evidence of anything. Whatever use the Book of Mormon made of David, it still couldn’t be denied that the material was available to Joseph Smith. Therefore, it can’t in itself be used as evidence of historicity.

It should go without saying that if the presence of something is not evidence of anything, then the absence of that that thing is not evidence of anything either.

If we can’t say the lack of Davidic references don’t prove anything vis a vis BofM historicity, is there nothing that can be said about this? To use Reynolds’ term, could we justifiably criticize the Book of Mormon for not having them? I propose this is going to depend on two factors. First, is the Book of Mormon really lacking in references to David? If so, does the Book of Mormon have a reason to avoid mentioning David?

Beshears is correct the Book of Mormon only directly mentions David seven times. I confirmed this by doing a search on a PDF version. In contrast, my preliminary⁵ counts yielded twenty-three references to Joseph, forty-nine mentions of Jacob, and seventy-five references to Moses. Beshears counted twenty-seven references to Abraham (19). Mentions of David certainly do pale by comparison.

Direct mentions probably don’t fully do the job, however. We should also take into account allusions as well. For example, Ben McGuire makes a case that the killing of Laban (1 Ne. 3:31–4:19) has several deliberate allusions to the story of David and Goliath (1 Sam. 17).⁶ If this deliberate modeling does not count as a reference to David, then naming a land after him (Morm. 2:5) probably doesn’t either. There may well be more of these types of allusions to David, so this is a subject that could use further exploration. Even so, I don’t think we will find enough such allusions to say the Book of Mormon is under the long shadow of David, especially not in the way we could say this of Moses.

Should we count quotations or allusions to Psalms attributed to David as Davidic references? Beshears asserts there are no direct quotes from the Psalms⁷ and that possible allusions to them are problematic at best (41-44). So answering this question requires delving into at least one controversy.⁸ Even if we resolve the question of whether the Psalms are quoted or alluded to,⁹ that still would not necessarily mean they should count as Davidic references. Since the argument I’m going to make could account for such quotations or allusions (assuming they exist), I will set this question aside for now.

Especially when setting aside that question, I think it safe to say David is not emphasized in the Book of Mormon. That answers the first question. Now let’s turn to the second. Does the Book of Mormon have a reason to avoid mentioning David? I think it does.¹⁰

The Book of Mormon begins in “the first year of the reign of Zedekiah” (1 Ne. 1:4). Zedekiah was installed by King Nebuchadnezzar after a disastrous battle with Zedekiah’s nephew Jehoiachin. Besides installing Zedekiah, Nebuchadnezzar exiled at least ten thousand people to Babylon, leaving only “the poorest of the land” (2 Kgs. 24:10-20).¹¹ Among these captives was the prophet Ezekiel (Ezek. 1:2).

For Jerusalem, this was just the latest in a series of disasters. First, King Josiah was killed in battle with Pharaoh Neco (2 Kgs. 23:29). Then Neco subsequently dethroned Jehoahaz, imposed a heavy tribute on Jerusalem, and installed Jehoiakim to the throne (2 Kgs. 23:33-34). Jehoiakim. either by choice or by force, switched allegiance to Nebuchadnezzar, only to rebel with calamitous consequences to Jerusalem (2 Kngs. 24:1-7).

Since these disasters all occurred in a space of no more than twenty years, this is the environment the Book of Mormon portrays Nephi and his brothers growing up in. And it is in this environment that Lehi began prophesying.¹² However, unlike Jeremiah (26:16-24; 36:11-19; 37:16-21, 38:1-28), Lehi did not have any protection from institutional sources. Lehi was on his own against those who mocked him and “sought his life” (1 Ne. 1:19-20).

So on the eve of Lehi’s departure from Jerusalem, no one in his party had reason to hold the Davidic monarchy in high regard. For all their complaints and desire to return to Jerusalem, Laman and Lemuel never said a word about its leadership. There are some clues in the Bible that the sentiment was widespread. The final four kings of Judah are not compared to David (2 Kngs. 23:31-24:20). Jeremiah clearly rejected the monarchy of his day, instead promising the Lord would raise a “righteous Branch” after the coming exile (22:24-23:6). In the aftermath of Jerusalem’s destruction, Ezekiel affirms the Davidic covenant (34:24), but the role and power of the “prince” are greatly reduced in his vision of the restored Israel (45:7-46:18). The book of Nehemiah, set during the post-exilic Persian period, identified David only as “the man of God”(12:24); Solomon is identified as “king” while emphasizing his sin in taking foreign wives (13:26).

Let’s back up a little. Nephi was originally commanded to start making his record between thirty and forty years after he left Jerusalem (2 Ne. 5:28-34). Within a few leaves of this record, we are told he received a revelation telling him he would “be made a ruler and a teacher over thy brethren” (1 Ne. 2:22). This revelation was later confirmed to Laman and Lemuel by an angel (1 Ne. 3:29). Despite this, a recurring complaint made by the two brothers is that Nephi was taking it upon himself to be a ruler over them (e.g., 1 Ne. 16:37-38; 18:10). Nephi’s final break with his brothers was precipitated by yet another such jealous outbreak (2 Ne. 5:3-5).

As noted above, the story of the killing of Laban seems deliberately modeled after the story of David and Goliath. When the people desire that Nephi be made a king, he tries to demur but humbly says “I did for them that which was in my power”¹³ (2 Ne. 5:18). Nevertheless, he could not seem to resist the impulse to note this was in fulfillment of prophecy (2 Ne. 5:19). Whatever reluctance Nephi had about being king did not prevent him from anointing a successor “according to the reigns of the kings”(Jacob 1:9). As Beshears himself notes, three of the references to David occur in the extensive copying of Isaiah in 2 Nephi. We can agree with him that “had Isaiah not mentioned David in those three verses, one wonders if Nephi would have ever mentioned the king at all, and the near-absense of Davidic references outside of this section in the BofM inclines one to suppose he would not have” (37). Interestingly, one of those mentions, 2 Ne. 19:7 (Isa. 9:7), does affirm the Davidic covenant, but as Beshears notes, Nephi makes nothing of this (37). This someone trying to establish his legitimacy to the throne.

As Nephi (and probably Zoram and Sam) die, a new problem arises. Nearly everyone in the budding Nephite community was either born in the sojourn out of Jerusalem or in the promised land. No one had any memories of Jerusalem in the final years leading to its destruction. What they did have were the brass plates.

We do not have an exact picture the brass plates’ contents. We can only assemble this picture through what the Book of Mormon specifically tells us and what is quoted or clearly alluded to. One of the things it tells us is that the brass plates contained “a record of the Jews from the beginning, even down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah” (1 Ne. 5:12). This would appear to mean they had something like 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and 2 Kings up to chapter twenty-four.¹⁴

Again, exactly what is in the version of these books is unknown. However, it does seem that the Book of Mormon pictures the Nephites having some version the Davidic Covenant as presented in 2 Samuel 7. This will bring us to the three clearest mentions of David other than the Isaiah quotations in the Book of Mormon.

2 Samuel 7 starts with David proposing to build a temple for the Lord (v. 2). The prophet Nathan originally approves (v. 3), but then has a dream where the Lord tells him it will be David’s son that will build the temple and specifically says of this son, “I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me” (v. 13-14). Moreover, the Lord adds “Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever” (v. 16).

This seems particularly important for a couple reasons. First, it inextricably binds David and Solomon together. Second, it raises a note of illegitimacy to the Nephite kings.¹⁵

The Nephite community clearly regard David and Solomon as role models. It’s hard to think of them justifying their polygamous practices because of them otherwise. It is also hard to see any other place in the Bible that the Nephites would have had that so inextricably bind David and Solomon together. This would explain why the next few BofM Davidic references we are going to consider (Jacob 1:15, 2:23, 24) put them together.¹⁶

Note how Jacob sets the stage leading into the references to David and Solomon. First, he writes that Nephi anoints a new king before dying (Jacob 1:9). Next he comments that the people held Nephi I in such regard that subsequent kings (up to the fourth as of the time Jacob wrote) had Nephi as their regnal name (Jacob 1:10-11). So Jacob is writing well after the time he presents the sermon in Jacob 2-3. A dynasty has been established, which will last until the death of Mosiah₂(Mosiah 29:38ff).

After relaying this information, Jacob discusses the circumstances of the sermon he gives in Jacob 2-3. He backs up to the “reign of the second king,” and discusses how he became concerned with “wicked practices, such as like unto David of old desiring many wives and concubines, and also Solomon, his son” (Jacob 1:15). And when Jacob discusses David and Solomon, he lets loose:

For behold, thus saith the Lord: This people begin to wax in iniquity; they understand not the scriptures, for they seek to excuse themselves in committing whoredoms, because of the things which were written concerning David, and Solomon his son.

Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord. (Jacob 2:23-24)

Looking at the sermon’s placement in the Book of Mormon, Jacob seems to be trying to kill two birds with one stone. The first, of course, is to record the start of his campaign against Nephite polygamy. The second is to help establish the legitimacy of the Nephite kings by castigating David and Solomon.¹⁷

Fast forward a couple hundred years or so. Warned to leave the land of Nephi, Mosiah₁ leads his people through the wilderness until they discover the people of Zarahemla. The people of Zarahemla are described as leaving Jerusalem in the wake of Zedekiah’s final defeat (Omni 12-14). The leader of this party is later identified as Mulek, and specifically called “the son of Zedekiah” (Hel. 6:10). The people of Zarahemla and the people of Mosiah₁ come to an accommodation which results in Mosiah₁ becoming the king of both (Omni 19).

However, this presents another problem. Now the Nephites have legitimate heirs to the kingdom of the house of Israel among them.¹⁸ Furthermore, the text later notes that: 1) the Nephites are a minority in Zarahemla and 2) the combined population of Zarahemla was less than half that of the Lamanites (Mosiah 25:3). This puts the Nephite monarchy in the horns of a dilemma. Emphasize David too much, and Mulek’s descendants might start getting ideas. But they definitely need the people of Zarahemla, so outright badmouthing Mulek’s ancestor would not be wise. Better to avoid mentioning him at all. Might that explain how the small plates seem to have gotten lost (W of M 3)?

Fast forward another couple generations. Mosiah₂ has come to a point in his reign where it time to appoint a successor. The problem was that none of his sons wanted the throne (Mosiah 29:3). Rather than anointing one of his brothers (Mosiah 1:2), hypothetical nephews, or even someone outside the family (Alma₂ would have been a popular candidate, as shown by Mosiah 29:42), Mosiah proposes a radical change in government.

Instead of continuing the monarchy, Mosiah proposes that instead of continuing the monarchy, the people themselves should choose judges. In making his argument, Mosiah attacks the very idea of monarchy. Acknowledging that if the people always had a “just man” ruling over them, monarchy would be an “expedient” form of government (Mosiah 29:11), Mosiah emphasizes that the consequences of having a wicked man on the throne are too great:

And if my son should turn again to his pride and vain things he would recall the things which he had said, and claim his right to the kingdom, which would cause him and also this people to commit much sin.

…

For behold, how much iniquity doth one wicked king cause to be committed, yea, and what great destruction!

Yea, remember king Noah, his wickedness and his abominations, and also the wickedness and abominations of his people. Behold what great destruction did come upon them; and also because of their iniquities they were brought into bondage.

…

And behold, now I say unto you, ye cannot dethrone an iniquitous king save it be through much contention, and the shedding of much blood.

For behold, he has his friends in iniquity, and he keepeth his guards about him; and he teareth up the laws of those who have reigned in righteousness before him; and he trampleth under his feet the commandments of God;

And he enacteth laws, and sendeth them forth among his people, yea, laws after the manner of his own wickedness; and whosoever doth not obey his laws he causeth to be destroyed; and whosoever doth rebel against him he will send his armies against them to war, and if he can he will destroy them; and thus an unrighteous king doth pervert the ways of all righteousness. (Mosiah 29:8, 17-18, 21-23)

The people ratified Mosiah’s proposal, and the era of judges began. But within five years, Amlici had gathered enough of a following that he was able to force an election for his effort to be declared king. In what appears to be a fairly close vote,¹⁹ Amlici lost. Instead of accepting the voice of the people, Amlici started a civil war, which ultimately led to his death (Alma 2).

Less than twenty years after that, Amalickiah and his followers aspired to kingship in the wake of a dispute with the high priest Helaman₂. This time, there would be no election. Under the leadership of Moroni₁, the Nephites immediately took up arms against Amalickiah and his followers, forcing them to flee. Amalickiah himself made good his escape, but many of his followers were captured and forced to swear allegiance to the existing regime on pain of death (Alma 46).

They evidently did not keep this oath. Within a few years, they were attempting to change the government into a monarchy yet again. Again, this was put to the voice of the people. This time, the vote was so overwhelmingly against the king-men they were forced to keep their peace. However, in the face a Lamanite invasion, the king-men refused to be conscripted. Moroni₁ in turn diverted resources to root out a potential fifth column (Alma 51).

During the course of the war, it appears another group managed to force the chief judge, Pahoran, out of power and out of Zarahemla.²⁰ This group installed Pachus as king of Zarahemla. Again, Moroni₁ had to divert forces back to Zarahemla in order to deal with the problem (Alma 61-62).

The final attempt to establish a king over the Nephites was both a success and a failure. A complaint against lower judges was brought to the chief judge in Zarahemla. These judges were brought to Zarahemla to stand trial. However, their supporters formed a conspiracy overthrow the government and establish a king. They were successful in murdering the chief judge. This caused the entire government to collapse.

However, the conspirators were unable to take advantage. Instead of getting behind the conspiracy’s leader, the people simply divided into tribes. The leader was proclaimed king of his group, but realized he did not have enough power to unite the tribes under his leadership. As a result, his people migrated out of the land. However divided Nephite society had become, it was clear the last thing they wanted was a king (3 Ne. 6:25-7:14).

This review of the BofM’s plot suggests there are good reasons why it doesn’t mention David very often. The political situation described throughout the narrative militates against it. Lehi’s party had personal reasons not to be too enthusiastic about the Davidic monarchy. The Davidic covenant attached a note of illegitimacy to the entire Nephite monarchy from Nephi to Mosiah, such that Nephi had to justify his rulership and Jacob bolstered the monarchy by castigating David and Solomon. Later, Nephite society included legitimate Davidic heirs and the monarchy could not afford to give them ideas but also could not afford to badmouth David either. After transitioning to a more democratic form of government, Nephite society became plagued with demagogues seeking to become kings. This is not a society that is going to promote David—the paragon of Israelite kings.

This does not mean that Nephite society had no regard for David. They did name a “land” after him (Morm. 2:5), which suggests, contra Beshears, that the Book of Mormon does not merely fixate “on the ancient monarch’s practice of polygamy as a sinful abomination” (45). Even ignoring his status as king, David’s accomplishments were such that he was more than worthy of having a land named after him. In fact, we can’t even be certain from the text whether Jacob’s sermon circulated widely enough for this to be a major part of the way the Nephites thought of David.

This argument extends to the BofM’s utilization of the Psalms. One can admire David the psalmist while also retaining a hands-off attitude toward David the king. We moderns can acknowledge someone’s achievements and art even while recognizing they weren’t very good people.

Beshears believes the Book of Mormon can be criticized for not saying anything about David’s role as the messiah’s progenitor. But such a criticism would still be misplaced. As Beshears himself points out, the Book of Mormon presents an “uncanny level of propehtic insight that these [BofM] prophets practiced is breathtaking in comparison to the shadowy predictions of the biblical prophets. While the Old World Jews yearned for a vague, future Davidic messiah, the New World Jews eagerly awaited Jesus Christ by name and date” (22-23). This is reason enough not to expect Nephite prophecy and preaching would discuss David as Jesus’ ancestor.

Consider what it means to predict the Messiah will be the son of David. It gives the hearer something to look for to and/or a means of testing a particular person’s claim to be the Messiah. But the Nephites knew that Jesus’ entire mortal life would be lived in the Old World. That disqualifies everyone in the New World, including the descendants of Mulek, who are portrayed as sons of David. Emphasizing Jesus as the son of David would literally have no meaning to the Nephites.

To sum things up, Beshears’ basic argument is not sound. Davidic references would not show anything about BofM historicity, so lack of such references would not show anything either. Even a softer version of his argument, that it could be justifiably criticized for lacking those references, would not work very well either. Given the BofM’s dominant anti-monarchical theme, mentioning David too frequently and too approvingly would be contraindicated. In fact, doing so would actually be too jarring in its narrative. Instead of being a shortcoming, the lack of Davidic references contributes to its verisimilitude precisely because the lack of such references contributes to the development of one of the Book of Mormon’s major themes.

NOTES

1(master’s thesis, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2016).

2Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 29 (2018): 31-64. Page references are to the PDF version available on the website.

3I frequently found myself eliding the second m and reading “moronic” time and again while reading the thesis.

4BYU Studies 44, no. 2 (2005): 5-23.

5I have to emphasize preliminary. Joseph and Jacob are both mentioned in the Book of Mormon, but the Book of Mormon also has other characters named Joseph and Jacob. I could have easily erred in counting or discounting references. Likewise, many mentions of Jacob and Moses occur in the formulaic forms of “God of … Jacob” and “law of Moses.” I counted them, but an argument could be made that I should not have.

6Ben McGuire, “Nephi and Goliath: A Case Study of Literary Allusion in the Book of Mormon,” Journal of the Book of Mormon and Other Restoration Scripture 18/1 (2009): 16–31.

7Notably, Lindsay does not dispute this. For the purpose of this essay, I’ll take this to mean Beshears is correct.

8Another source of controversy would be the fact Beshears obviously assumes Davidic authorship of the Psalms attributed to him. I do not.

9For the record I think they are. But whatever problem Beshears thinks using the King James Version wording has for BofM translation and/or historicity, it is not a problem for the Book of Mormon itself. If it made deliberate allusions to the Psalms, as pictured in the Book of Mormon the characters had access to them. That in itself would answer Beshears argument they did not.

10Compare Lindsay’s explanation in “Too Much or Too Little?” 56-63. I draw on some of the same facts as Lindsay, but I’m taking an entirely different approach.

11All biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise noted.

12We should not discount the possibility the Book of Mormon pictures Lehi having his own grudge against Josiah, whether or not we accept Lindsay’s argument he was “at odds with the Deuteronomists and their scribes” (58). Given Lehi’s probable age and the fact he was a Jospehite (1 Ne. 5:14), he may have been at least indirectly affected by Josiah’s invasion of Samaria (2 Kngs. 23:15-20).

13Compare 1 Sam. 10:20-24.

14Responding to an earlier version of this essay, Ben McGuire reminded me that these books were actually post-exilic and could not realistically be on the brass plates. I am aware of this, but I have other reasons for being tentative here. Even from an environmentalist perspective, it is difficult to ascertain what Joseph Smith imagined was in the brass plates. I personally think Smith had some kind of ur-text of our present books in mind without worrying overmuch about the exact contents.

15Alexander Campbell seemed to have sensed the problem: “He [Joseph Smith] has more of the Jews, living in the new world, than could have been numbered any where else, even in the days of John the Baptist; and has placed them under a new dynasty. The sceptre, with him, has departed from Judah, and a law-giver from among his descendants, hundreds of years before Shiloh came….” Campbell is alluding to Gen. 49:10. Alexander Campbell, Delusions. An Analysis of the Book of Mormon with an Examination of Its Internal and External Evidences, and a Refutation of Its Pretences to Divine Authority (Boston: Benjamin H. Greene, 1932), 12.

16Interestingly, Solomon himself is only mentioned six times in the Book of Mormon. The first two come in the same verse describing the first temple the Nephites built—the very temple Jacob will be preaching at (2 Ne. 5:16). The next three references are in the passage we now considering. The final reference (3 Ne. 13:29) is a quotation of Matthew 6:29.

17Compare/contrast BMC Team, “What Does the Book of Mormon Say About Polygamy?”

2 Sam. 12:8 specifically says God gave David at least some of his wives. This fact seems to have escaped Jacob’s notice, but exactly why this is so is unknown.

At the meta-narrative level, perhaps Joseph Smith didn’t know or recall this fact when writing the Book of Mormon. However, the Joseph Smith Translation passes over the verse without modification, so he may not have sensed a contradiction.

How this plays out in the Book of Mormon narrative is another matter. Perhaps the verse was not present on the brass plates. Or perhaps Jacob deliberately ignored it, but this opens the possibility of the Nephite polygamists throwing the verse back at him. Later, King Noah and his priests are portrayed as having multiple wives and concubines, but this is blamed on Noah’s own lust without reference to David and Solomon (Mosiah 11:2-4). So it would appear Jacob’s denunciation had some effect.

Ben McGuire suggested another possibility to me, that Lehi’s commandment of monogamy superseded the practices of the Old World. In this context, see Jacob 3:5, where the Lamanites are praised for keeping that commandment.

18It should be remembered that though 1 Kings 12 presents Jeroboam’s rebellion as authorized by God, Israel’s kings were never truly considered legitimate. Visions of the restored Davidic monarchy always portray its rulership of the reunited house of Israel.

19It is difficult to believe that both members and non-members of the church would be so alarmed by Amlici’s campaign (Alma 2:3) unless it had a real chance of succeeding. The church members’ alarm is explicitly identified as caused by Amilici’s “intent to destroy the church of God” (Alma 2:4). The cause of the non-members’ concern isn’t specifically identified. The fact Amlici was able to form his followers into an army suggests both he didn’t lose in a landslide and he thought he could win through force of arms. Compare the parallel story in Alma 51, where the king-men are reduced to simply refusing military service in the face of a Lamanite invasion.

20Pachus and his followers are pictured as a distinct group than the king-men of Alma 51. Alma 62:9 notes the “men of Pachus” being tried, “and also those king-men who had been taken and cast into prison” during Moroni₁’s purge.

Consent, Sex, and the Clit: A Response to Beckwith and Thomas

2022-11-04T17:55:00.002-07:00

Since writing Why Abortion Is Permissible, I have been more or less looking out for counterarguments as a means of testing the strength of my argument. As of this writing, that post has generated 374 comments, but even the most serious attempts to attack the argument tended to delve into issues that have no direct bearing on the argument itself. In other forums, the slavers mostly characterized the argument as absurd but demurred my challenge that it should be easy to prove me wrong. I made a list of the things I thought it would take to defeat the argument and even came up with a new variation on the Responsibility Objection. But nobody even tried to make such arguments.

As I mentioned in the update to that post, I eventually came across references to and eventually read Eileen L. McDonagh’s Breaking the Abortion Deadlock: From Choice to Consent.¹ Among other things, this expanded my search for counterarguments. Since our arguments are so similar, criticism of her work could have implications for mine.

This approach is starting to bear fruit. I came across Francis J. Beckwith and Steven D. Thomas’ “Consent, Sex, and the Prenatal Rapist: A Brief Reply to McDonagh's Suggested Revision of Roe v. Wade” quite by accident. I was reading another paper not actually expecting it to directly reply to McDonagh. But it did, adopting Beckwith and Thomas’ counterexamples wholesale while further manipulating the scenarios to establish its own points. Parts of it didn’t quite make sense, so I began a search for the original.

Beckwith and Thomas (hereafter B&T) are obviously responding to McDonagh rather than my argument. While our arguments are very similar, meaning B&T’s arguments have implications for mine, the differences are such that it does not necessarily follow that if their argument is successful against her, it is also successful against me. However, since I don’t think their arguments are successful against McDonagh, I shall make very little reference to my argument except for illustrative purposes. Note: I am using gender terms either as in the originals or in a strictly biological sense. No implication about transgender or nonbinary persons should be drawn from said usage.

Before looking at the specifics of B&T’s argument, I would remiss in not pointing out that B&T are making a strawman out of McDonagh’s arguments. They directly acknowledge at the beginning of their paper and later directly quote McDonagh specifying that it is nonconsensual pregnancy that is comparable to rape, assault, and other bodily violations. Yet the nonconsensual part repeatedly drops out of their discussion.

So a stated purpose of the counterexamples is to show that “pregnancy, unlike rape, is not a prima facie harm.” But McDonagh never said it was. They say they are “[a]dopting McDonagh’s understanding of pregnancy as morally equivalent to rape in assault” for their first counterexample, but McDonagh isn’t saying this at all. Part of the supposed contrast between “the traditional pro-choice position” is that position acknowledges that pregnancy could be good, whereas McDonagh turns pregnancy into rape, so it can’t be a good at all. But again, she never does this.

McDonagh is saying pregnancy can be good or bad, and the distinction turns on whether it is consensual. In the same manner, the distinction between sex (good) and rape (bad) is whether it is consensual. To be sure, she is unsparing in describing what a fetus does to a person during pregnancy. While that does illustrate the magnitude of the fetus’ assault when the pregnancy is nonconsensual, it also demonstrates the great generosity of the person who does consent to the pregnancy.

B&T’s response to McDonagh has two parts. The first part is divided into two counterexamples which are both apparently meant to be reductio ad absurdum arguments.² In the first counterexample, B&T takes a point made by McDonagh, that a nonconsensual pregnancy is like rape and needs to be treated the same way, and attempts to show this has absurd consequences. In the second, they attempt to show that if we are treating the conceptus as a full member of the moral community, a woman cannot withdraw consent to a pregnancy when paternity is in doubt because that would substantially risk killing the wrong and therefore innocent person. Exactly what B&T are trying to do in the second part is a bit unclear, but the means they are using is clear. They are attempting to use the teleological premise that the purpose of sex is procreation to assert that consent to sex is consent to pregnancy. The strange sound you heard when I originally read the paper was me rolling my eyes and heavily groaning.

The first counterexample looks at a point McDonagh pressed about a suggestion that a pregnant person should simply wait until birth, at which time the coercive pregnancy will end. “This type of reasoning is akin to suggesting that a woman being raped should wait until the rape is over rather than stopping the rapist. Nonconsensual pregnancy, like nonconsensual sexual intercourse, is a condition that must be stopped immediately because both processes severely violate one’s bodily integrity and liberty” (11-12).³

Taking McDonagh seriously, B&T propose the following scenario:

A young woman is involved in a car accident and is rendered unconscious by her injuries. She is brought to a hospital where, still comatose, she is examined by a doctor. While performing some tests, the doctor determines that the woman has been pregnant for several weeks. Furthermore, suppose that evidence comes to light to suggest that the woman is unaware of her pregnancy—perhaps her close friends know nothing of the pregnancy, her diary shows no knowledge of being pregnant, and so on.

Given these circumstances, what is the doctor’s obligation here? B&T argue that if we follow McDonagh’s argument to its conclusion, the physician is obligated to immediately perform an abortion and tell the woman after she wakes up. In other words, since there is no good evidence the pregnancy was consensual, the doctor must assume it is not and act accordingly. But this could also wind up being a serious violation of the woman’s bodily integrity.

You may be inclined to respond, “Why not just wait until she wakes up and ask?” If so, you are not taking the situation seriously enough. If you came across a man having sex with an unconscious woman, would you wait until she wakes up to see if she consents to the sex? No, you would immediately intervene and stop the man. If nonconsensual pregnancy is akin to rape and they should be treated similarly, then the doctor is obligated to perform the abortion immediately.

McDonagh seems to be in trouble and my argument can’t sidestep the problem. Fortunately, these situations are not actually analogous and B&T’s argument is fatally flawed.

Focus on the man having sex with the unconscious woman. What makes us so sure that we should intervene now rather than wait for the woman to wake up and ask her if she consents to the sex? Because having sex with an unconscious person is by definition rape! See, for example, California Penal Code 261.

Contrast this with what is presented to the doctor. The doctor is treating an unconscious woman who happens to be pregnant. The doctor does not know whether the patient consents to the pregnancy. For all the doctor knows, the woman herself doesn’t know she is pregnant. Contra B&T, this is not good evidence consent had not been given and that she is therefore under assault. By itself, it’s not evidence of anything.

Consider a situation that is more analogous to the doctor’s case. A police officer sees that a passenger in a moving car is sleeping. The officer does not know whether the passenger is in the car voluntarily. This is a possible kidnapping situation. What is the officer’s obligation to the sleeping passenger? Should the officer immediately pull the car over and slap some cuffs on the driver until the passenger wakes so he can ask whether they are being transported consensually? Of course not! The fact the passenger is sleeping is not in itself evidence of anything.

This counterexample was intended to show that McDonagh’s argument was “ill-formed.” However, there are relevant differences in the cases that mandate they be treated differently. Since having sex with a sleeping person is by definition rape, one needs no further evidence before intervening. An unknown pregnancy is not by definition nonconsensual, so one does need further evidence before proceeding.

Moving on to B&T’s second counterexample:

Imagine if a woman were raped by her husband’s identical twin brother within five hours after having unprotected sex with her husband. Suppose that she and her husband engaged in sex for the express purpose of procreating a child. A month later she discovers that she is pregnant, but she does not know, and cannot know, if the child’s father is her husband or the rapist. Would she be justified in having the abortion? Apparently not, according to McDonagh, for there would be a 50/50 chance that she would be killing an innocent person, someone whom she consented to let live in her body.

This is wrong on so many levels that I hardly knew where to begin! We will start by saying the anonymous referee quoted by B&T is not wrong in saying that since the woman withdraws her consent now, she can have an abortion. But we will deal with this later. B&T contend that the referee missed the point, so we will continue here to show that they are just plain wrong on their own terms. The real point, according to B&T, is that the conceptus conceived with her husband “was an invited guest,” and to have an abortion now risks a 50/50 chance the woman is killing an innocent person.

The problem here is that it is impossible for the conceptus to be an invited guest. In order to be an invited guest, one must be somewhere that the host can issue the invitation. In other words, the potential guest must exist. I can’t invite Batman into my home because Batman doesn’t exist! As Judith Jarvis Thomson pointed out more fifty years ago, unborn persons aren’t floating about somewhere where a couple could say to it, “Come on in!”⁴

If we can’t say the prenate was invited, what can we say that preserves the original scenario as closely as possible? The closest we come is to say that preclearance was granted should the woman become pregnant. But preclearances are often conditioned by certain factors being met. Is this the case here? Let’s attend closely to the scenario.

B&T specifically stipulated that “she and her husband engaged in sex for the express purpose of procreating child.” Implicit here is that they had sex under conditions that would ensure that the husband would be the father if pregnancy resulted. Remember, the woman did not know she would be raped five hours later. Based on their actions, this would mean that the preclearance was conditioned on the certainty the husband would be the father. But since she was raped and now doesn’t know and cannot know who the father is, the conditions of the preclearance have not been met. That means she does not consent to let the conceptus live in her body, regardless of who the father actually is. She would be justified in having the abortion, even on B&T’s own terms.

At this point we need not continue with B&T’s extension of the counterexample to the possibility of executing the wrong identical triplet. That comparison depends on establishing with certainty the exact identity of the rapist, but since we’ve established the exact identity of the conceptus is irrelevant, there is no need to belabor the point.

Curiously, B&T anticipates a possible response by writing “If … McDonagh were to say … that the pregnant woman may withdraw her consent at any time…” (emphasis added). We need not wonder about this, since McDonagh outright said this:

What is more, pregnancy is an ongoing condition, defined by a series of ways in which the implanted, fertilized ovum initiates and maintains massive bodily changes in the woman. As such, it requires not just a woman’s initial consent but also her ongoing consent in tandem with the ongoing bodily changes involved. Pregnancy based on consent, therefore, does not constitute either a binding contract or a binding promise—what the law calls an estoppel by promise. (79)

In any case, B&T are reduced to complaining:

A consent that can be withdrawn at any time for any reason or for no reason—even if it results in the death of a mentally immature, rights-bearing, human being that one intentionally brought into existence and invited to be placed in a vulnerable position—is no “consent” at all. It is a will to power.

There is really only one possible response here: If so, so what? In nearly every other conceivable context, that is exactly how consent works. Just because I kiss a woman doesn’t mean I’m obliged to have intercourse with her. I can tell my employer at any time for any reason, “Take this job and shove it!” Just because I accompany a workmate toward their home doesn’t mean I’m obligated to go with them all the way. I can stop donating in the middle of a series of transfusions—even if that means the recipient will die without them. I can invite a person into my home and kick them right back out.

So saying pregnant people may withdraw their consent to pregnancy at any time, for any reason, or no reason at all is simply taking the rules that apply to everyone else and applying it to them. To say that a pregnant person must carry the pregnancy just because they initially agreed to let the prenate use their body is to say that pregnant people are not rights-bearing human beings who deserve equal treatment.

And what of the “mentally immature, rights-bearing, human being that one intentionally brought into existence?” What of it? The woman I kiss has no right to my penis. My employer has no right to my labor. My workmate has no right to my company. The sick person has no right to my blood. A guest has no right to my home. And a prenate has no right to a pregnant person’s body. That means if consent is withdrawn, the other person’s rights are not violated. To say that prenates have a right to a pregnant person’s body is to give them special rights.

This is the difference between McDonagh on the one hand and Beckwith and Thomas on the other. When McDonagh concedes the fertilized ovum is a full member of the human community with the same rights as the person carrying it, she means it. B&T don’t.

Before moving to the core of their argument that consent to sex is consent to pregnancy, we will look at a couple side issues B&T raise. B&T believe issues against McDonagh’s argument could be raised on other grounds, but they only specifically get into a couple. They try to make out a case of negligence that requires a pregnant person to carry to term. Basically, we have a duty to exercise care so that a person likely to be aborted is not created. Put in the form of a syllogism, this is how it works:

Pregnancy is a foreseeable result of unprotected sex.
The fetus is a human person.
Therefore, one has a duty to avoid creating persons when abortion is foreseeable.

First, let’s note the conclusion does not follow from the premises. Even if the premises are true, they do not constitute a duty to avoid creating persons who are likely to be aborted.

Second, even if it is true that we have a duty of care not to bring people into existence when an abortion is foreseeable,⁵ no case of negligence can be made from its breach. As B&T remind us, “one is liable for negligence if one (1) has a duty, (2) breached a duty, and (3) caused harm as a result of breaching the duty.” However, breaching this alleged duty results in the creation of a person whose abortion is foreseeable. No one is harmed by being created.

We can dismiss the Hand Formula on the same grounds. We don’t need to calculate the burden of preventing an unwanted pregnancy against the expected cost of an injury because, again, creation is not an injury.⁶

In the midst of their core argument, B&T takes a stab at refuting McDonagh’s contention that self-defense applies to abortion even though the fetus is not deliberately doing what it does by comparing it to defending oneself against an incompetent (and therefore legally nonculpable) person. They ask you to imagine locking yourself in a room with such an individual knowing with certainty the individual would attack you. Could you then claim justifiable self-defense if you kill that individual? Probably not, since in most cases you can’t provoke a fight and then claim self-defense. Similarly, by virtue of inviting the conceptus into your body, you can’t claim self-defense in having an abortion.

However, this scenario faces the same problem we saw in counterexample two. You can’t invite someone who does not exist anywhere. If I claimed I locked Batman into a room with me knowing this would trigger an attack, but I killed him in self-defense, I would not be sent to jail. I would be sent to an insane asylum.

As mentioned previously, I am uncertain what B&T are attempting to do with their consent-to-sex as consent-to-pregnancy argument. In their words, “If one can show that McDonagh’s philosophical anthropology is controversial, then the moral intuitions that are grounded in it and to which she appeals in order to make her case are not prima facie correct.” Assuming they have successfully accomplished the goal of showing McDonagh’s anthropology is controversial, I am not certain what this is supposed to mean. I can think of two things:

McDonagh’s case is not sufficient to take to court, as it were.
B&T have offered an alternative account for the reader’s consideration.

Either way, I don’t imagine they think they have actually defeated McDonagh’s argument. They concede as much when they responded to a referee by saying, “All we are trying to do is to show that McDonagh does not have a prima facie case…” (emphasis added). Unfortunately, this doesn’t clarify what B&T are trying to do.

In both law and philosophy, a prima facie case is one that establishes the argument is basically sound. Prima facie cases are usually defeasible either by presenting additional evidence or through the circumstances of a specific case.⁷ Prosecutors obtain indictments by proving to a grand jury that their case, if unanswered, is sufficient to establish the guilt of the accused. We have a prima facie obligation not to kill other people. However, the accused can defeat a prima facie case by presenting evidence and arguments that they are not guilty. The basic obligation not to kill other people can be overcome by the circumstances in which a person finds themselves, e.g., self-defense.

If B&T have shown McDonagh does not have a prima facie case as in sense 1, then all McDonagh needs to do is rebuild her argument so that it is stronger and try again. Perhaps such an argument would take into account the factors B&T identified.

But this doesn’t seem to be what they are doing. What they are doing is offering different evidence and arguments to show McDonagh has not proven her case. Instead of acting as grand jurors determining whether the prosecutor has enough a case to take to court, they are acting as defendants in a court case that has already begun. This would mean that McDonagh has established a prima facie case.

That leaves us with sense 2. B&T are merely trying to establish an alternative case and letting the reader decide. I myself noted that doing this has the benefit of providing interested but uncommitted third parties with clear choices. So if this is what they are trying to do, I’m not going to complain.

Yet this is not a satisfying account either. Beckwith’s history in particular militates against it. Beckwith doesn’t merely argue that abortion is immoral. He wants pregnant people to carry to term in nearly all cases, and he wants the state to legally enforce it. Merely presenting an alternative case and letting the reader decide will not accomplish this.

Indeed, I suspect B&T originally intended to offer a more full-throttled case than simply trying to show McDonagh doesn’t have a prima facie case. Their case that consent to sex is consent to pregnancy is built on the premise that the purpose of sex is procreation. Let’s take at some of the things they say:

“[I]t seems correct to say that the telos (or purpose) of reproductive organs is reproduction (i.e., pregnancy), for the sperm and ova seem designed for that very purpose.”

“Thus, to understand one’s self and one’s nature is to understand that one’s sexual organs are designed for procreation.”

“[McDonagh] maintains that it is permissible to engage in a pleasurable act whose design is to bring into existence a vulnerable, defenseless, and dependent human person….”

“[T]he mother, by virtue of the sexual act’s reproductive purpose….”

Then towards the end of the paper, they shift the goalposts and only say “procreation is part of the purpose of sexual intercourse.” Notably this happens during a discussion of a referee’s objections to their teleological argument. Apparently, the referee’s objections were substantial enough that they tempered their argument. No longer able to meet the burden of defeating McDonagh’s argument, they are now contenting themselves making a case that has a substantially lower burden.

Whichever sense they intend, once they pull back to the position that procreation is only part of the purpose of sex, their case can no longer serve either the senses discussed. In fact, their case falls apart entirely. Let me explain.

If we were to construct their case with a syllogism, it would look something like this:

The purpose of sex is procreation.
When someone consents to sex, they consent to the entire process of procreation.
Withdrawing consent after a child has been created is unconscionable.
Therefore, a person who became pregnant as a result of voluntary sex may not obtain an abortion.

This may not be a perfect representation, but it will serve the purpose. We could pick on any of the premises to show the argument is not sound, but since B&T are merely trying to show that McDonagh does not have a prima facie case, we need not actually do so at this point. Our point here is that in order for B&T to actually make that case, premise 1 absolutely, positively needs to be true. To demonstrate this, let’s change premise 1 and see what happens.

1a. Part of the purpose of sex is procreation.

Changing the premise this way renders the entire argument invalid. If procreation is only part of the purpose of sex, there is no longer any reason to believe that by consenting to sex, a person is consenting to procreation. In other words, if procreation is only part of the purpose of sex, then sex and pregnancy are severable—the very point McDonagh is making. Once severed, the idea that consent to sex does not mean consent to pregnancy has a solid foundational basis.⁸

Likewise, if procreation is only part of the purpose of sex, the argument can no longer serve as an alternative explanation for maintaining that consent to sex is consent to pregnancy. To serve as a fully fledged alternative to McDonagh’s anthropology, sex and pregnancy need to be so firmly connected that it can reasonably be said that consent to one is consent to the other. But if procreation is only part of, as opposed to the purpose of sex, the solid connection between sex and pregnancy is lost.

As part of their argument that McDonagh does not have a prima facie case, B&T try to put McDonagh in the horns of a dilemma. On one hand, McDonagh cannot deny things have a natural purpose, since that would undermine her argument that humans have natural rights. On the other, once teleology is admitted to the discussion, she can’t deny the belief that sex is part of pregnancy is at least as well grounded as her own.

I am unclear about how this is supposed to help their argument. B&T are ostensibly arguing against McDonagh’s contention that consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy. As such, whether sex is part of pregnancy seems irrelevant. McDonagh is not denying that sex and pregnancy are connected; she is arguing that they are not connected in such a way that consent to one entails consent to the other. Up until this point in their argument, B&T were arguing that sex and pregnancy are so firmly connected that consent to one entails consent to the other. This part of the argument seems to come out of left field.

Regardless, we’ll go ahead and grant this dilemma somehow rebuts McDonagh’s contention that consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy. We will go even further and grant they have successfully painted McDonagh into a corner.

We can be so generous because it is easy to cut through the Gordian knot B&T think they have tied: deny premise 1. As we’ve already shown, the ability to deny McDonagh has a prima facie case absolutely, positively depends on premise 1 being true. Even retreating to the position that procreation is only part of the purpose of sex is enough to make their case collapse. If premise 1 simply isn’t true, then McDonagh can simultaneously admit teleology and deny their case is at least as well grounded as her own.

It would be all too easy to focus on B&T’s repetitive use of the word design in their argument. Design implies at least one designer and we could simply demand B&T produce the designer(s) so the purpose of the design can be explained. That would clarify the issue once and for all. But that would be grossly unfair.

Instead, what we are going to do is look at the human species as it is. It makes sense to say that the purpose of sex for many animals is procreation because these animals only have sex when the female is in season. Nonsocial animals meet, mate, and go their separate ways.

Humans are not like this. They have evolved away from the estrus cycle entirely. Among other things, this means humans have sex even when it is unlikely pregnancy will result. Worse from the standpoint of procreation, humans have evolved to the point where even females themselves usually can’t tell when they are ovulating. This means that if a couple were trying to achieve pregnancy, they can’t tell on their own when the optimal time to achieve the 10% chance⁹ they’ll actually succeed is.

If the purpose of human sex is procreation, then nature has an insane way of showing it. Forget about sex when one partner is already pregnant, homosexual sex, oral sex, anal sex, masturbation or any number of human sexual practices that can’t possibly result in procreation. Just focusing on vaginal intercourse, the physiology of human sex can only ensure an enormous amount of waste in terms of time, energy, and resources.

Consider human breasts. Humans are the only known species to have permanent breasts. Breasts are a locus of the human sexual response, both in terms of attracting mates and in sexual activity itself. Breast play, oral and manual, is a common part of sexual activity. Breasts undergo various changes during sexual arousal, and nipple sensations are sent to the same area of the brain as sensations from the clitoris, vagina, and cervix. Some of those who possess them report having orgasms from nipple stimulation alone. It would be fair to say the human breasts serves the dual purposes of mammary gland and sex organ. This is totally unnecessary when it comes to reproduction.

And for the pièce de résistance, consider the human clitoris. As far as we can tell, the sole function of the human clitoris is to enable sexual pleasure. It literally does nothing else. All it does is sit there, waiting to be stimulated in order to give its possessor intense pleasure. Think about this: In the human clitoris, we have a fully fledged, honest to God sex organ that does absolutely nothing for reproduction. As I’m sure many people who have been pregnant can remind us, it is utterly irrelevant that the female feel pleasure for reproduction to take place.

If there is any one single piece of evidence that shows the purpose of human sex is not procreation, the clit is it.

We could of course point to other problems with B&T’s philosophical anthropology. However, that is not necessary for our purpose. We only need to show that McDonagh could get out of the dilemma B&T thought they had her in. We have done that.

Beckwith and Thomas are trying to establish that McDonagh’s argument is problematic, if not wrong. Even at this lower standard, they have failed. Their counterexamples are fatally flawed, the first because it makes an inapt comparison, and the second because it asserts an impossibility. Their effort to show McDonagh does not have a prima facie case that consent to sex does not entail consent to pregnancy also falls short. It requires their first and most basic premise to be true, and that premise turns out to be false.

NOTES

1(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

2I say apparently because the first counterexample is clearly a reductio, attempting to take one of McDonagh’s contentions to the point of absurdity to demonstrate her principle is wrong. The second counterexample does not have the same form. However, both are meant to show McDonagh’s arguments have undesirable implications for “the traditional pro-choice position.”

3See my somewhat more sarcastic response to a similar argument.

4“A Defense of Abortion,” in Rights, Restitution, & Risk: Essays in Moral Theory. Ed by William Parent. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986), 11.

5As a sidenote, one wonders how anyone could possibly bring into existence a person whose death from abortion is foreseeable. Outside of IVF methods (and even then conception is not guaranteed), all one can do is have unprotected sex in an attempt to create such a person. But having unprotected sex is not sufficient to create a person. Furthermore, having an abortion is a decision one makes subsequent to becoming pregnant. If one doesn’t foresee becoming pregnant, one can’t foresee they are going to abort. The closest we could come is to say that a person can take a risk of becoming pregnant intending to have an abortion if it actually happens. However, since the actual decision to have an abortion is subsequent to actually becoming pregnant, there is still an opportunity to change one’s mind, meaning death from abortion is not foreseeable in any meaningful way.

6For a more fully developed explication, see Ann Garry’s “Abortion: Models of Responsibility.”

7This description is somewhat oversimplified.

8As a sidenote, if procreation is only a purpose of sex, then a similar argument can be made against the so-called perverted faculty argument.

9Foster, Diana Greene. The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion (p. 52). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

How High the Risk? How Staggering the Cost? A Response to Matthew Braddock

2022-10-24T10:01:00.002-07:00

In previous posts, I dealt with different forms of the argument from uncertainty regarding the permissibility of abortion. I rejected an argument based on having any doubt whatsoever about prenatal personhood because it erased the pregnant person, making the guidance cruel. I rejected the Quadrillemma largely on the grounds that the odds calculated for the impermissibility of abortion do not withstand scrutiny.

A brand new paper by Matthew Braddock, “Don’t Risk Homicide: Abortion After 10 Weeks Gestation,” has a new wrinkle on the uncertainty argument. Braddock argues that after ten weeks gestation, there is a substantial risk that abortion is homicide, and that is enough to make abortion at that point morally impermissible. One is still permitted to take that risk if the cost to oneself is staggering or to avoid greater moral risk. However, Braddock argues that the only thing that qualifies is a threat to the pregnant person’s life.

The overall impression I have about Braddock’s thesis is the stunning lack of argumentation. He asserts there is more than a 20% chance that abortion after ten weeks gestation is homicide, and that is enough to make it impermissible, but he gives only a brief, vague argument that this risk is substantial enough. He only makes token arguments against bodily autonomy and self-defense arguments, but as we shall see, they are grave threats to his argument. When he finally makes arguments to show there is more than a 20% chance the conceptus has acquired personhood at ten weeks, he doesn’t bother to assign numbers to those arguments, let alone defend them.

Let’s start by acknowledging Braddock’s basic premise is sound, insofar as it goes. If a proposed action has a substantial risk of being morally wrong, it is better not to take the risk so long as refraining from that action does not involve greater moral risk or comes with too high a cost. This of course raises a few questions: How substantial must the risk of wrongdoing be before we are generally¹ required not to take an action? How do we go about determining how much greater the moral harm must be before taking the risk is justified? Finally, how much cost must we bear before taking the risk is deemed justified or excused?

With these questions in mind, let’s turn to Braddock’s motivating cases. We can readily dismiss Braddock’s drone pilot case as presented.² According to the account, the pilot fired a missile at a home during nighttime. This means it was very likely that the missile would kill innocent persons—far more likely than the 1 in 5 chance Braddock believes is enough to prohibit abortion after ten weeks. The pilots did not even know who the actual target was, let alone whether the target was an immanent threat to other innocent people. Under these circumstances, they should not have fired in the first place! It was a little too late to have second thoughts because the pilot saw something that may or may not have been a child. By Braddock’s reasoning, they have already unjustifiably risked homicide before that point.

Braddock’s case of the demolition expert does not offer much light. Using demolitions already incurs strict liability if someone is hurt. So of course the expert is going delay the procedure even given an impatient boss. The consequences to the expert, the boss, and the company are going to be far greater than the consequences of being fired if it turns out the detected movement was in fact a child.

Braddock’s case of the person driving “like a demon” offers the best possibilities for evaluating his thesis. This case can be manipulated in various ways for determining whether such driving at the risk of committing homicide can be justified or excused. In one iteration, you are driving recklessly because you have “a medical emergency that imminently threatens your life.” Here, I agree with Braddock that even if the risk of “homicide is … substantial,” the risk is justified. I also agree with him that if the reason you are driving like a demon is because your career is at risk, you would not be justified if the risk of committing homicide substantial. In between these extremes, the relative risks and costs will have different effects on our judgment. Therefore, I will have recourse to further manipulation of this scenario as we go along.

How High the Risk?

The first premise of Braddock’s argument is there is a substantial (specifically, a “more than 1 in 5 chance”) that prenatal humans are innocent people with a prima facie right to life after ten weeks gestation. This means there is a substantial chance that after this point abortions are in fact homicide and therefore morally wrong (premise 3). Why should we accept this figure? Why not a 40% chance? Why not a 50.1% chance (i.e., more likely than not)? Why not an 80% chance? Why not a 99.99% chance? I don’t know—Braddock barely tries to defend this figure. I can theoretically accept that, other things being equal, we don’t have to be 100% certain that abortion is homicide for it deemed morally impermissible. But if you are going to name a figure, you had better justify it.

Braddock makes a stab at defending the figure by asserting that playing Russian Roulette with a five-chambered pistol is strictly prohibited, though also noting that playing with a six-chambered pistol isn’t morally irrelevant. Regardless of whether Braddock is correct in this assertion, it doesn’t support his case. The odds are 100% that the being playing Russian Roulette is a person. Regardless of the moral permissibility of playing Russian Roulette at whatever odds, the person is taking the risk on themselves, not threatening someone that is only 20% likely to be a person. This example gives us no reason to believe that killing a being that has only a 20% chance of being a person is impermissible. Since Braddock does not attempt to otherwise defend his assertion, that leaves us with no reason to believe that an abortion is impermissible if there is a 1 in 5 chance the prenatal being is a person.

It is possible that Braddock or someone else will publish a defense of the 1 in 5 figure. So for now, we will allow it provisionally, if for no other reason than to evaluate Braddock’s case that the evidence actually supports his contention that there is at least a 20% chance the prenatal being is a person at ten weeks gestation. Braddock holds his defense of this contention until section IV, but for reasons that will be clear later, we will deal with that evidence now.

How High is the Risk?

First, it should be noted that although Braddock contends his six lines of argument “establishes a substantial chance (a more than 1 in 5 chance) that preborn humans are persons after 10 weeks gestation,” he assigns no figures to these lines of evidence, let alone defends them. I agree with Braddock that the figures do not have to be precise, and that even at best can only be roughly estimated. However, Braddock doesn’t even try to put any figures to his arguments. This means that even if the arguments deserve some weight, we have no idea how much weight Braddock thinks they deserve, can’t evaluate whether they deserve that much weight, and can’t tell whether the weight adds up to a 20% chance the prenatal being is a person. Even if they come with heavy caveats, we need some figures to work with.

Worse, many of these arguments are not about building a case for the personhood of the prenatal being, but about “lessen[ing] our confidence” that it is not. Again, Braddock does not say how much less confident we should be than before. Nor does he say how this lessened confidence should figure into the cumulative calculation. Given that no one has made an argument conclusively proving the prenatal being is not a person, few people other than fools will think it is 100% certain the prenatal being isn’t a person at ten weeks. So do we add the lessened confidence to the percentage of uncertainty we already have? What if we had already thought of the argument and our percentage of certainty already accounts for it?

More to the point, what if we haven’t calculated our level of certainty or uncertainty in the first place? I hadn’t made such a calculation. As far as I am concerned, when it comes to the permissibility of abortion, whether the prenatal being is a person is irrelevant. This is why I grant it for the sake of argument. I simply had no need to calculate the odds that the prenatal being has become a person at a given stage of development.

Braddock’s first argument is probably the best. The argument is that humanity as a whole has a really bad track record when it comes to treating others as nonpersons. Whatever level of confidence we have that the prenate at ten weeks gestation is not a person, our bad track record should lessen our confidence. I have to admit, it extremely difficult to argue against this. Nevertheless, the argument is problematic in a couple ways.

First, this argument cannot be limited to prenatal beings at ten weeks gestation. The argument also means that we must lessen our confidence that a newly fertilized ovum is not a person. I doubt Braddock would object to this. But it also means that we must lessen our confidence that bacteria are not persons. And blades of grass. And dogs. And potentially every other living thing. Maybe even some things that aren’t actually alive. Braddock might try to insist that we are talking only about preborn humans at ten weeks gestation, but that still doesn’t avoid the implications of the argument. For the argument to work on Braddock’s terms, it would still have to be substantially more likely that the conceptus at ten weeks gestation is a person than any other living thing deemed nonpersons. Maybe it is more likely to be a person than a newly fertilized ovum. Maybe it is more likely to be a person than a bacterium or blade of grass. But it certainly is not more likely to be a person than a dog, let alone an orca or a bonobo. This means that if this argument is enough to tip the balance, then it would be at least as wrong to kill most animals, an implication Braddock otherwise wants to avoid.

Second, even if we could avoid the implications for killing most animals, it is doubtful the argument has enough weight to potentially tip the balance. Consider that I am not 100% certain that a newly created zygote is not a person. I just consider it highly unlikely, to the point where I would say I am 99.99%+ certain the zygote is not a person. Furthermore, the bad track record plays into that calculation. If I’m going to be fair, I would lessen my confidence the conceptus at ten weeks gestation is not a person by only 0.01% at most. That means all the other arguments will have to account for 19.99% of the probability prenatal beings are persons at ten weeks gestation. And since this is Braddock's best argument, things don’t look very hopeful.

Braddock’s second argument is that we should “lessen our confidence” because of widespread disagreement about fetal personhood. This argument is subject to the same problems as the bad track record argument. There are some additional problems with the subarguments Braddock makes here, however. That there is extensive scholarly literature reflecting upon fetal personhood without it resulting in a consensus on the topic can’t be disputed. I will go so far as to agree that this should lessen our confidence. But again, it doesn’t help much as far as weighting. That 99.99% figure I gave above about newly fertilized ova also includes that widespread disagreement. So if we’re generous and round everything up, then we get to a 0.02% chance the prenatal being is a person at ten weeks gestation.

Braddock wants us to consider the legal status of abortion around the world, citing Boland’s review of abortion laws in 191 countries. Braddock doesn’t say what this should tell us. It really shouldn’t tell us all that much. Most of our laws and customs presume personhood begins at birth. The preborn are not counted in censuses. Pregnant people are not required to obtain or present a second passport for their unborn children. Historically, tax and other benefits parents may receive could not be claimed until the child is born. The minimum age for activities such as driving, voting, marriage, military service, drinking alcohol, and so forth are reckoned from birth. Even where it is illegal, the penalty for abortion is usually not as stiff as homicide against a born person.

Then too, we must remember that of the 191 countries surveyed, 191 have a history of treating women at best as second-class citizens, and often as little more than the property of their husbands and/or fathers.³ Abortion laws are not about whether the preborn are persons; rather, they reflect uncertainty about whether those bearing them are.

As a final note, most countries that limit abortions to the first trimester cover the procedure in that its universal healthcare system. Notably, this is not the case in the United States. I shall have cause to mention this fact again later.

Finally, Braddock asks us to consider the evidence of sociological polling. Given that considerable disagreement about the morality of abortion grows after the first trimester, we should “lessen our confidence” about the personhood of the fetus. Here, we can say a number of things. First, most polls are about recording the opinion of the general populace—whether or not they’ve thought deeply about a given issue, let alone whether they have any expertise on it. For example, over a time span of nearly forty years, Gallup found that around 40% of Americans have consistently reported believing that humans were directly created by God. This doesn’t lessen my confidence that humans evolved over time—nor should it.

Notably, the higher one’s educational level, the more likely one thinks abortion remains permissible at later stages of pregnancy, a fact Braddock fails to mention. To be sure, it never reaches the level that Braddock would deem beyond widespread disagreement. Nevertheless, it would seem to indicate that those who have more awareness of the issues surrounding later term abortions aren’t as willing to rule those abortions impermissible. That should also be taken into account when evaluating how public polling should affect our confidence—particularly if you are among those who have thought deeply and/or have some expertise about the abortion issue.

This brings us to Braddock’s “motivating case” showing that widespread disagreement should lessen our confidence. He asks you to imagine being in a math class with students of comparable background and intelligence. You come up with an answer to a question. Twelve other students came up with the same answer, and eight other students came up with a different though not clearly absurd answer. What should this do to your confidence? Braddock argues you should be less confident about your answer. Is this true?

Not necessarily. Details are going are going to matter. If the twelve students who came up with the same answer are consistently getting As and Bs, while the eight who came up with the different answer are consistently getting Cs and Ds, then why should your confidence be lessened? Arguably, in this case your confidence should be strengthened—particularly if you are also one of the students consistently getting As and Bs.

This is basically the situation that we are dealing with when it comes to public polling. Those of us reading Braddock’s article (and this response) are likely better positioned than the average member of the general public when it comes to the issue of abortion, simply because we think deeply about the subject. Even if few of us can be considered actual experts, we’ve done the research, we’ve participated in the back-and-forth argumentation, and so on. What public polling tells us gives us little reason to lessen our confidence in our stances.⁴

Finally, Braddock’s argument, to the degree that it is successful, is a knife that cuts both ways. If widespread disagreement should lessen our confidence that the preborn are not persons at ten weeks gestation, it should also lessen the confidence of those who think they are. Funnily enough Braddock doesn’t mention this. However, this is a problem for him. The lessened confidence for each side would likely cancel each other out, resulting in a 0% increased chance the prenatal being is a person at ten weeks gestation.

Braddock’s next line of argument is to point out problems in various theories of personhood. First, let me say I have problems with all the different theories I’ve encountered so far, including the humanist theory he endorses. However, I am not going to detail my objections to each of these theories here. The crux of my disagreement with Braddock is not why a given argument succeeds or fails, but his reasoning.

Braddock’s rejection of mental capacity and relational theories of personhood, and his acceptance of the humanist theory turns on how well they accord with the commonsense view. To recap, the commonsense view is that infants and severely cognitively disabled humans are persons. It is not only prima facie wrong to kill them, but also prima facie wrong to use them in experiments the way we use animals.⁵ In short, they are persons with full moral status.

Thus, many criticisms of some personhood theories revolve around what they exclude according to the commonsense view, and theorists often take pains to make sure those considered persons in the commonsense view are included in their theories. But the commonsense view itself is rarely questioned.

Personally, I suspect that once we start really digging, we would find that many people holding the commonsense view are in fact self-contradictory. “Is a human infant a person?” and “What makes a person a person?” are two entirely different questions. If you ask someone the first question, they would probably answer affirmatively while looking at you like you’ve suddenly grown a third eye.⁶ Ask that person the second question, and they may name attributes that clearly exclude a human infant.⁷ Humans are not well known for being entirely self-consistent.

But testing this theory would involve expending time and money I simply do not have.

Setting aside my speculations, there is the incontrovertible fact that the commonsense view has been proven wrong time and again in other areas. The most (in)famous example of the commonsense view being wrong is planetary motion. Until the Copernican Revolution, the commonsense view was that the sun revolved around the earth. The terms sunrise and sunset are leftovers of the commonsense view. Indeed, the science of physics has a particular knack for upending the commonsense view.

The fact that the commonsense view has been shown wrong so often should, in Braddock’s terms, lessen our confidence in the commonsense view that infants, those with severe cognitive impairment, and/or those in advanced stages of dementia (among possibly others) are persons. It follows that if the commonsense view is wrong, it doesn’t matter how well the humanist theory Braddock prefers accords with it.

Where does this leave us on the question of how to weigh the probability the conceptus at ten weeks gestation is a person? Nowhere. Braddock’s concluding remark is that “confident denials of preborn personhood cannot rationally rest on confidence in these [mental capacity and relational] accounts.” But if one doesn’t rely on them in the first place, nothing is lost here. And since the commonsense view can’t be relied on either, Braddock’s endorsement of the humanist account on the basis of comportment with it doesn’t gain us anything.

Braddock’s first and perhaps only positive argument (i.e., not calculated to “lessen our confidence” of the opposite perspective) is to point out similarities between the ten week fetus and a newborn. How much the similarities can buy us is unclear. The higher apes are very similar to humans, and indeed the case that they are persons is less controversial than the case for most other animals. Nonetheless, it is still a controversial position.

More to the point, in assessing the weight of the similarities, one must also take full account of the differences. Braddock limits the differences to the facts that the newborn is “older, larger, more mature, medically viable, and born.” But these are not the only differences, and they are not even the most important differences.

Other differences between the ten week fetus and the newborn include: The fetus has organs, e.g., the placenta and umbilical cord, that the newborn does not. The newborn acquires nutrients and oxygen in an entirely different manner than the fetus. The newborn disposes of metabolic wastes in an entirely different manner than the fetus. The fetus’ blood circulation operates differently than a newborn’s. The fetus at ten weeks cannot survive outside the body of another human; the newborn cannot survive inside the body of another human. Indeed, the differences between the fetus and newborn are such that we could without much exaggeration liken them to the differences between a tadpole and a frog.⁸

Do the similarities outweigh the differences such that the ten week fetus has a 1 in 5 chance of being a person? Maybe or maybe not. The point here is that this is the argument Braddock actually needs to make.

Braddock next points to gestational age miscalculations, but I have no idea how this is supposed to be evidence of personhood at ten weeks. Whether a fetus is a person at ten weeks gestation is one thing; calculating gestational age is another. I could understand an argument that a twelve week fetus has likely acquired personhood but we should limit abortions to ten weeks in light of common mistakes calculating gestational age. How gestational age is calculated has nothing to do with whether the fetus has acquired personhood. In any case, presumably medical technology will eventually render this argument moot.

Finally, Braddock points to the “common intuitive responses” of pregnant people to their fetuses at around ten weeks gestation as evidence pointing toward personhood at this stage. As examples, Braddock points out that pregnant people treat their fetus more like a person than, say, a blade of grass. They also tend to mourn miscarriages after ten weeks in a comparable way they would mourn a newborn. Furthermore, these phenomena are fairly common even when the person has prior commitments to the pro-choice position. Surely this counts as (defeasible) evidence pointing to personhood at this stage.

However, Braddock fails to account for biological factors that are at play, not the least of which is the fact that the fetus is injecting oxytocin into the mother precisely to encourage the mother-fetal bond. The human species as a whole engages in a K-selection reproductive strategy, meaning we spend a relatively large amount of time and energy caring for relatively few offspring. Obviously, the earlier and more intense our feelings toward it, the better our offspring will fare.⁹

Then, too, by ten weeks gestation, many or most people are cognitively aware they are pregnant. This means they’ve had a chance to decide whether the pregnancy is welcome. Since Braddock quotes from The Turnaway Study, surely he is aware that a common reason for having an abortion after the first trimester is that the person didn’t know they were pregnant.¹⁰ Surely they weren’t treating a fetus they didn’t even know about as if it were a person. Just as obviously, the fact that they sought an abortion when they did learn they were pregnant means the pregnancy was unwelcome.

It is the welcome/unwelcome distinction that would seem to play the greater role in whether the fetus is treated as a person. Consider that fully 75% of the Turnaway Study’s participants were at fourteen-plus weeks gestation, with nearly half of them beyond twenty weeks.¹¹ Presumably, those who wound up giving birth did so only because they effectively had no means left to abort the pregnancy. But it would also be safe to presume they would have gotten an abortion even later if they could have.

Therefore, contra Braddock, the intuitive responses displayed by pregnant people can easily be explained and/or dismissed. Furthermore, our confidence in the “common intuitive response” argument has to be offset by the biological imperative and the wanted/unwanted distinction.

To sum up, whatever weight Braddock may think these arguments have, they are not going to add up to a 1 in 5 chance the fetus is a person at ten weeks. All his arguments are problematic to some degree, with some of them utterly failing.

It is possible that Braddock or someone else will publish better arguments that will show the fetus at ten weeks has at least a 20% chance of being a person. So for now, we will allow it provisionally so we can evaluate Braddock’s case that only a threat to the mother’s life can justify taking the risk of homicide.

How Staggering the Cost?

Braddock identifies two broad categories that would justify taking an action that comes with a 1 in 5 chance of committing homicide, the lesser risk justification and the staggering cost justification. To qualify for the lesser risk justification, one is permitted to take the risk in order to prevent a greater moral harm. Under the staggering cost justification, one is permitted to take the risk if the personal costs are high enough. We are going to first deal with the staggering cost justification.

To do this, we are going to work with variations on Braddock’s Reckless Driver scenario. Let’s start with a variation proposed by Braddock himself:

Suppose you are rushing to the hospital to save your almost severed limb and you encounter an injured child blocking your only driving path. Can you intentionally run over the child if necessary to save your limb? It strongly seems not.

At first glance, Braddock’s judgment appears correct. But realistically speaking, if you have a nearly severed limb, you are also bleeding to death. And we are already agreed this would justify risking homicide by driving like a bat out of hell. But the odds have now changed from 1 in 5 to a near certainty of committing homicide. Obviously if you can avoid hitting the child, you should. But what if you can’t? Can we say more here?

Perhaps. Let us look at the Innocent Shield scenario as proposed by Judith Jarvis Thomson.¹² Imagine someone has a tank and is driving it at you with the express intent of murdering you. You are in an open field and escape is not possible. As luck would have it, you happen to have an antitank weapon. However, your enemy knew this was a possibility and accounted for it by strapping a baby to the front of the tank. If you use the antitank weapon, you will almost certainly kill not only the aggressor, but the child as well. Are you permitted to fire? It strongly seems so.

Let’s note the similarities between the Reckless Driver and the Innocent Shield cases. In both cases, you had no intent to harm the child, i.e., you would not have harmed the child but for the circumstances. In both cases, the child is not the direct cause of the danger to your life. However, the Reckless Driver case is certainly not a self-defense situation. So now we seem to have hit an insoluble impasse.

That is, until we look at yet another similarity between the cases. In both cases, given the threat to one’s life, it is unreasonable to expect an ordinary person to not act to save their own life. If I were a juror in your case, I would convict you only on a lesser charge with a lighter sentence, and acquit if not given such an option. While I can’t say you are justified in hitting the child, I can say the circumstances partially excuses you.

This may well be a moot point since Braddock already agrees it is permissible to risk homicide given a threat to one’s life. Nonetheless, in the post-Dobbs world, doctors are hesitating to offer treatment and pharmacies are delaying prescriptions for fear of running afoul of abortion bans that nominally have life and/or health exceptions. So we could still use more guidance one what “immanent threat to life” means.

My real purpose in manipulating the Reckless Driver scenario is to test whether Braddock’s argument that only a threat to one’s life would justify the risk is sound on his own terms. Now I will manipulate the scenario even further and see where it might lead.

Let us now imagine that instead of driving recklessly, you are driving normally and legally. There is no threat to your life. Suddenly you see the child in your driving path and you cannot stop the vehicle in time. You can avoid hitting the child, but doing so means crashing into something that, while it wouldn’t outright kill you, would certainly cause grievous bodily harm. Are you obligated to incur such cost? Probably not.

My reasoning is similar to the Reckless Driver/Innocent Shield comparison. One can claim self-defense for killing someone in the face of an aggressor trying to cause serious bodily harm. Again, you had no intent on harming the child. But this time, the child is at least an indirect threat and you were not even nominally doing anything wrong. It also seems unreasonable to expect an ordinary person to incur grievous bodily harm. If I were a juror in your case I would outright acquit you, counting this a horribly tragic accident. Both you and the child were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

By this reckoning, it appears that grievous bodily harm is also a staggering enough cost to justify taking a 1 in 5 chance that an abortion after ten weeks is homicide. This would also raise the question of how serious the bodily harm must be to justify the risk. Presumably the answer is going to depend on exactly how high the risk is. The higher the risk of homicide, the more grievous the bodily harm must be.

But what if the cost isn’t strictly physical? What if we are talking “only” about the costs of “the physical and mental burdens of unwanted pregnancy and birth, financial costs, social costs, and the frustration of … life plans to some extent?” I have already agreed that driving so recklessly that it creates a 1 in 5 chance of homicide is not justified by a possible loss of one’s career. I outright argued the drone pilots should not have fired the missile in the first place, and I see no reason to believe the possible loss of career and a prison sentence would justify the action. However unilluminating the case may be, I also agreed the demolition expert should not set off the charges if their employment is threatened. It would seem I’ve painted myself into a corner and could be charged with inconsistency if not hypocrisy if I changed course now.

But it only seems so. The basic premise behind Braddock’s entire line of reasoning is actually flawed, perhaps fatally so. I hinted at this flaw in the Russian Roulette case, but now I want to bring the flaw to the fore. While the risk of homicide has the same numerical value, the kind of risk we are facing is very different. In the cases of the Reckless Driver, the drone pilots and the demolition expert, the risk consists of the possibility we might kill a being that we know is a person. In the case of an abortion at ten weeks gestation, the risk consists of killing something that might be a person.

Braddock conflates these different types of risks. I permitted this to show one of his arguments don’t work on his own terms. Having accomplished that, it is now time to point out that since we are talking different types of risks, we are justified in treating those risks differently. Where does this lead now?

First, the bar of what we can and can’t do is lowered. I am required to avoid harming—let alone killing—you because we know you are a person. I am not so required to avoid harming a blade of grass even though, however unlikely, it might actually be a person. I would take greater care not to harm fellow great apes or members of the dolphin family than I would for dogs and cats because I am more (though not 100%) certain the former are persons than the latter. And I would be more careful of harming dogs and cats than I would a fetus at ten weeks gestation because, once again, my level of certainty that dogs and cats are persons is higher.

Second, reasons that certainly would not justify or excuse the risk of killing a being we know to be a person may well justify or excuse killing things that only might be a person. Being late for work is all the justification I need for taking a shortcut through the grass even though there is a risk I would be committing mass homicide. As with the grievous bodily harm case above, presumably the more likely something is to be a person, the more compelling the reason must be to risk homicide.

Now let’s look at the Turnaway Study. The study shows that denying a wanted abortion comes with significant costs to the person in terms of physical health, derailed life plans, finances, economic opportunity, educational attainment, and relationships. Given that (granting Braddock’s arguments) there is a 20% chance the fetus at ten weeks is a person and that an abortion would be homicide, would any one of these costs be enough reason to take the risk? Perhaps not, but importantly that would have to be argued. Would combining two of these categories of cost be enough reason to take the risk? Again, that would have to be argued, but it is more likely. Add another category and the it becomes more likely to be reason enough to take the risk. All of them combined? It would almost certainly be reason enough to take the risk.

Moreover, multiply these costs to the tune of 150,000+ times per year in the United States (Braddock’s figure). Now we are talking about a staggering cost to society. A 1 in 5 chance the fetus is a person is definitely not enough to offset that cost.

How Low the Moral Risk?

We now turn to the lesser risk justification. According to Braddock, the lesser risk justification means that one may risk homicide in order to avoid greater moral harm. Also according to Braddock, the greater moral risk falls on the side of abortion.

To fully explore whether this is true, it is necessary to go back to Braddock’s premise 2: “If they [fetuses at ten weeks gestation] are in fact innocent persons, then killing them in abortion is an act of homicide….” Braddock is aware, of course, that there are philosophers who argue that even if the fetus is a person, an abortion is still not an unjust killing. Most of these arguments are rooted in Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion.” This means Braddock has to deal with such arguments.

He deals with them by basically dismissing them with very little argument. He characterizes Thomson’s argument as “flawed,” but his own responses don’t inspire much confidence as they fall into the category of “asked and answered.” Moreover, however “flawed” Thomson’s original argument may be, it is obviously not fatally flawed. The fact that it is still a focus in discussing abortion more than fifty years after it was published itself means that Braddock should lessen his confidence the argument is flawed enough avoid “contribut[ing] to an already developed literature.”

Braddock is even more dismissive of arguments based on self-defense, merely presuming unborn humans are innocent. But Eileen L. McDonagh’s Breaking the Abortion Deadlock: From Choice to Consent¹³ has been around for nearly thirty years. While I don’t necessarily expect Braddock to take notice of it, my argument has been readily accessible on the web for seven years. Both argue that in an unwanted pregnancy, the fetus is an aggressor performing actions that would justify self-defense in any other context.

But let’s assume that argument is also flawed. There is still a basic problem with Braddock’s dismissal: these lines of argument presume a 100% chance of personhood for the conceptus. But Braddock is only arguing that the fetus at ten weeks gestation is only 20% likely to be a person. What might be a flawed argument under the presumption the conceptus is 100% a person may not be as flawed if the fetus is only 20% likely to be a person.

For example, every argument I make about abortion presumes the conceptus is a person right from conception. What I do is take the rules that apply to you and me and I apply them to the situation of the pregnant person and the fetus. To the extent those arguments succeed, they succeed because those rules apply to those who are 100% without a doubt a person. If they are successful given the assumption prenates are fully persons, then they are that much more successful if we are making out the odds of personhood to be only 20%.

However, the core reason Braddock can’t dismiss these arguments so easily is because they are rights-based arguments. And as rights-based arguments, they directly play into the lesser risk justification. If there is a greater moral risk in denying abortions even considering there is a 20% chance the abortion is homicide, then violating the pregnant person’s fundamental rights would certainly be it.

Perhaps a 20% chance an abortion is homicide is enough to outweigh the pregnant person’s reproductive rights (though Braddock would have have to make a far better argument¹⁴). But reproductive rights are not the only rights that are implicated in the abortion debate, particularly when the state gets involved. The right to be free from slavery or involuntary servitude is not so easily defeated, for example.

Avoiding the Risk

When Braddock turns to policy implications, he makes me wonder if he takes his own argument very seriously. If there is such a risk of homicide in having an abortion after ten weeks, and it is as grave a problem as he thinks, surely he could have spent more than a single paragraph working out what we could do about the problem!¹⁵

And what is his solution? It is obvious Braddock strongly favors outlawing abortion after ten weeks. What else? We could implement social policies to “minimize the cost faced by women in unwanted pregnancies.” But we don’t actually have to go that far. And that is the extent of his policy recommendations.

What about doing things that will reduce the likelihood of having an unwanted pregnancy in the first place? Braddock says nothing about comprehensive sex education or the provision of effective contraceptives.¹⁶ Surely if one wants to avert the risk of homicide, preventing the creation of a person in the first place is a good place to start! Perhaps Braddock omitted discussion of preventing unwanted pregnancies because he wanted to focus on actual as opposed to possible pregnancies. If so, then fair enough.

But even focusing on actual pregnancies, there is still things that could be said about preventing the risk of homicide from climbing to twenty percent. He cited Boland and even quoted Foster. He should therefore be well aware of the fact that the primary delay in getting an abortion, other than discovering one is pregnant, is access.¹⁷ Yet Braddock says nothing about access even though he asserts the violation to a pregnant person’s reproductive rights is moderated by the fact they could have an abortion before ten weeks.¹⁸

We previously noted that countries that restrict abortion to the first trimester also usually pay for them through their universal healthcare systems. This is not the case in the United States, where the Hyde amendment prevents the use of federal funding for abortions, and only a handful of states provided such funding even before the Dobbs decision. Half of the states restrict if not outright prohibit private health insurance from covering abortion. Even pre-Dobbs, 86% of US counties did not have an abortion provider, meaning pregnant people had to travel long distances in order to get an abortion. These are significant barriers without getting into regulatory obstacles such as waiting periods and TRAP laws. Yet Braddock says nothing about any of this.

Conclusion: Make an Argument!

The entire basis of Braddock’s argument is fundamentally flawed. It confounds two entirely different types of risk and treats them as if they were the same. This is clearly seen by contrasting his “motivating cases” with the actual argument he is making. In the motivating cases, the person is risking homicide by taking actions that could kill someone. But the argument Braddock is trying to make is that having an abortion at ten weeks gestation risks homicide by killing something that has a 1 in 5 chance of being a person. The rest of his argument builds on this equivocation. However, since they are different types of risks, they can be treated differently.

Even if Braddock had made a more straightforward case without the equivocation, it still suffers from a lack of argumentation. Braddock makes no argument that a 1 in 5 chance something is a person is in itself too substantial a risk of homicide to generally prohibit killing it. Indeed, he probably can’t do so without opening a can of worms he would rather avoid, such as the permissibility of killing animals that are far more likely to be persons than fetuses at ten weeks gestation.

In building the case that the fetus has a twenty percent chance of being a person at ten weeks gestation, Braddock simply says nothing about how much weight should be assigned to each piece of evidence. He doesn’t argue they deserve as much weight as he thinks they have. So even if they were successful (and we’ve seen they are problematic at best), we have no basis to assess whether they add up to at least a 1 in 5 chance the fetus is a person at that stage.

Braddock tries to argue that only a risk to the mother’s life is enough a staggering cost to justify taking the risk. But we demonstrated on his own terms that grievous bodily harm would also justify it. Once we drop the equivocation, we’ve shown that the costs to individual pregnant people and society far outweighs the risk.

Braddock dismisses arguments favoring the permissibility of abortion without considering that he changed the ground of the debate. That means he has to argue not only are those arguments flawed, but also they are so flawed that a 1 in 5 chance an abortion is homicide is still enough to defeat them. Instead, he merely sweeps pregnant people’s rights under the rug. This is especially problematic since he strongly favors bringing in the state to enforce his pronouncements without requiring it to effectively reduce the risk or the costs.

NOTES

1 Here we need to distinguish between what an individual decides is too high a risk and what is too high a risk generally. Individuals are of course free to set the bar as low as they need to feel comfortable. In most cases, not acting is entirely permissible morally speaking. So if you feel there is a 1% chance that abortion is homicide, and those odds are too high for your comfort, then you should not have an abortion. The question before us is how substantial the risk must be before no one is permitted to take the risk, other things being equal.

2 It should be stressed that I am evaluating the case as presented. A more complete account may well cover the holes in the story that lead to my conclusion.

3 As an aside, Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization reviews the history of abortion laws in common law and the states. Alito fails to mention that nearly all these laws were promulgated at a time when women had little say and no power to effect the promulgation of such laws. I don’t know if I fully buy Reva B. Siegel’s Nineteenth Amendment argument (“Sigegel, J., concurring” in What Roe V. Wade Should Have Said: The Nation’s Top Legal Experts Rewrite America’s Most Controversial Decision, Jack M. Balkin, ed [New York and London: New York University Press, 2005], 63-85), but I do think we should at least be suspicious of laws directly affecting women that were passed before they had the right to vote.

4 To be absolutely clear, this applies to both sides. If polls went the other way, anti-abortion proponents who think deeply about the topic, have done their research, etc., need not “lessen their confidence” either.

5 I am certainly (and Braddock is presumably) aware that the issue of animal experimentation hotly contested in both the moral and political arenas. That issue, however, is beyond the scope of both essays.

6 Yes, I’ve recently seen Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

7 The most obvious exceptions are going to be those who would give an explicitly religious answer, such as being made in the image of God or the possession of souls.

8 Two additional things may be said here. First, we could point out the manner in which the newborn takes in oxygen and nutrients, disposes of its wastes, and circulates its blood more closely aligns with how beings we know are persons handle these functions. Second, the birth criterion is not as absurd as Braddock makes it out to be.

9 I am indebted to the person using the pseudonym “Ignorance is Curable” for this argument, as well as for pointing out the huge difference the placenta and umbilical cord makes.

10 Diana Greene Foster, The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, A Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—An Abortion, (New York: Scribner, 2020), 5. Notably, Boland observes this phenomenon is not limited to the United States; unawareness of pregnancy as a primary reason for having a second-trimester abortion seems to be universal.

11 Foster, 20.

12 “Self-Defense and Rights” in Rights, Restitution, & Risk: Essays in Moral Theory. Ed. William Parent. (New York: Harvard UP, 1986), 33-38.

13 New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

14 How does a 20% chance of homicide really stack up against a 100% chance of violating the person’s reproductive rights? Remember, a twenty percent chance of homicide means there is an eighty percent (i.e., a far greater) chance that it is not. Sure, other things being equal, violating a person’s right to life would be a worse violation than violating a person’s reproductive rights. But given an eighty percent chance an abortion at ten weeks gestation is not homicide, all other things are not equal here. If Braddock wants to discuss odds, he should weigh them seriously.

15 Braddock writes more about preventing fetal pain than he does about preventing the fetus being killed!

16 When it comes to contraceptives, Braddock cannot appeal to the canard of many slavers that certain contraceptives act as abortifacients. The theoretical grounds that these contraceptives might prevent implantation occurs well before Braddock’s ten week cutoff.

17 See Foster, 65 and Chapter 3.

18 Notably this leaves those who don’t become aware they are pregnant until after ten weeks out in the cold. As noted previously, Braddock should also be well aware of this fact as well.

Joseph Smith's Reply to David Hume: A Study in the Advantages of Heresy

2022-10-04T11:42:00.002-07:00

This is a copy of a paper I wrote around twenty-five years ago. Like my Environmental Theory essay I had intended it as a prolegomena for future studies, but life got in the way. I'm leaving the text as I wrote it except for linking to appropriate sources and minor formatting. Readers should be aware that some links are to different editions of the work I cited. Some of the information is probably outdated and there are some things I would change if I were rewriting it today.

Most religions eventually develop a set of propositions a follower must believe as a member of the faith community. This is a natural development. However, when such orthodoxy becomes too strict, it becomes harder to respond to new challenges. Instead, what may happen is the religion will develop into a fundamentalism, becoming increasingly marginalized and irrelevant. Often, it becomes necessary to break free from orthodox thinking to respond to new challenges. The answers of such so-called heretics often have resounding implications for the wider world and provide compelling visions for their followers.

Joseph Smith provides us such a case. Freed early in his ministry from orthodox considerations, he offered the world a theology that was, and is, often viewed with outrage by mainstream Christianity.ⁱ Embedded in his theology is an ingenious response to Scottish skeptic David Hume’s attack on the teleological argument for the existence of God. If one were to attempt to find proof of God’s existence in the Bible, they would search in vain. Some passages seem to try to prove God’s existence (e.g., Isa. 40:12-20), but closer examination shows the author’s intent is to display the Lord’s superiority over idols. The biblical writers simply took His existence for granted. Trying to prove it would have been a foreign idea to them. Some psalmists wrote, “Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no god” (Ps. 10:4; 14:1; 53:1).ⁱⁱ However, these passages do not refer to philosophical atheism, but to those who deny God’s activity in the world.ⁱⁱⁱ

Eventually, philosophers developed arguments that supposedly proved God’s existence from reason. Christian theologians often borrowed these arguments to show the compatibility between faith and reason. They may have also believed certain biblical passages suggested these arguments. Two of these arguments are in part based on creation, and consequently they may be confused. Since Joseph Smith’s theology affects both arguments, briefly reviewing both will be necessary.

The main idea of the cosmological argument is that God must exist because the universe must have had a beginning. God is the only adequate explanation for the existence of the universe. Naturally, the cause of the universe must itself be distinct from the universe. The common form of the argument attempts to show that rational persons must inevitably trace a sequence of events to an ultimate source, or “first cause.” This first cause is what we call God.^iv Philosophers have perpetuated different ways of expressing this argument. St. Thomas Aquinas gave three forms of the argument in his Summa Theologica.^v

For mainstream Christians, the cosmological argument is especially compelling, as they view God in absolutist terms. God must be the reason everything exists. Likewise, God is utterly independent of the created universe. To say that there exist things to explain God detracts from His station as deity.^vi

The cosmological argument seems to have some support in the Bible, especially if we interpret Genesis 1:1 to mean the absolute beginning of space, time, and matter. However, biblical scholars generally agree that the Hebrew original does not support this idea.^vii In English, many of them would combine the first two verses of Genesis and render them similarly to the New Revised Standard Version:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

The teleological argument attempts to show that the universe exhibits signs of being designed by an intelligent creator. Therefore, people also call the teleological argument the argument from design.^viii Christian philosophers likely took some of their inspiration from the Bible in using this argument.

Assertions that “everything has been created for its own purpose” (Sir. 39:21)^ix abound in the Bible. Sirach goes on to list the purpose of certain objects as rewarding the righteous or punishing the wicked (Sir. 39:25-31). Other biblical writers list more practical purposes for created objects. God created the sun and the moon “to separate the day from the night, … [to] be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and … to give light upon the earth” (Gen. 1:14-15). Similarly, a psalmist displays God’s wisdom by showing how he created several things to give food and shelter for various animals and people (Ps. 104:14-20). Nature declares “the glory of God” in a silent language (Ps. 19:1-3), which leaves humanity no excuse for their behavior before God (Rom. 1:19-20).

David Hume made a devastating attack on this argument in his last work Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Hume was born on 26 April 1711 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He graduated from Edinburgh University in 1723. By 1751, he had already established worldwide recognition based on several books he published. It was during this year that he originally wrote Dialogues. He worked on revising the manuscript during his retirement in Edinburgh. Hume died in 1776. Dialogues was published posthumously in 1779.^x

Hume believed we cannot deduce the effect of an event without having previously experienced a similar event. He thought no one could ever establish causal links through abstract reasoning alone. Though a skeptic, he did not consider himself an atheist. Hume disagreed with both Christians and deists, who held that religion is man’s natural response to the proof of God’s existence, as seen in nature. He also believed “everything is surely governed by steady, inviolable laws.”^xi

Dialogues presents Hume’s arguments in a fictional exchange between characters named Cleanthes, Philo, and Demla. Cleanthes argued in favor of the teleological argument:

Look around the world: Contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines…. All these various machines … are adjusted to each other with an accuracy, which ravishes into admiration all men, who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance….^xii

The similarities of the universe to a machine lead us to infer that the cause of the machine is an intelligence similar to human minds. This proves the existence of God and says something of his similarity to human nature. Theists do not need to prove the similarities between the universe and a work of art because it is self-evident. “The same matter, a like form.” “Whatever cavils may be urged, an orderly world … will still be received as an incontestable proof of design and intention.”^xiii

Demla and Philo both had objections, but Philo most closely represents Hume’s position.^xiv Though Hume had other objections to the teleological argument, this essay will concentrate on objections that go to the heart of orthodox thought.

Hume believed the strength of an argument by analogy lay in the similarity between the objects compared. If similar effects imply similar causes, then we should be prepared to accept the consequences. An object such as a watch or a house would tell us that there is an intelligent designer behind it, but what else would it tell us?^xv

Could we say that the designer has infinite power and knowledge? Of course not. We need only suppose that cause is proportional to effect. The universe, being finite, does not need an infinite designer.^xvi

Could we assume that the designer was perfect? If we examined most devices more closely, we would likely find many imperfections. The imperfections may be due to the quality of the material, the ability of the designer, or other limitations. This holds true with nature, as well. Therefore, God must also have limits.^xvii

Could we say that the person who designed a given device also built it? That is possible. However, people most often use blueprints or patterns provided by others when constructing any device. Any machine is likely the result of trial and error. Just as likely, it is based on a design that improved through the ages. All that is necessary to make any machine are blueprints and the parts. Perhaps God worked off a model himself. Regardless, this also suggests God is neither omnipotent nor omniscient.^xviii

Perhaps God simply used his staff to create the universe. Many people have built houses and ships working together, each of whom had a hand in the process. We have no reason to believe God worked alone, either. Human objects are often the result of different people working together on a given project.^xix

Could we say the designer was a self-existent being – someone who has no antecedents? The natural assumption would be that he had parents, grandparents, and other ancestors, perhaps as far back as eternity. The same conclusion would therefore apply to God, as well. Also, it would be conceivable that God (or the gods) also reproduces.^xx

Could we say that the designer was a being of pure spirit completely independent of the physical world? That would hardly be conceivable. By way of analogy, God would have to have some sort of body. As Philo asked, “Why not become a perfect anthropomorphite?”^xxi

Finally, do we have any assurance that this universe is not “only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance?” For that matter, God could be some decrepit old deity whose mind is degenerating.^xxii

Cleanthes rejects the notion that the universe is eternal.^xxiii However, he is unable to answer Philo’s questions about the absolute beginnings of the world:

How therefore shall we satisfy ourselves concerning the cause of that being … into which you trace the material? Have we not the same reason to trace that ideal world, or new intelligent principle? But if we stop and go no further; why go so far? Why not stop at the material world? How can we satisfy ourselves without going on ad infinitum? And after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression?^xxiv

In summary, Hume chastised those who would use an analogy to prove God’s existence without taking the analogy to its natural conclusions. The reason they are unwilling to follow through with the implications is because they would be forced to make conclusions that no theist is willing to make. Cleanthes would disavow all of Philo’s inferences, accepting them only as far as he was “obliged, at every turn, to have recourse to [the hypotheses of design].”^xxv

However, the problem is not that these theologians are unwilling to tease out the implications. The real problem is that more than a thousand years of orthodox thought has constrained them. Simply put, they cannot make those conclusions. Only a theologian free from the bonds of orthodox thought could answer Hume adequately.

Joseph Smith was such a person. Smith’s prophetic career began with what Latter-day Saints commonly call the First Vision. According to the canonical account, religious revivals in his area prompted Smith to think more deeply about religious matters. Subsequent fighting between competing churches vying for members agitated him (JS-H 5-10). Confused by these competing claims, Smith eventually decided to settle the matter by prayer, directly asking God which church he should join (JS-H 13-14).

God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to Smith and answered his prayer (JS-H 17). They told him “must join none of them, for they were all wrong … and … all their creeds were an abomination in his sight” (JS-H 18-19). Though Smith’s more radical theological innovations would come later, God’s reply established the foundation for ignoring orthodox thought. The publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830 marks the beginning of Smith’s thoughts on the nature of God.^xxvi

The Book of Mormon, like the Bible, assumes the existence of God. Unlike the Bible, the Book of Mormon does give us a bona fide atheist in the character of Korihor (Alma 30:36-38). In a debate with the current leader of the Church, named Alma, Korihor challenges him to provide a sign proving God’s existence (Alma 30:43). In response, Alma replies, “All things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a creator” (Alma 30:44). In this respect, Hullinger was not far off the mark when he said Smith wrote the Book of Mormon in part to prove the existence of God.^xxvii Since the Book of Mormon uses the teleological argument, it has been the primary appeal of Latter-day Saints in establishing God’s existence. As another Book of Mormon prophet stated, “if there be no God we are not, for there could have been no creation” (2 Ne. 11:7). Smith later appealed to astronomy and botany as signs of God’s decrees.^xxviii An official Church publication notes that “the system of nature is the manifestation of an order that argues a directing intelligence.”^xxix

Whether Smith had direct contact with Hume’s work or not, he was more willing to work out the implications of the teleological argument. Learning about the nature of God was one of his preoccupations. In one of his final sermons, he said, “The first principle of truth … is to know for a certainty the character of God, and that we may converse with Him the same as one man with another.”^xxx

The key point of Smith’s theology was expressed in the same sermon. According to Smith, God was “once a man like one of us and … dwelled on an earth the same as Jesus Christ himself did in the flesh and like us.”^xxxi According to a revelation given to Smith, God still resides in time and space, on another planet (D&C 130:7). He identified the name of the star as Kolob (Abr. 3:2-3). Smith, in effect, flatly denies we need to have an ultimate first cause. We can go on endlessly if we please, but we need only be concerned with what we are doing right now.

Not long afterward, Smith added that God the Father himself had a father, a grandfather, and so on eternally. Every person that ever existed always had some antecedent, except in their original form as intelligences.^xxxii

Moreover, Smith did become “a perfect anthropomorphite.”^xxxiii In a series of instructions later canonized by the Church, Smith told his listeners “the Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as a man’s; the Son also.” Only the Holy Ghost “is a personage of spirit” – this was necessary to carry out His functions (D&C 130:22).^xxxiv

In contrast to Christian orthodoxy, God has restrictions in Mormon theology. For example, God organized the world using already existent material and following laws he must obey.^xxxv Smith rejected the Christian doctrine of creation from nothing. “The elements are eternal,” God told Smith (D&C 93:33). Talmage stated the idea succinctly: “from nothing, nothing can be derived.”^xxxvi

By elements, Smith meant not only matter. In a revelation God told him “intelligence … was not created or made, neither indeed can be” (D&C 93:29). Smith is unclear whether spirit and intelligence are the same. What is clear is he thought “the mind of man – the intelligent part – is as immortal as, and is coequal with, God himself.”^xxxvii

At some point, God organized “the intelligences,” selecting “many of the noble and great ones” to be his “rulers” (Abr. 3:22-23). The rulers, called “Gods,” accompanied the Lord to our corner of space and helped Him create the world (Abr. 4:1). Any imperfections can be explained by the eternal nature of space/time and matter/energy. However, “God did all that could be done as the immanent, eternally active, and creating, and causing power in the universe under the limitations of any other eternal existences, … including consideration of the intractableness of the material with which the Creator had to work.”^xxxviii

It would also seem to follow that God had patterns available to him when creating our world. He already had experience with a world like ours, and could call upon the assistance of those who had gone before Him. These factors would help check any blatant mistakes. Additionally, “there are many worlds that have passed away by the word of my [God’s] power. And there are many that now stand, and innumerable are they unto man” (Moses 1:35).

Having granted most of Hume’s points, one might ask whether such a view of God is viable. The thought of humans and deity being too closely alike “scandalizes” Hume. He preferred God to be utterly unfathomable.^xxxix Would the finite God Smith presents be worthy of worship?

Hume himself admits to advantages inherent in an anthropomorphic deity. For example, he notes that in common experience, no one has ever observed a disembodied intelligence. Mormon theologian B. H. Roberts believed that Smith’s theology solved the problem of evil.^xl Blake T. Ostler shows how a finite God is still worthy of worship. David Paulsen recently established that a material God resolved other vexing problems in Christian thought.^xli

Smith would have felt that the answer was self-evident. He would not have taught such a god otherwise. However, we should remember that he was a prophet, not a philosopher. Like the biblical authors, his function was to reveal God, not to reason about him.

Likely, the defenses mentioned above would seem alien to him. Smith might justify his ideas with the Bible, but this was more of a concession to those who “would cry treason” otherwise.^xlii Like all prophets, Smith was an authority unto himself – justified only by God’s revelation. If pressed into answering the question, Smith may have turned to the purpose of creation. According to Smith, God’s purpose is “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39).

For Smith, this meant much more than an idyllic existence in Heaven singing praises to God. As mere intelligences, human beings are incomplete. “All the minds and spirits that God ever sent into the world are susceptible of enlargement and improvement. The relationship we have with God places us in a situation to advance in knowledge…. Because He was greater He saw proper to institute laws whereby the rest who were less in intelligence could have a privilege to advance like Himself and be exalted with Him….”^xliii One purpose of creation was to have a place to test whether men and women would do everything required of them by God (Abr. 3:24-25).

Part of the necessary knowledge is experience with good and evil. According to the Book of Mormon, “there must be an opposition in all things.” The Book of Mormon connects this idea to the very existence of God. Opposition also serves God’s “eternal purposes in the end of man.” Without it, existence would have no purpose (2 Ne. 2:11-15).

Picking up on the thought of Paul (e.g., Rom. 8:17), Smith preached that to be “heirs of God” and “joint-heirs with Jesus Christ” means “to inherit and enjoy the same glory, powers and exaltation until you ascend a throne of eternal power and arrive at the station of a God the same as those who have gone before.”^xliv When this happens, “then shall they be gods, because they have no end; therefore shall they be from everlasting to everlasting, because they continue; then shall they be above all, because all things are subject unto them” (D&C 132:20).^xlv

Joseph Smith’s answer to David Hume was bold and outrageous. It also has important consequences in the broader world of philosophy and theology. Yet Smith’s theology was also a stepping stone to a greater vision of man’s possibilities. This vision simply would not have been possible if Smith were forced to stay within the box of orthodox thinking.

This essay is meant as a test case in exploring how heretics solve problems with which orthodox thinkers are less able to deal. We have likely ignored other heretics though their ideas are well worth exploring. Not only do they deserve better, so does the world.

Notes

i For the purposes of this essay, “mainstream Christianity” refers to the bodies of Christians normally divided into Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant branches. I avoid the term “orthodox Christianity” to prevent confusion with the Orthodox Churches. When I refer to “orthodox” or “mainstream” thought in this essay, I am referring to beliefs about God held in common between these strands of the Christian tradition.

ii All quotations of the Bible in this essay are from the New Revised Standard Version.

iii Arnold B. Rhodes, Psalms, The Layman’s Bible Commentary, vol. 9 (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1960), 89.

iv Brian Davies, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 75-84.

v Part 1, Question 1, Article 3.

vi Blake T. Ostler, “The Concept of a Finite God as an Adequate Object of Worship,” in Line Upon Line: Essays on Mormon Doctrine, ed. Gary James Bergera (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1989), 77-78.

vii E. A. Speiser, Genesis: Introduction, Translation, and Notes, The Anchor Bible, vol. 1 (Garden City:, NJ: Doubleday & Company, 1984), 12.

viii Davies, 84, 93.

ix Sirach, also called Ecclesiasticus, is one of the apocryphal/deuterocanonical books. It is considered canonical by Catholics and the Orthodox, but listed with the Apocrypha in Protestant bibles. For a brief discussion, see Bernhard W. Anderson, Understanding the Old Testament, 2^nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 3. A chart is available in Anderson, 4-5.

x Martin Bell, Introduction, in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, by David Hume (London: Penguin Press, 1990), 1-5.

xi David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Martin Bell (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 84 (30); Bell, 5-7, 13.

xii Hume, 53.

xiii Hume, 53, 63-66.

xiv Bell, 16.

xv Hume, 75.

xvi Hume, 76.

xvii Hume, 76-77.

xviii Hume, 77.

xix Hume, 77.

xx Hume, 78-79.

xxi Hume, 78.

xxii Hume, 79.

xxiii Hume, 82.

xxiv Hume, 72.

xxv Hume, 57, 79.

xxvi On the development of Smith’s doctrine during his lifetime, see Thomas G. Alexander “The Reconstruction of Mormon Doctrine,” Sunstone, June 1999, 15-19. Different accounts of the First Vision are extent and differ in detail. However, all the accounts agree that God told Smith all the churches in existence were wrong. Most Mormons believe Smith translated the works of the individual Book of Mormon authors. Others attribute authorship directly to Smith. Neither view affects the thesis of this essay.

xxvii Robert N. Hullinger, Mormon Answer to Skepticism, Why Joseph Smith Wrote the Book of Mormon (St. Louis: Clayton Publishing House, 1980), 5. However, Hullinger’s study was mainly directed at deism, mentioned briefly above. Hullinger admits that deists believed in God. The real controversy was between those who argued for “revealed religion” and those who argued for “natural religion.” See Hullinger, 20. Hullinger also concentrates mainly on the Book of Mormon, whereas this study surveys Smith’s theology as it developed in his ministry. [Hullinger’s revised edition of this work is titled Joseph Smith’s Response to Skepticism.]

xxviii The Essential Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1995), 155.

xxix James E. Talmage, The Articles of Faith, 12^th ed. (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1957), 34.

xxx Smith, 235.

xxxi Smith, 235.

xxxii Smith, 253.

xxxiii Hume, 79.

xxxiv Many passages in the Bible likely influenced Smith, even discounting the obvious “God created humankind in the image of God” (Gen. 1:27). For example, the Lord appeared to Abraham, accepting and eating a meal prepared by him (Gen. 18). Jacob wrestled with a “man” whom he identified as God (Gen. 32:24-30). The elders of Israel dined with God not long after leaving Egypt (Ex. 24:9-11). Other references are possible.

xxxv Smith studied Hebrew under Joshua Seixas in Kirtland, Ohio. He undoubtedly understood the Hebrew word translated “created” in Genesis 1:1 means “to organize,” rather than to create from nothing. On Smith’s Hebrew studies, see Kevin L. Barney, “Joseph Smith’s Emendation of Hebrew Genesis 1:1,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 30, no. 4 (1997): 109-119. See also the discussion on this verse above.

xxxvi Kent E. Robson, “Omnipotence, Omnipresence, and Omniscience in Mormon Theology,” in Bergera, 69-70; Talmage, 34.

xxxvii Smith, 239.

xxxviii B. H. Roberts, The Truth, The Way, The Life, An Elementary Treatise on Theology: The Masterwork of B. H. Roberts, ed. Stan Larson (San Francisco: Smith Research Associates, 1994), 381.

xxxix Hume, 57.

xl Briefly stated, the problem of evil is the dilemma posed by the existence of evil. The argument states if God can prevent evil, but did not, then He is not morally good. On the other hand, if He cannot prevent evil, though morally good, then God is powerless.

xli Hume, 81; B. H. Roberts, 374-383; Ostler 77-82; David Paulsen, “Must God Be Incorporeal?” Faith and Philosophy 6 (1989): 76-87.

xlii Smith, 236.

xliii Smith, 240.

xliv Smith, 236.

xlv In 3 Ne. 28:10, Jesus tells his audience “ye shall be even as I am, and I am as the Father….” This may be the initial seed of Smith’s thought on people becoming gods. The first explicit mention of this possibility does not come until later (D&C 76:58). Alexander believes that the Church did not fully realize the implications of these passages until an even later time. See Alexander, 18.

Victory in Kansas

2022-08-03T16:13:00.002-07:00

On most days, “What’s happening in Kansas?” is not a question I usually ask. It is certainly not a question that I would spend much of my day refreshing my browser about. But yesterday, 2 August 2022, was special. For the first time since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, abortion rights were on the ballot. So the answer to that question could well prove to be a bellwether of what is to come.

In 2019, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that the right to have an abortion is protected under the Kansas Constitution. This year, the Kansas legislature referred the deceptively named “Value Them Both” amendment to the ballot of yesterday’s primary election. Note the dirty trick here: the amendment was placed in the primary election, where turnout is usually very low; usually only the most partisan voters cast a ballot. With the state skewed as Republican as it is, the legislature obviously hoped the amendment would squeak under the radar.

Kansas abortion rights activists got to work. Fighting against a campaign of lies and deceit, activists engaged in a good old-fashioned grassroots effort, knocking on doors and talking to people. The effort worked. Voting in record numbers for a primary, the amendment failed. As of this writing, CNN reports the tally is 58.8% against the amendment.

Keep in mind that Kansas is a deep red state. It hasn’t given its electoral college votes to a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964. Since 1976, the Republican candidate has only rarely gotten less than 55% percent of the vote. This was the point. Given the Republican edge in registered voters, in a closed primary state independents aren’t typically a factor.

Yet the “No” vote garnered a higher percentage of the vote than 45* did in both 2016 and 2020. This suggests that, even in Kansas, a significant number of Republicans are willing to vote against their party’s stance on abortion if given the chance. Going forward, the GOP will have to keep this in mind. Unfortunately, this probably means doing everything they can to keep the people from actually voting on abortion rights.

More significantly, the turnout suggests that abortion rights will drive voter turnout. Several states will have ballot measures on abortion rights on the ballot for November, and it is likely that more such measures will be on the ballot in 2024. However, it is less certain that Democrats will benefit from making the coming election a referendum on abortion rights. History shows that enough Republicans will cross over to protect abortion rights in ballot measures while still electing Republican officials. Democrats won’t be able to stand on abortion rights alone.

Looking at the county-by-county results in Kansas also reveals a pattern we should note. The failure of the amendment was driven largely by the urban counties. For example, Johnson County alone provided nearly a third of the overall “No” vote. The more populous the county, the more likely it was to vote “No,” and do so with huge margins. Only two counties with more than 10,000 votes, Butler and Reno, saw the yes vote win, and both these counties were squeakers where less than 200 votes decided the outcome. This may well imply that for ballot measures, abortion rights are safe only if the urban vote is enough to determine the outcome.

For now, the right to have an abortion is safe in Kansas. This gives us hope that another deep red state, Kentucky, will follow suit in November.

On Violinists and Ruined Suits: A Response to Matthew Lu

2021-10-27T17:33:00.003-07:00

I had planned on writing a substantial response to Matthew Lu’s “Defusing the Violinist Analogy” for a very long time. But after finishing my last post, I began wondering if there was anything left to say about Lu’s argument that I haven’t already essentially said about Wagner’s “De Facto Guardian.” Like “De Facto Guardian,” “Defusing” is meant to be a response to Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion.” Both essays discuss teleological matters. Both have a version of the snowed-in cabin scenario. Both attempt to establish a basis for saying raped people must carry any resulting pregnancy to term without necessarily relying on the prenate’s alleged rights. And in doing so, both ignore the fact Thomson had something to say about the approaches they use.

While Wagner was cautious about using teleological arguments against Thomson’s violinist analogy, Lu is more full-throttled in his approach. But instead of discussing what kidneys and uteruses are for, Lu focuses on what they normally do. His variation on the teleological argument relies on the fact that in the violinist analogy, you are artificially plugged into the violinist while in pregnancy the attachment of the prenate to the pregnant person is natural. That makes a straightforward application of the argument I previously made less tenable. So there is still something to say here.

While discussing the differences between the violinist analogy and pregnancy-by-rape, Lu engages in a discussion about whether aborting a pregnancy from rape can properly be seen as a restoring the status quo ante that obtained before the rape. I already had an argument that aborting pregnancies from rape would be an appropriate way of viewing it. I will still offer that argument. However, while reviewing Lu’s essay in preparation for writing this response, I had an insight suggesting that attempting to restore the status quo ante from before the rape is not the right model to view pregnancy from rape. A more appropriate model makes Lu’s case fall apart entirely.

Wagner also attacks the concept of bodily self-ownership, which he believes Thomson’s positive plank depends on. So obviously I have something to say here. Having some investment in the concept, my original plan was to offer a full-throttled defense of bodily self-ownership. But upon reviewing Lu’s essay, I realized the argument he offered simply fails. This means that even if Thomson and I are wrong about bodily self-ownership, the permissibility of abortion does not depend on it anyway.

Wagner offered the concept of the “de facto guardian” to explain why we have an obligation to feed infants we happen to be stuck with in snowed-in cabins with. But Thomson herself offered an explanation for this: Minimally Decent Samaritanism. Wagner’s failure to address Thomson here was intellectually lazy. But in theory Wagner’s readers can easily access Thomson’s paper, compare their accounts, and come to their own decision about which account is better. In short, though Wagner was lazy, no irreparable harm was done.

But Lu’s failure address Thomson’s Minimally Decent Samaritanism is especially infuriating. This is because Lu’s account of the immorality of abortion is Minimally Decent Samaritanism. Recall that in “Defense,” Thomson specifically states, “There may well be cases in which carrying the child to term requires only Minimally Decent Samaritanism of the mother, and this is a standard we must not fall below.” Lu, in effect, is saying that “normal” pregnancies, including those caused by rape, fall within the scope of Minimally Decent Samaritanism. Thomson denies this, so one would think there should be some discussion here.

Instead, Lu dismisses the burdens of a “normal” pregnancy as no more significant than ruining an expensive suit. Obviously, I have something to say here. In fact, I have a lot to say here. If you want to skip that part, the TLDR version is STFU.

Lu doesn’t say anything about the political implications of his argument. However, his article was originally brought to my attention by a slaver who obviously thought the argument could serve as the basis for a legal ban on abortion. So I will finish this post by considering the legal implications of Lu’s argument assuming he has made his case. I conclude the slavers won’t get much, and the cost of what they do gain may not be worth the price.

Attacking the Violinist Analogy

Before proceeding to the violinist analogy itself, Lu points to the fact that Thomson herself noted that the right to be unplugged does not entail the right to ensure the death of the violinist. To use her terms, if the violinist survives the unplugging, you can’t turn around and slit his throat. But since most abortions involve directly killing the prenate either before or during the process of unplugging it, it would seem that if Thomson’s analogy holds, most abortions still wouldn’t be permissible.

If Lu is correct, then Thomson is contradicting herself. However, Lu misconstrues what Thomson actually said. When Thomson turned away from the violinist and addresses abortion itself, she did not hesitate to call it a killing. In section 4, she didn’t contemplate the question of whether abortion is unplugging or direct killing. She contemplated the question of whether abortion is unjust killing. She not only knew that abortion is a killing, she didn’t even bother to note the difference between unplugging and killing. She was not going to turn around and completely undermine her entire argument. Something else is going on here.

As it turns out, in a subsequent defense of her “Defense,” Thomson outright said, “Now it had not actually escaped my notice that the mother who aborts herself kills the child, whereas a [the person who has the violinist unplugged] merely does not save.” She felt that the difference between abortion and unplugging faded into moral insignificance, and was not worth discussing. Indeed, she thought asserting that the distinction makes a difference is “shown to be false by the story of you and the violinist.”¹

Unfortunately, as I write this section, I don’t have a ready copy of “Rights and Deaths” available, so I don’t know whether Thomson spelled the case out. Let’s see if I can construct it independently. Go back to Thomson’s story. You demand to be unplugged. The hospital director completely agrees that you are entirely justified in making that demand. However, there is a problem: “I would certainly unplug you, but the process of unplugging you will itself kill the violinist. As this would be a direct killing, we can’t do it.” Or again: “I would certainly unplug you, but in order to unplug you, we must first slit the violinist’s throat. As that would be a direct killing, we can’t do it.”

I don’t think that would assuage our sense of outrage in the original case. I would think that if anything, our sense of outrage would be intensified. If we are justified in being unhooked, then we are justified in doing whatever is necessary to be unhooked. If the violinist is directly killed, it would still not be an unjust killing.

Now we can make sense of Thomson’s statement that if violinist survives, we can’t turn around and slit his throat. The difference is that though you are justified in killing the violinist if that is necessary to be unplugged, killing the violinist if he survives the unplugging process would be unjust. By parity of reasoning, abortions are permissible even if it is a direct killing, but if the fetus is detached alive, it would be impermissible to then kill it.²

With that misunderstanding out of the way, let’s move on to Lu’s attack on the violinist analogy itself. Lu himself sets the parameters:

Of course, the point of drawing analogies in moral reasoning is to suggest

that what applies in the putatively clear case also applies in the controversial

case. Therefore, an analogy is apt only to the extent that the two cases are

relevantly similar. If we can show that the two cases should not be analyzed

in the same way, then whatever conclusions might apply in the one case will

not necessarily apply in the other.

This means that when analyzing the distinctions Lu asserts, the question before us will be, “How does this make a difference?” If it doesn’t make a difference, then what applies in the clear case (here, the violinist scenario) still applies in the controversial case (here, aborting rape pregnancies). But we also have to note what Lu does not say. If the difference is relevant, it does not mean the argument for the controversial case is false. That would require further argument. It would just mean the specific analogy doesn’t shed any light on the controversial case.

The first distinction Lu makes is that while kidneys can be forced to filter another person’s blood, that is not their normal function. To unplug yourself from the violinist is to restore the kidney’s normal, natural functioning (i.e., filtering your own blood). On the other hand, the normal function of a uterus is to provide for the gestation and protection of prenatal beings. An abortion involves interfering with (Lu: “a violent assault on”) the normal functioning of the uterus.

This seems to be a valid distinction. How does this make a difference? Lu doesn’t actually say. We can infer from his language that he considers interfering with the normal process of pregnancy a bad thing. But that would still raise the question of why this is a bad thing. And Lu doesn’t answer this question; he just takes it for granted that it is bad. We need not do the same. Without that assumption, there is no reason to believe the extrinsic/intrinsic functioning distinction makes any difference. In one case, someone is using your organ(s) to stay alive; in the other, someone is using the pregnant person’s organ(s) to stay alive. That’s all the analogy needs to function.

Next, Lu asks us to consider the nature of plugs. Plugs are designed to be inserted and taken out at will. This is why you can move electrical appliances around your house. The embedding of the conceptus into the woman’s body, however, is not intended to be inserted and taken out at will. It will permanently detach itself in due time. “A normal pregnancy, by its own nature, ends in birth.” I’m sure that assurance is no small comfort to someone who became pregnant through rape.

Let’s try a statement like that on the rape itself. Suppose I catch a person with a penis in the act of raping a person with a vagina. So I shout: “Don’t worry! Normal intercourse, by its own nature, ends in ejaculation!” Somehow, I don’t think the person with a vagina will thank me for that.

Regardless, let’s go ahead and consider whether this distinction makes a difference. It doesn’t. Bottom line: In Thomson’s scenario, the violinist is attached to you. In pregnancy, the conceptus is attached to the person with a uterus. That’s all that is necessary for the analogy to work.

Strictly speaking, Lu’s argument about attempting to restore the status quo ante that obtained before the rape by allowing the pregnant person to abort a rape pregnancy is not a disanalogy at all. It seems to be a reflection on the fact that most people hold onto the rape exception even while disapproving most other reasons people have abortions. It seems unjust, not to mention cruel, to force a pregnant person to carry (and probably raise) their rapist’s child. As Lu said of unplugging, there is a certain “conceptual and imaginative clarity” here. The pregnant person was wronged by the rapist, forbidding her an abortion would only compound that wrong.

Lu thinks this line of thinking is muddled. It is proper justice to return something one has stolen or compensate them for the damages. That restores the victim to “the state of not having something stolen,” i.e., the status quo ante or the state which was before (the unjust act). But properly speaking, the unjust act is the rape. Aborting a resulting pregnancy does not restore the rape; it doesn’t restore one to “the state of not having been raped.” The pregnancy was just a(n unfortunate) side effect. This is just a philosophical way of saying, “I’m sorry you were raped, but you can’t take that out on a helpless child!”

However, having a stolen object returned doesn’t seem to be what we have in mind when we think it would be unjust to force a pregnant person to carry the rapist’s child. Let’s use a model that reflects what we seem to think. Someone stabs you, regardless of whether they intended to kill you. You survive the stabbing, but you don’t make it to the hospital in time to keep the wound from becoming infected. Fortunately, the wound is healed and the infection cleared. So now you sue the assailant. After considering the case, the judge rules you are entitled compensation for having the wound healed, but not for having the infection cleared. The judge explains that the actual crime consists of the knifing, and the infection was just an unfortunate side effect. The actual status quo ante is not “the state of not having been infected,” but “the state of not having been knifed.” The assailant owes you the latter but not the former. I think most of us would consider this an outrageous miscarriage of justice.

This model seems to reflect what most of us have in mind regarding rape pregnancies. And put this way, it reflects reality. You would be compensated for having the infection cleared as well as having the wound healed. The reason is simple: if you had not been knifed, you would not have gotten infected. The status quo ante folds “the state of not having been infected” into “the state of not having been knifed” as it were. Similarly, if the pregnant person had not been raped, they would not be pregnant. Allowing an abortion in these cases folds “the state of not being pregnant” into “the state of not having been raped.” So it does seem that allowing an abortion to a person pregnant from rape is properly addressing the crime.

I suspect Lu’s answer would be the same as in the original case: “achieving that state does not license a second immoral act.” However, the topic of discussion is precisely whether abortion is moral. So he would be begging the question in this case—just as he was in the original.

While discussing the proper status quo ante, Lu made the statement that rape “consists in the assault on the woman’s bodily integrity” (emphasis removed). My immediate thought was Lu simply doesn’t consider the possibility that an unwanted pregnancy is an assault on the bodily integrity of the person with a uterus. Men can be raped but they can’t get pregnant.³ I wondered whether I should relegate this thought to a footnote or find some way to work it into the text when another thought occurred to me. What if we combined these two facts (rape is an assault on a person’s bodily integrity; an unwanted pregnancy is an assault on the bodily integrity of a person with a uterus)? I concluded that debating whether aborting a rape pregnancy is an attempt to restore “the state of not having been raped” is the wrong approach entirely.

Let me suggest another model that more accurately captures the rape pregnancy. The rapist has their way with a person with a vagina. The rapist then either is captured or escapes; it doesn’t really matter. Then, still dealing with the trauma, the person with a vagina is kidnapped by the rapist’s child.

This model is both more accurate and sheds new light on the situation. To seek restitution from the kidnapper in this case has nothing to do with restoring “the state of not having been raped.” It is rather an attempt to restore “the state of not having been kidnapped.” That the kidnapper happens to be rapist’s child has no direct relevance. Similarly, aborting a rape pregnancy is not about “taking the rape out on the child.” It is about dealing with a different assault on the pregnant person’s bodily integrity. While aborting that pregnancy may not restore “the state of not having been raped,” it’s not meant to do that in the first place.

Now let’s turn back to Thomson’s scenario. Discovering you were the only person who could aid the violinist, the Society of Music Lovers kidnaps you and attaches you to the violinist. After that, the Society disappears from the story entirely. The rest of the story is about what to do about the fact you are plugged into the violinist. The discussion at this point is not whether unplugging yourself restores you to “the state of not having been kidnapped.” The question is not whether “the state of not being unwillingly plugged in” can be folded into “the state of not having been kidnapped.” We are simply discussing whether you have the right to be restored to “the state of not being unwillingly plugged in.” It turns out that the violinist analogy not only holds up, it captures the situation of the person impregnated through rape even better than Thomson herself may have realized!⁴

After all this discussion about how the violinist analogy doesn’t capture pregnancy from rape, Lu throws us for a loop by conceding Thomson is correct that the right to life does not entail a right to use someone’s body. Remember, this conclusion was the entire point of the analogy. Also remember Lu never at any point says his disanalogies show that abortion is impermissible. The closest he comes is calling interfering with the normal and natural process of pregnancy a “violent assault.” But violent assaults may be permitted under certain circumstances, so the language itself doesn’t necessarily mean interfering with the normal process of pregnancy is strictly prohibited. In fact, only one of these disanalogies come up again when Lu argues his own positive plank.

This is enough to make one wonder what the hell is going on here. Why spend more than four pages trying to prove the violinist analogy doesn’t help us analyze the controversial case, only to concede the point of the analogy? Lu does have a specific reason for disconnecting the violinist from the rape pregnancy, which I’ll address in due time. For now, the key takeaway is that not only does Thomson’s violinist analogy survive Lu’s attack, it more closely resembles the controversial case than expected.

Attacking Bodily Self-Ownership

Lu next attacks Thomson’s assertion of bodily self-ownership, but again I’m not entirely certain why. It doesn’t help his case at all. Most of the points he makes are irrelevant to the abortion debate, and he doesn’t address the most relevant point relating abortion to bodily self-ownership at all. And in the end, he admits his attack on bodily self-ownership doesn’t prove abortion is immoral. So why bother then?

It seems clear is that Lu is concerned with defending anti-abortion proponents from a charge of inconsistency allegedly made by Thomson. But that is not what she said. In fact, Lu quotes what she actually did say. Thomson wrote that, although abortion opponents grant that one has a right to control their own body, they "do not take seriously what is done in granting it.” This could mean they are being inconsistent, but it could also mean other things, like not thinking through the scope of what they are granting. Thomson simply could have been saying something like, “They let this can of worms be opened, so I’m going to take advantage of it.” In any case, to the extent Lu’s argument does work, it works whether or not Thomson was making a charge of inconsistency.

This means we need not concern ourselves with whether Thomson’s alleged charge of inconsistency holds. We can simply analyze his arguments in terms of whether the right to controls one’s body entails a right to abortion. Thomson likens bodily self-ownership to being the owner of a house. Just as a homeowner has the right to eject trespassers, a pregnant person, as the owner of her body, can eject unwanted conceptuses. This is the central point we need to keep in mind.

Lu attacks Thomson’s alleged argument that the right to bodily self-control entails ownership by pointing out renters may have the right to use the property, but that right of use does not mean they own the property. While right of use certainly does not entail ownership, what puzzles me is why Lu thinks Thomson was making this argument in the first place. She didn’t actually say that bodily self-control entails ownership. Indeed, the general sense I get from what she said is that the right to bodily self-control follows from bodily self-ownership, not the other way around:

My own view is that if a human being has any just, prior claim to anything at all, he has a just, prior claim to his own body. And perhaps this needn't be argued for her anyway, since, as I mentioned, the arguments against abortion we are looking at do grant that the woman has a right to decide what happens in and to her body.

It is true enough that Thomson didn’t actually argue for bodily self-ownership. But this was simply because she didn’t think it was necessary given that her opponents already granted a right she thought entails from ownership. Her argument wasn’t, “I have the right to control my body, therefore I own my body.” Rather her argument was, “I own my body and therefore have the right to control it.”

Even though Lu is rebutting an argument Thomson did not make, I am going to grant him the general point. It is certainly conceivable that we don’t own our bodies, but merely have the right to use them. On the analogy of our bodies being like our homes, our right of use would be limited to things that we are not specifically prohibited from doing in the rental agreement. This will raise questions that are hard to answer without “retrench[ing] into a religiously grounded position.” Specifically, who owns our bodies and can demand we not use them in certain ways? Considering the fact Lu endorses Kass’ view that our bodies are not the sort of thing that can be owned, it would seem that no one can demand we not use them in certain ways. With specific regard to abortion, the possibility that we only have right of use doesn’t seem to help his case. Still, I will set aside that difficulty because I have a larger point to make later.

Lu goes on to mention a number of things we can’t do with our homes and that a number of things we can do are highly regulated. I’m not going to argue against this for three reasons. First, I can’t—regardless of whether I agree with the listed restrictions, the reality that those restrictions exist is simply a fact. Second, I do agree with at least some of those restrictions and would not want to argue against them anyway. Third, they are irrelevant.

Lu further argues even on the assumption of bodily self-ownership, there are numerous things we cannot do with our bodies. Here, I was prepared to argue we actually can do most or all the things Lu listed, but then I realized I don’t have to. So while I’m not going to stipulate we can’t do those things, neither am I going to argue about them here.⁵

What I want to point out about Lu’s arguments is that for everything he says about whether we own our bodies, or what we can and can’t do with our houses and our bodies, Lu never addresses the central issue as it relates to abortion. For all the things a homeowner can and cannot do with their property, homeowners unambiguously have the right to eject trespassers. Furthermore, even renters have the unambiguous right to eject trespassers. So whether the right to bodily self-control stems from outright ownership of our bodies or the mere right of use to them, by parity of reasoning the right to bodily self-control does entail the right to abortion. Thomson’s basic point holds.

Evaluating Lu’s Positive Plank

We have seen that Thomson’s violinist analogy resists Lu’s criticisms even better than we would expect. Therefore her putatively clear case can be used to evaluate the controversial one. While Lu succeeds in questioning Thomson’s assertion of bodily self-ownership, we have found her basic point holds even without that assumption. So Lu’s negative plank fails.

However, this does not mean we are done. Lu’s thesis is not “Thomson’s resolution of the conflict of rights case is wrong.” His thesis is rather, “The conflict of rights analysis is the wrong approach.” This is why he can concede Thomson’s central point that the right to life does not necessarily entail the right to things one needs to live. It doesn’t affect his thesis one whit. He could grant that I have totally and completely vindicated Thomson’s “Defense” without it affecting his own positive argument.⁶

Nevertheless, conceding Thomson’s central point does not mean Lu is quite done with rights yet. Acknowledging that the right to life merely means one can’t be killed unjustly, Lu again takes up the issue of direct killing. Except to note that the “unjustly” part silently drops out of his reassertion that “the child’s right to life similarly precludes its being directly killed,” I’m not going to re-engage this point. If Lu doesn’t accept the argument that the distinction between unplugging and abortion is insignificant, fine and well.

He does acknowledge that, assuming the distinction holds, abortion could still be conceived of as a case of self-defense. He relegates his rebuttal to a footnote, but here I will engage because my argument for the permissibility of abortion is modeled on self-defense. Lu’s rebuttal still seems to be tied to cases of pregnancy from rape: “In a pregnancy-by-rape case, killing the child would be no more a case of self-defense than killing one of the rapist’s other (already born) children who had nothing to do with the attack.” Conceptually, he is addressing the self-defense claim the same way he addressed the restoration of the status quo ante claim. And he is just as wrong here.

Recall the model I proposed for a rape pregnancy: The rapist has their way with the victim, and shortly thereafter, the victim is kidnapped by the rapist’s child. In this case, defending oneself from the kidnapper is not a case of attacking a person innocent of the original assault. It is a case of defending oneself against a separate attack. Remembering that an unwanted pregnancy is itself an attack on one’s bodily integrity, the person seeking an abortion is indeed responding to an illegitimate attacker.

Lu argues that Thomson’s treatment of the abortion question as a conflict of rights is a “radically incomplete understanding of justice.” He points out that there are numerous cases where we have obligations even though there is no corresponding rights claim. As examples, he notes we should not abuse animals, that we should not harm the environment, and that we should not destroy culturally significant artifacts even if we do own them.⁷

Before going on, I’d like to note here his examples do not involve infringements on fundamental rights and in the case of property, the infringement is minor. I don’t have a fundamental right to abuse animals. Using an electric car rather than a gas-powered one does not infringe on my right to travel. Not destroying my own property isn’t going to hurt me, and in cases of important cultural artifacts, it would be against my best interest to destroy them anyway. Lu is not wrong about having these obligations, but they are not the types of things we would do a conflict-of-rights analysis about anyway.

Nevertheless, I do think a good (though not necessarily better, see note 7) explanation for these obligations does stem from “the fact of their vulnerability (and [our] relative strength).” Let’s see where this can lead us.

Lu starts with his variation of the snowed-in cabin scenario. It is so absurdly bad that I can’t help but poke fun at it. In this variation, I live in a cabin that is isolated from society by distance and by nine months of bad weather per year. I have adequate supplies plus a little extra, presumably to get through the bad weather while accounting for the fact it might last a little longer than expected. One day I return from whatever I was doing—and surprise! Someone left a baby on the doorstep! “If you refuse to take in the child on the grounds that it does not have a right to the use of your private property, you prove yourself a moral monster.”

Really? In this situation what I’d actually do is take it to whatever constitutes the local authorities and be done with it. The distance and weather can’t be that bad. After all, philosophers intent on proving I’m a moral monster keep dropping infants on my porch! Why can’t I just drop it off like I did with Beckwith’s baby and Wagner’s baby and Poupard’s baby and …?⁸

Of course, the actual point is that we have an obligation to not let the child starve. Likewise we should keep wandering toddlers out from busy streets and fish drowning children out of the water (even if it means ruining an expensive suit!). Yada yada yada. One would think abortion opponents would come up with new examples once in a while. Maybe even throw an adult into the mix just to blunt the criticism they are using arguments for their emotional charge rather than logical soundness.

Anyway, so we have the obligation. How extensive is the obligation? If the time required more than nine months (have to cover the period of pregnancy here), then maybe the obligation will change (but see Lu’s note 25). If the risks involved are more extensive than ruining an expensive suit or “risking” one’s car (have to cover burdens of pregnancy itself here), then the obligation might change. But certainly “nine months of inconvenience” is covered.

Sarcasm aside, is this starting to sound familiar? If so, go back to Thomson’s “Defense” and read the section on Minimally Decent Samaritanism (MDS). What will you see there? First, that Thomson’s conception of justice was not so “radically incomplete” after all; she did account for situations where we have an obligation to help others without a corresponding right claim. Second, it is the same thing as Lu’s positive plank. Thomson’s examples differ, but MDS can certainly cover Lu’s examples. Not simply let an infant dropped on your doorstep starve? Covered. Don’t let toddlers wander into a busy street? Certainly. Fish a child out of the water, even at the cost of ruining an expensive suit? Check. Thomson’s examples even include adults!

The only real difference between Lu and Thomson is the scope of the obligation they say we have. Lu must surely be aware of Thomson’s thoughts on Minimally Decent Samaritanism. Just as surely, he must be aware Thomson argued MDS does not cover a “normal” pregnancy. And unlike the violinist analogy or the argument from bodily rights, Lu can’t concede to Thomson here because her argument is a direct threat to his positive plank. Yet Lu ignores it completely. Wagner may have been intellectually lazy to ignore it, but Lu moves into the territory of outright intellectual dishonesty.

Let’s forgive Lu for the time being, though. We know that Thomson had something to say here, so we can go ahead and make some comparisons. We’ve already noted the scope of the obligation Lu thinks we have. What did Thomson say about the scope of Minimally Decent Samaritanism?

[N]obody is morally required to make large sacrifices, of health, of all other interests and concerns, and of all other duties and commitments, for nine years, or even nine months, in order to keep another person alive.

...

At all events it seems plain … it is not morally required of anyone that he give long stretches of his life—nine years or nine months—to sustaining the life of a person who has no special right … to demand it.

On the time period, Lu thinks (at least) nine months is covered under our obligation. Thomson said certainly not. But it could be argued that Lu is simply trying to include the period of pregnancy and Thomson was simply trying to exclude it. Neither one of them actually makes an argument about the time period involved, so we’re going to have to settle this another way.

Intuitively, Thomson’s version seems more correct. For example, in the cabin scenario, assuming we can make it work, nine months looks less like babysitting and more like parenting. So unless the child does have a special right against me, that would at best be pushing the limits. Lu’s judgment that the obligation might even extend to raising the child to maturity looks even more like parenting and certainly would require a special right against me. Lu grants I don’t have to risk starvation, but his judgment requires that I am required to stretch my resources very thin. For nine months? For someone who is not my responsibility? That sounds more like a Good Samaritan rather than someone just meeting their minimum moral obligations.

Or look at the violinist scenario. An hour under normal circumstances is a relatively minor inconvenience. Nine months? Well, I do have other concerns here. I have a job to keep, rent to pay, relationships to maintain, pro-choice articles to write. Surely even Lu would let me go, despite the fact I’d write more pro-choice articles. After all, the burden is more extensive than ruining an expensive suit. Right?

Perhaps I’m just going about this the wrong way. Let’s try examining what the “nine months of inconvenience” a “normal” pregnancy consists of.

First, just for the sake of thoroughness, let’s consider Lu’s contention that caring for an infant for nine months is much more burdensome than a “normal” pregnancy. What proof does Lu offer for this contention? Another man told him so!

Okay, then. We’re going to move on now.

Defining “normal” is a difficult task for anything, let alone pregnancy. I’m going to discuss what happens in all pregnancies (thus including “normal” ones)⁹ and draw on the summary of typical symptoms and side-effects made by Donald H. Regan in his “Rewriting Roe v. Wade.” I’m relying on this summary because—regardless whether one considers his argument successful—he has a vested interest in not overstating the symptoms and side-effects of pregnancy for the emotional impact. So if anything, he was underplaying the severity of the possible complications of pregnancy.

In all pregnancies, the conceptus attaches itself to the uterus, draws oxygen and nutrients from the pregnant person’s blood, and returns carbon dioxide and metabolic wastes to their blood. The biological mother essentially serves simultaneously as a living feeding tube, respirator, and dialysis machine for the conceptus.¹⁰ All pregnancies have some risk of permanent disability and death. The actual risk depends on the availability and quality of medical care; in the United States that is a confluence of location, race, and class. All pregnancies cause permanent alterations to the person’s body, even if they don’t lead to permanent disability.

Here is Regan’s summary of the physical burdens of pregnancy and childbirth:

First, complaints involving general inconvenience or discomfort: a tendency to faintness (generally limited to the first fourteen weeks); nausea and possibly vomiting (generally limited to the first fourteen weeks); tiredness (pronounced in the first fourteen weeks, then disappearing, to reappear near the end of pregnancy); insomnia (difficulty going to sleep caused by inability in late pregnancy to find a comfortable position in bed, compounded by difficulty going back to sleep when wakened by a kicking fetus or by the need for frequent urination which accompanies pregnancy, also compounded by general disruption of the body's internal temperature-regulation mechanism); slowed reflexes; poor coordination; uncertainty of balance (caused by increase and redistribution of body weight); manual clumsiness in the morning (caused by swollen fingers and carpal-tunnel syndrome); shortness of breath following even mild exertion; and new aversions to certain foods or smells (especially fatty or spicy foods).

More specific complaints, still involving inconvenience or discomfort, are: tender breasts; stuffy nose; constipation; heartburn (different from nausea, and not limited to early pregnancy); nosebleeds; edema of the feet and ankles; a metallic taste in the mouth; special difficulty in curing any vaginitis that may occur; increased susceptibility to and difficulty of curing urinary tract infection; increased frequency of urination (quite apart from any urinary infection); occasional extreme urgency of urination (as the fetus bumps the bladder); and occasional stress incontinence from the same source. Many pregnant women also report more headaches than when they were not pregnant, though there is no apparent reason for this aside from the increased psychological stress of pregnancy.

Among complaints not merely uncomfortable but painful, some of which can be very painful indeed, we find: backache; costal-marginal pain (caused by the enlarged uterus pushing against the lower ribs); abdominal "round ligament" pain; abdominal muscle pain; pelvic ache; pelvic shooting pain (as the fetus bumps a nerve at the rim of the pelvis); foot and leg cramps; the different pain and leg cramps associated with varicose veins; hemorrhoids; pain and pins-and-needles in the wrist (carpaltunnel syndrome); and mastitis. Finally, as a result of the general softening of ligaments during pregnancy, along with the extra weight and the loss of balance, there is an increased susceptibility to sprains and to aching feet.

The pregnant woman also experiences changes in her appearance: most obviously, the pronounced change in the shape of her body as a whole; consequent upon the change of body shape, an awkward gait and inability to wear her normal wardrobe; increased dryness of skin (for women with dry skin initially); thin, brittle, unmanageable hair; varicose veins (in the legs or the vulva, and sometimes in pelvis, abdomen, or breasts7); swelling of the face; changes in pigmentation (darkening of the nipples and areolae; sometimes darkening of larger patches of the breast; darkening of freckles or moles; the linea nigra from the pubic area to the naval; the often blotchy "butterfly mask" or chloasma); stretch marks (which result in part from avoidable excessive weight gain, but which are not always avoidable).

Finally, as a result of hormonal changes, the pregnant woman is likely to be at times markedly irritable, volatile in her moods, or subject to periods of depression. She may also experience a loss of sexual desire.

After the period of pregnancy, there is the actual delivery of the fetus. The days when a woman had a reasonable chance of spending twelve hours or more in sweaty agony are happily gone. But it is still true that for many women parturition is a thoroughly unpleasant and significantly painful experience. It can also involve a major operation, with all the added risk and discomfort that entails, if the fetus is delivered by cesarean section.

This looks more burdensome than ruining an expensive suit. And it is certainly no mere inconvenience. I’m going to go with Thomson here.

I’ve mocked Lu’s ruined suit mercilessly, and perhaps some might think that is unfair. Can we discuss abortion in terms of a (limited) “general obligation to protect the vulnerable” or Minimally Decent Samaritanism? Sure. The topic is not inherently beyond the realm of debate.

What we can’t do in such discussions is dismiss pregnancy as “nine months of inconvenience.” Pregnancy takes its toll on a person, and we need to deal with that fact realistically. None of the examples in Lu’s article is even close to doing what a pregnant person does for the conceptus. None of them require risking the effects even a “normal” pregnancy causes.

And maybe let’s be more realistic about what our obligations toward people we have no special responsibility for entails. Use up the extra stores and hope the storm doesn’t last any longer than expected? Sure. Do some rationing and tighten our belts a bit? I think most people would be willing to do that. Ration the stores to the point where the cabin owner is just barely surviving? Certainly not unless the owner does have a special obligation toward the infant. I’m not even so sure this is required even when we do have a special responsibility for the person.¹¹

Then, too, it is all fine and well to say we have to feed an infant we happen to be stuck with in a snowed-in cabin. But how many of us are ever going to be in that kind of situation? Whatever judgments Lu or Beckwith or I make in judging the cabin scenario, we make them secure in the knowledge that those judgments will only apply to a certain class of people, which doesn’t include us.¹² Can we really say “me and thee” when in practice it is only “thee”? Is it any wonder that some people who can get pregnant say (cisgender) men have nothing to say about abortion?

Prospects for Legalizing Lu’s Approach

Strictly speaking, Lu is making an argument about the morality of abortion. However, as noted in the introduction, his article was passed to me by a slaver who thought the argument could be used as a legal basis for banning abortion. So for now, let’s assume that Lu is correct that our general obligation to help the vulnerable includes suffering burdens equivalent to a “normal” pregnancy. What might this look like in terms of law?

First, the law would have to establish what a “normal” pregnancy is. We know what all pregnancies do, and we know what all pregnancies risk. We know that all pregnancies come with symptoms, though not all pregnant people suffer all the symptoms. We also know that the severity of the symptoms can vary among those experiencing them. So we can say that so long as the risks are no higher than x and the symptoms are no more severe than y, that is a “normal” pregnancy under the law. That would require a lot of suppleness that the law—especially criminal law—is not known for.

But assuming we can get past the subtleties of defining a “normal” pregnancy, what kind of abortion ban could we expect? Certainly not a blanket ban. If the pregnant person were experiencing an “abnormal” pregnancy they would still be allowed to have one. Despite what Lu may think, it is unclear whether abortions in cases of rape would be banned. The emotional and psychological trauma entailing from carrying a rapist’s child is certainly not “normal.”

Who would have the burden of proof that the pregnancy was “abnormal?” Presumably, one way or the other, the burden would be on the pregnant person. We could go one of two ways: use a preclearance scheme or prosecute all abortions after the fact. In a preclearance scheme, the pregnant person would have to show their pregnancy is “abnormal” before having an abortion. Prosecuting all abortions after the fact would set “abnormal” pregnancies as a sort of positive defense, and the burden of proof would be on the defendant in many jurisdictions, except now there would be multiple defendants, the pregnant person and the people actually performing the abortion. Either way the question becomes how high the standard of proof would be. Set too high, then too many “abnormal” pregnancies would have to be carried; set too low, then too many “normal” pregnancies would be aborted.

Then there is the other end. Remembering Thomson originally wrote “Defense” at a time when most abortions were illegal in most states, she wrote:

Indeed, with one rather striking class of exceptions, no one in any country in the world is legally required to do anywhere near as much as this for anyone else. The class of exceptions is obvious. My main concern here is not the state of the law in respect to abortion, but it is worth drawing attention to the fact that in no state in this country is any man compelled by law to be even a Minimally Decent Samaritan to any person…. By contrast, in most states in this country women are compelled by law to be not merely Minimally Decent Samaritans, but Good Samaritans to unborn persons inside them. This doesn't by itself settle anything one way or the other, because it may well be argued that there should be laws in this country—as there are in many European countries—compelling at least Minimally Decent Samaritanism. But it does show that there is a gross injustice in the existing state of the law. And it shows also that the groups currently working against liberalization of abortion laws, in fact working toward having it declared unconstitutional for a state to permit abortion, had better start working for the adoption of Good Samaritan laws generally, or earn the charge that they are acting in bad faith.

Lu, in principle should agree with this. He does argue that all people have “an obligation to care for the vulnerable, even at considerable personal inconvenience” and at the expense of their other rights. So if a “normal” pregnancy falls withing this general obligation and/or Minimally Decent Samaritanism, then equal treatment would suggest that everyone would have the duty equivalent to the pregnant person carrying a “normal” pregnancy.

What would this look like when enforced by law? Considering there aren’t too many things that come to the level of simultaneously acting as a living feeding tube, respirator, and dialysis machine for nine months, while also having the risk of death or permanent disability that all pregnancies have, while also permanently changing one’s body in any case, while also imposing the symptoms and side effects of “normal” pregnancies, there isn’t much one cannot be required to do. This would entail that when it comes to helping vulnerable people, the government could force you to do practically anything, at your own expense and without compensation.

What about rights? Lu writes “if we cannot account for the responsibility in terms of rights claims, that is more of a reason to reject the applicability of the rights framework than a reason to reject that responsibility.” When talking solely about morality, this statement is not as disconcerting as it may first appear. In discussing ethics, it is not outside the realm of debate to question whether natural subjective rights exist and/or the role they play in determining whether a given action is moral. In a political context, Lu’s statement becomes very disconcerting.

To be fair, Lu does seem to acknowledge the pragmatic utility of applying the rights framework in the political context. He does not explicitly say we should reject rights arguments in the political context. However, the slaver who passed his article to me certainly is willing to sacrifice my rights (though not their own) if that is what it takes to get an abortion ban. I have noted before that we cannot get the type of abortion demand the slavers want without resorting to authoritarianism. Using Lu’s positive plank as a legal basis for an abortion ban would only ensure that authoritarianism wins the day.

Final Addendum

Since writing above about the distinction between unplugging and abortion, I have come into possession of a copy of Thomson’s “Rights and Deaths.”¹³ Thomson still didn’t spell out exactly why the distinction, assuming it has any moral significance, does not apply to the violinist analogy. Instead, she questioned whether the distinction between direct and indirect killing has any moral significance at all. Obviously, if the distinction has no moral significance at all, it wouldn’t have any application to the violinist analogy.

As I am myself inclined to deny there is any significant moral difference between direct and indirect killing, perhaps we can leave it at that. The distinction is not going to make a difference to the violinist, and it’s not going to make a difference to the prenatal being. After all, they are going to wind up dead either way. However, I think there is still more to be said here.

Though I didn’t raise this point earlier specifically because I was trying to imagine a continuation of the violinist analogy, I’m not so sure that unplugging the violinist would not actually constitute a direct killing. Someone has to do the unplugging, and the unplugging will result in the violinist’s death. That the violinist dies from the underlying kidney ailment doesn’t seem relevant. But for the unplugging, the violinist would still be alive regardless of the underlying condition. So the person(s) responsible for the unplugging may as well slit the violinist’s throat.

The irrelevance of the underlying condition (and thus the distinction between direct and indirect killing) can be demonstrated by another variation on the violinist analogy. Suppose you do want to be a Good Samaritan, so rather than demanding to be unplugged, you allow the violinist to use your kidneys for the nine months it will take for him to recover. But then, while you were sleeping, a not-so-famous violinist wishing to gain rank in the list of most famous living violinists comes into the room and unplugs you. Again, the violinist dies from the underlying kidney ailment. However, the not-so-famous violinist will certainly be charged with murder. In this case, the distinction between direct and indirect killing makes no difference.¹⁴

If the distinction between direct and indirect killing will not absolve the not-so-famous violinist of murder, it makes sense that Thomson didn’t deal with that issue in the original “Defense.” Since that distinction makes no difference in the case of the not-so-famous violinist, the question becomes whether unplugging the violinist in the analogy also constitutes murder. It was entirely appropriate for Thomson to focus on the question of whether the killing is unjust rather than on the method. And it also explains why Thomson can simultaneously hold that we cannot turn around and slit the violinist’s throat should he survive the unplugging process.

Important update 21 October 2022: I have make an important correction. I wrote, "However, while reviewing Lu’s essay in preparation for writing this response, I had an insight suggesting that attempting to restore the status quo ante from before the rape is not the right model to view pregnancy from rape." I then went on to report my thought process about Lu not considering the possibility that an unwanted pregnancy is an assault on a person's bodily integrity and combining the two facts (both rape and unwanted pregnancy are assaults on a person's bodily integrity).

All of that is true, insofar as it goes. I did hit upon these thoughts while reviewing Lu's essay in the manner I described. However, I happened to be reviewing my comments on Disqus when I came across comments I made in response to Monica Snyder's post at Secular Pro-Life, "Misconceptions about the rape exception." The fact I commented on that post demonstrates that not only was I familiar with it, but I in fact read it. The relevant portion of Snyder's post is point 5:

You don’t “undo” rape. Whether a rape survivor gets pregnant or not, whether she carries that pregnancy or not, she was still raped.

When a rape survivor gets pregnant and doesn’t want to be pregnant, there are two separate issues: (1) she was raped, and (2) she is pregnant against her will. The rape exception is about addressing the second issue, not the first.

By the time I started working on this essay, I had forgotten about this post. So at the time, it seemed like I was having an original thought. In retrospect, it seems more likely my intense thinking merely sparked something in my brain that was already there, even if I didn't consciously remember where the idea came from. The illustration is (so far as I know) original to me, but it needs to be made clear the idea behind it is not.

1Judith Jarvis Thomson “Rights and Deaths.” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 2 (1973), 156–57. Qtd. in David Boonin. A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 190.

2As a sidenote, we should question why Lu makes this argument at all. The general sense I get from his argument is that under “normal” circumstances, we are obligated to remain plugged into the violinist. This would seem to make the distinction between unplugging and abortion moot. I suspect that this argument serves as a backup. Lu can probably anticipate that many readers would still think one can be unplugged from the violinist even given his argument. Strictly speaking, his anti-abortion argument only applies to “normal” pregnancies. This would imply that in situations that are not “normal,” abortion could be permissible but for the direct vs. indirect killing distinction.

However, there are in fact abortion methods that unplug the prenate without directly killing it, e.g., medication abortions and hysteronomies. Lu notes such possibilities without specifically ruling them out. Perhaps he thinks his positive plank is strong enough to effectively make them impermissible. If his stance is that they are indeed impermissible, that means he acknowledges there is no significant difference between unplugging and direct killing himself.

Note I am not the only person to have noticed this phenomenon among abortion opponents. Boonin (Defense, 189) makes much the same point.

3At least, cisgender men can’t get pregnant. It seems doubtful to me (though obviously I could be wrong) that Lu accepts the validity of transgender people, so would not apply the cisgender label to anyone, let alone himself.

4Note I am not saying the pregnant person’s reason for aborting a rape pregnancy has nothing to do with being raped. It may well be that their reason for wanting an abortion is because they were raped. By the same token, you may well want to be unplugged because you were kidnapped. The point remains that we are not dealing with an attempt to restore “the state of not having been raped” or “the state of not having been kidnapped.” We are dealing with an attempt to restore “the state of not being unwillingly pregnant” and the “state of not being unwillingly plugged in.” The reason for wanting to restore that state is irrelevant.

5To be clear, I do think it is not inherently wrong to do most or all the things Lu lists. More specifically, I would argue that, to the extent those activities can be prohibited, we can’t do it on a straightforward denial of the right to bodily control. But to make those arguments here would merely sidetrack us from the issue at hand.

6To be sure, his case would be that much stronger if Thomson’s case fails. In much the same way, Thomson’s case that the right to abortion stems from the right to control our bodies would be that much stronger if we do in fact own our bodies. Failing to defeat Thomson’s argument simply means Lu is reduced to providing an alternate account against abortion and letting the reader decide.

7I should note there are those who argue instances like these and others do in fact have a corresponding rights claim. Most of these arguments are controversial, so I’m not going to rely on them even if I agree with those arguments.

8Joking aside, Lu’s analogy doesn’t even try to account for my ability to care for the infant. Realistically speaking, if I’m living in a cabin isolated from society, it is extremely unlikely that my provisions will include things like formula, bottles, diapers or anything else that is necessary to care for an infant. Obligation presumes ability, so this scenario can’t be saved even if it were adjusted to make it impossible to deliver the child to the authorities.

9I am aware that that I am somewhat (over)simplifying pregnancy, but I don’t want to actually scare anyone considering having a baby.

10A difference between Thomson’s analogy and pregnancy that abortion opponents do not want you to notice is that in the scenario, you are only serving as a living dialysis machine. This, of course, is a difference that favors the pregnant person.

11Yes, poor people do this for their children all the time—for which they are to be commended! Treating what poor people do for their children as the minimum obligation makes a mockery of the sacrifices they make. Worse, taking that position only serves to absolve us of our responsibility as a society to help them in their need. How convenient for the middle and upper classes who don’t have to make such sacrifices!

12To be fair, a similar criticism could in theory be levied at Thomson’s violinist analogy. However, while we are never going to find ourselves connected to someone like in the analogy, all of us could be asked to give our blood, tissues, or organs to someone in need. This means Thomson’s analogy can be universalized in a way the cabin analogy cannot.

13In Rights, Restitution, & Risk: Essays in Moral Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986): 20-32.

14This point was brought back to my attention by David Boonin’s similar discussion in Beyond Roe: Why Abortion Should be Legal—Even if the Fetus is a Person (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 107-120.

Deserted Islands and Snowed-in Cabins, Oh My: The De Facto Guardian

2021-10-17T17:01:00.002-07:00

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Through no fault of your own, you find yourself stuck on a deserted island or in a snowed-in cabin with an infant. You are not the infant’s legal guardian. Do you have any obligation to feed the infant? If you say yes, then you have just shown that a pregnant person is obligated to carry the pregnancy even in cases of rape.

If your immediate response is “Wait a minute here!” you are not alone. If this is not your immediate reaction, it should be. The basic scenario falls apart at the slightest touch. Merely feeding an infant is nothing like pregnancy with the attendant symptoms and side effects and an infant doesn’t take nutrition directly from a person’s body. The deserted island scenario is so unlike pregnancy, let alone pregnancy resulting from rape, that it is a wonder this scenario and others like it are a favorite among the slavers.

But what if a scenario like this can worked into something that fairly closely resembles a pregnancy caused by rape? Could the scenario be so easily defeated then? Enter “De Facto Guardian and Abortion: A Response to the Strongest Violinist” by Stephen Wagner. Wagner is writing for some slavers called the “Justice for All Philosophy Team,” so this paper is the result of a group project. Wagner is building on previous versions of the snowed-in cabin story proposed by Francis Beckwith and Rich Poupard. So “De Facto Guardian” is probably about as strong a version of this scenario as we are going to get.

The violinist of the title is a reference to the famous analogy proposed by Judith Jarvis Thomson in her “A Defense of Abortion.” The “strongest” violinist probably references the fact that it is widely acknowledged that Thomson’s analogy has its clearest application to pregnancies resulting from rape. Wagner and his team are especially concerned with her argument, and this paper is trying to refute it. So “De Facto Guardian” is best read as a response to Thomson. Though I don’t believe their response successfully refutes Thomson, assuming they do, it remains to be seen if and how their arguments might affect other attempts to show abortion is permissible, including my own.

The basic strategy of Wagner’s argument is take things step-by-step. The initial story hardly resembles pregnancy at all, let alone pregnancy caused by rape. The object is to see if the person has any moral obligation to act at this stage. If so, then we proceed to the next step to see if that obligation still holds. If so, we proceed to the next step, and so on until we have arrived at the point the scenario most closely resembles pregnancy. Wagner goes even further and ponders whether the obligation holds even in cases where the scenario is actually worse than pregnancy.

This means we are faced with a two-fold question by Wagner’s argument. The first question is, “Does someone have a moral obligation in this scenario?” The second question is how far that obligation, if any, extends given how onerous the conditions become. This means that if we can definitively answer there is no moral obligation in the first place, we need not consider how burdensome the conditions are. However, even if we do allow there is a moral obligation in the basic case, if we can definitively answer the conditions have become so taxing that the obligation no longer holds, we are justified in stopping at that point. If this point falls short of the scenario most closely resembling pregnancy, then Wagner’s argument fails. By parity of reasoning, the person who becomes pregnant as a result of rape is not obligated to carry the pregnancy to term.

The Basic Story

Mary, who gave birth a week ago, wakes up one morning and discovers she is in a cabin that has been snowed in. She finds a note telling her that she is stuck in the cabin for six weeks, that both she and her child are safe, and there is plenty of food. She searches the cabin and discovers a week-old infant, but it is not her child. She also discovers there is enough formula to feed an infant for three months, along with “a huge store of food and a ready source of water.”

Six weeks later, the police show up and rescue her. They inform her that her kidnappers were some behavior psychologists from the local university and ask if anyone else is in the cabin. Mary answers, “There was.”

Concerned, the police search the cabin and find the body of the infant. It is determined the infant died from starvation. The infant formula was not touched.

The question before us is whether Mary did something wrong here. Specifically, did she have an obligation to feed the infant while they were stuck in the cabin?

Wagner takes it as a given that Mary was wrong to let the infant starve. On the initial reading, I suspect most people would think letting the child starve was morally outrageous. Absent justification or excuse then, it would seem that Mary was obligated to feed the child and did something seriously wrong by letting it starve. But once the emotional reaction subsides and we think about this scenario more rationally, should we think Mary was obligated to feed the infant? No. Why not? Because Mary clearly would have been justified in leaving the cabin even at the risk of letting the infant starve.

If this seems like a radical idea, let’s think this through. Mary was definitely kidnapped; possibly the infant was also. She had no assurance other than the note that she would be freed at all. The note insinuated her child was with her in the cabin; that was a lie. And a “huge” supply of food and a three-month store of infant formula? For what was only supposed to be a six-week captivity? Mary may not have known exactly what was going on, but it would be reasonable for her to have suspected she would not be freed in six weeks, if at all. Presumably only the kidnappers knew where she was and anyone who tried finding her would not have known where to begin looking. Finally, she did have an obligation to find out what happened to her own child.

Furthermore, if Mary did try to escape, it would not have been prudent to take the infant with her. Not only would the child have hindered her chances of successful escape, taking it with her would have only put the infant in further danger. If she successfully escaped, hopefully the authorities could be directed back to the cabin in time to keep the child from starving. If not, then for all Mary knows, both she and the infant were going to die anyway, so either way the child would not be any worse off.

Now let’s turn back to the question of whether Mary was obligated to feed the infant. Since Mary was not morally obligated to stay in the cabin, there is no reasonable case Mary was obligated to feed the infant, for whom, after all, Mary had no responsibility.

We haven’t gotten anywhere even remotely resembling pregnancy, and it seems we have stopped Wagner’s strategy before it has even started. It would be tempting to rest our laurels here and move on to considering less absurd slaver arguments. But let’s not be so hasty here. After all, the scenario can be modified so that Mary and the infant are placed in a situation that precludes any practical means of escape. Examples might include a deserted island, a deep sea base, or a space capsule.

Would so modifying the scenario change anything? Perhaps, but our basic insight that Mary was justified in leaving the cabin still holds. Even if Mary couldn’t escape for all practical purposes, she would have still been justified in doing anything that would have allowed her to escape had the opportunity presented itself, even if it risks the infant’s death.

Under the modified scenario, was Mary obligated to feed the infant? No doubt Wagner would say she was. I highly suspect most people would agree on the initial reading. Subject to the above provision, I’m also inclined to agree Mary was obligated. And once the emotional reaction subsides, there doesn’t seem to be a reasonable case that Mary was not obligated to feed the infant. So, unless someone presents a reasonable case that Mary was not obligated to feed the infant (in which case I will rewrite this entire essay), I will take it as a given that our intuition in this case is justified. In other words, subject to the above provision, Mary was obligated to feed the infant in our modified scenario.

We are in basic agreement with Wagner in the “formula” case in section Ib, though in our case, this is subject to the provision that she was justified in trying to escape. We disagree sharply with Wagner in the “no formula” case of section Ic. It seems to me that the fact of an obligation is severable from the scope of the obligation. Unless we wish to be perfect, the obligation to give to the poor does not extend to giving so much we no longer have enough to live on.¹ This means we can set aside the discussion of where the obligation no longer holds because it is too taxing for the time being. So at this point, I am going to skip ahead to Wagner’s discussion of why Mary was obligated to feed the infant.

Whence Mary’s Obligation?

Saying Mary did something wrong and explaining why it was wrong are two entirely different matters. Mary had no special obligation to the child. She was not the child’s parent. She did not agree to take care of it. So the infant didn’t seem to have a right against Mary that she should feed it. We are in agreement with Wagner on these points and that they don’t seem relevant.

We are in substantial agreement that the mode of killing also doesn’t seem relevant. I would disagree about the severity of letting the infant starve vs. slitting it’s throat. I have grave reservations about whether there is a significant moral difference between killing and letting die, so I would not necessarily agree that slitting the infant’s throat would actually be worse. In fact, I would contend that if Mary refuses² to feed the child, she may as well slit its throat. That, at least, would be more merciful. But at this point of the discussion, the distinction, if any, does not make a difference.

Particularly when it comes to the “formula” case, there is another factor Wagner does not mention but we can be fairly certain he would agree is not morally relevant. That factor is Mary’s sex. In the “formula” case, if we switched Mary out and put Peter in her place, I think we would agree Peter would have also been obligated to feed the infant.

Wagner proposes three facts about this case that may help us explain why Mary is obligated to feed the child:

Mary was the only one directly available.
Mary could help.
Only basic physical needs were required.

Again, we are in substantial agreement that if we changed any one of these facts, Mary’s obligation was less certain. If Mary wasn’t the only one available, it isn’t clear what her specific obligation would be. If for some reason Mary was unable to help, her obligation certainly would not be clear.³ I agree with Wagner’s statement that, had the child’s needs gone beyond basic physical necessities, then Mary’s obligations would have been less clear. But for reasons that will be made clear below, I’m not sure he agrees with that statement.

I would add a fourth fact about the “formula” case that helps explain why Mary is obligated to feed the child:

Given the circumstances, feeding the child was not a significant imposition.

This is the part where we are going to have controversy with Wagner. But strictly considering the “formula” case, that feeding the child was not a significant imposition is surely part of the reason we think Mary did something wrong. If you see someone drowning and there is an available rope, you would be morally criticized for not throwing him a line. But unless you are a trained and practicing lifeguard, you are not obligated to jump in after him. This is why if you do, you would be regarded as a hero. Again, if you stop at a convenience store on your way to work, and you see someone slip, you would be morally criticized if you did not at least call the paramedics if she is injured. But you are not obligated to drop everything and take her to the hospital yourself. This is why if you do, you would be regarded as a good Samaritan. And if throwing the line or checking on the person itself imposes a significant imposition, even the moral criticism is muted.

In Mary’s case, she was not going anywhere, whether because she couldn’t or she chose not to. Even though she retained the right to escape had the opportunity arose, feeding the infant in the modified “formula” case probably would not have detracted from her ability to escape. She was going to have to eat herself anyway. For at least six weeks, she had nothing but time. Finally and perhaps crucially, in this case, the supplies were already provided.⁴ There didn’t seem to be any good reason not to feed the infant, and this surely contributes to our sense Mary did something wrong by allowing the child to starve.

Assessing the factors that make us think Mary did something wrong doesn’t actually explain why we think she was wrong. But these facts can help us to build a theory that would explain the why. Wagner proposes the concept of the de facto guardian (DFG) to explain facts 1-3. This concept is not to be confused with the legal concept of de facto guardianship as it exists in some jurisdictions, though if Wagner’s concept holds and is legally implemented, it would replace the legal concept as it now exists.

These are the essentials of DFG:

If for any reason one finds themselves in a situation that a child needs care, and that person is the only one available to help, that person has “the same obligations of a parent or guardian” (italics Wagner’s).
The person’s lack of consent to care for the child is irrelevant.
Only a threat to the person’s life can potentially change the obligation.

Wagner is unclear whether the time period involved is relevant in determining the scope of the obligation. Certainly the six week period of Mary’s case is covered, which seems fairly reasonable. Wagner asserts without argument that a de facto guardian’s obligation covers Mary’s case even if she were stuck in the cabin for two years. He never explicitly states exactly how long the period the DFG obligation lasts. But given his contention that only a threat to the person’s life may change the obligation, the time period could last until the infant has grown into an adult without contradicting Wagner’s theory.

This would seem to go far beyond what our intuition tells us about this case. Six weeks given that Mary wasn’t going anywhere and couldn’t fulfill whatever other obligations she may had anyway? Sure. Two years? Possibly it can be stretched that long, but crucially Wagner would have to make an actual argument, not simply assert it. Eighteen years? Unless Mary had done something wrong commensurate to that level of obligation, there is just no way to justify that.

Moreover, if only a threat to the person’s life may potentially change the obligation, then the DFG obligation is actually greater than the actual parent’s obligations. For example, a parent is not obligated to give blood to their children, even though a simple blood transfusion hardly constitutes a threat to most people's lives.

In Mary’s specific case, the stipulation that only a threat to the person’s life can potentially change the obligation conflicts with the fact Mary would have been justified in leaving the cabin in the original scenario and doing anything that would have allowed her to escape should the opportunity arise in the modified scenario, even at the risk that the child will die. DFG would suggest that it would be impermissible to take that risk. But this would also contradict the premise the de facto guardian has the same obligations as a parent, since, as we shall see, even if Mary were the infant’s parent, she would still be justified in leaving the cabin or doing anything that would allow her to escape.

Also, if the de facto guardian has the same obligations as a parent, then the obligation extends beyond mere physical needs. In the “formula” case, we may be agreed Mary should have fed the child, but even Wagner himself did not say Mary had to show infant affection, play with it, and so on. But this is arguably part of a parent’s obligations, which are not solely limited to providing for its physical needs. Parenting also involves training the child to be a functioning member of society. If Mary was indeed stuck in the cabin for two years, does her obligation extend to potty training the child? What about teaching it to walk and talk? DFG would suggest that Mary’s obligation does extend this far. But this probably goes far beyond what our intuition tells us about this case.

Finally, DFG potentially places anyone who has a random encounter with a child under (at least) the same obligations of a parent. This raises the question of why we would assign the position of parent to anyone at all. Being a parent means having special obligations towards specific children. If DFG holds, every adult has those otherwise special obligations to every child. Whence parenting then?

However, let’s assume for the time being that Wagner’s de facto guardian can be fixed so that it can account for Mary’s obligation to feed the child without posing these problems. We can rightly ask whether this is the only theory that would account for our intuition that Mary should have fed the child. And as it so happens, not only is there at least one other theory, it was proposed by Thomson herself. Her concept of the Minimally Decent Samaritan (MDS) has the potential to explain Mary’s case at least as well as the de facto guardian concept.⁵

Thomson’s Minimally Decent Samaritan concept proposes that if it would be morally indecent to not help a person in need, we are obligated to help that person. This is true even if, strictly speaking, that person does not have a right to your assistance. However, the scope of that obligation is limited, both in terms of severity and time. MDS does not apply when assisting another person requires significant sacrifices of your total well-being. MDS also does not apply when the assistance would require a large sacrifice of time.

Now that we have an alternative theory, we can now ask which theory better explains Mary’s case. Here we see that MDS has far more explanatory power than DFG. Both MDS and DFG can explain why the fact Mary was the only one available is relevant and explain why her obligation would have been less apparent if there are many people. Both would also explain why Mary’s ability or lack thereof is a factor.

When we turn to the consideration that only physical needs are required, MDS can explain why we need only concern ourselves with physical needs that can be readily met. Training a child to be a functioning member of society involves a significant amount of time and resources and includes sacrificing many other interests and concerns. In Mary’s specific case, the time and resources spent on training a child to be a functioning member of society would have detracted from trying to escape if she could. As we’ve already seen, DFG as presented by Wagner is unclear whether whether the obligation is limited to physical needs that can be readily met and would even suggest those obligations take precedence over Mary’s interest in escaping.

Finally, MDS explains why the fact that feeding the child would not have been a significant imposition plays a role in our sense that Mary should have fed the infant, while also explaining why our sense that the obligation becomes less clear the more significant the imposition becomes. If the formula weren’t already supplied, or if preparing the formula required a long arduous process, or if feeding the child would in fact detract from her ability to escape, or if we were talking about eighteen years, or given any number of possible ifs, our sense of Mary’s obligation becomes less clear, and MDS can explain that.

In contrast, DFG says no imposition short of the threat of death can release Mary. Wagner in effect is saying that our sense that the severity of the imposition (short of death) has a role to play in our judgment is simply wrong; we have to bite the bullet here. However, Wagner gives us no reason to believe we should bite this bullet, let alone that we must do so. We are expected to bite the bullet simply on his say so. Perhaps he is right. If so, that still requires an argument.

Minimally Decent Samaritanism can also explain cases where our intuition says someone has done something wrong that the de facto guardian can’t explain.

We’ve already experimented with exchanging Mary for Peter and concluded Mary’s sex is not relevant to our sense of outrage. What happens if we exchange the infant for an adult who is disabled in such a way they cannot feed themselves? I’d imagine we would still feel morally outraged, that Mary should not have let this person starve. This would suggest the infant’s age or stage of development is not in itself a relevant factor.⁶ With its specialized concern for children, DFG to this point does not explain why Mary would be obligated to feed the disabled adult. MDS can explain this.

Let’s look at some other cases, drawn from both this essay and Thomson’s “Defense.”

MDS explains why we can be morally criticized for not throwing an available line to a drowning person. DFG would only explain it if the drowning person were a child.
MDS explains why should call the paramedics if we someone slip and seriously injure themselves. DFG would only explain it if the injured person were a child.
MDS explains why we ought to allow Thomson’s violinist to stay plugged into you if doing so only requires an hour and does not threaten your health. DFG would only explain it if the violinist were a child.
MDS explains why Henry Fonda should briefly touch Thomson’s brow to save her life if he need only walk across the room. DFG would only explain it if Thomson were a child.
If the legend surrounding the Kitty Genovese case were true, MDS would explain why someone should have called the police.⁷ DFG would only explain it if Genovese were a child.

Given the greater explanatory power of MDS, we conclude that it is a better explanation for Mary’s case than DFG. As we turn to examine the “no formula” case, we would be justified in using MDS as the primary theory to judge whether Mary’s obligation extends to breastfeeding the infant. But just in case DFG can be fixed, we will also look at this case through the first premise of the theory, that the de facto guardian has the same obligations as a parent.⁸

The “No Formula” Case

We rejected the conclusion Mary was obligated to feed the infant in the initial story Wagner proposed and offered a good justification for that rejection. But if the story is properly modified, we can agree that Mary did something wrong by letting the child starve. We also found substantial though not perfect agreement about the facts that make us think Mary was wrong to let the infant starve. We then considered Wagner’s de facto guardian theory and found it lacking, especially in comparison to Thomson’s Minimally Decent Samaritanism. We have, however, agreed to consider the premise that Mary has the same obligations toward the strange child as she would have toward her own child for the sake of argument.

Wagner may not be entirely happy with this, but presumably there is still enough here for him to move on to the next step of his strategy. After all, the bottom line is that we are agreed that Mary was obligated to feed the infant in the “formula” case.

Now, Wagner asks us to consider a modification to his scenario (or the scenario as modified to create Mary’s obligation in the “formula” case). Suppose the kidnappers did not provide any formula. But remember, she gave birth a week ago and is lactating.⁹ So she could breastfeed the infant. Now the question before us is this: Does Mary’s obligation in the “formula” case still hold if the only way to feed the child is breastfeeding?¹⁰ Obviously, Wagner takes it as a given that it does.

Just as obviously, Wagner anticipates that those who agree with him in the “formula” case won’t necessarily go along with him in the “no formula” case. He devoted only two paragraphs to the “formula” case but takes four to comment the “no formula” case. His language becomes less certain in section Ic: “If you think she did not have a moral obligation … If you have the same intuition I have.” Wagner clearly knows he’s moved into more controversial territory.

The “no formula” case looks sufficiently enough like Thomson’s strung-up violinist we could simply assert the right to refuse applies and be done with it. Most of the disanalogies between the strung-up violinist and a pregnant person Wagner will go on to propose, even if we were to grant they are relevant, simply do not apply in Mary’s case. We will consider the remaining disanalogies that may have relevance to Mary’s case soon enough. First, we will consider a new distinction Wagner proposes.

Strangely enough, Wagner waits until section VIc point E to even try making an argument that Mary’s case is not like the strung-up violinist. In Mary’s case, she is in the position of a de facto guardian, whereas you are not in the position of a de facto guardian in the original scenario proposed by Thomson. This argument clearly depends on DFG being correct, but as we’ve already seen, it is very problematic at best. Even if we were hold on to the premise that a de facto guardian has the same obligations as a parent, that still leaves us with the question of whether those obligations extend to the direct use of of one’s body.

Parents do not have the obligation to give their children blood, tissue, or organs, even if it is necessary for the child to live. It stands to reason that this would include breast milk. So if Mary has the same obligations as a parent in this case, she then does not need to breastfeed the child. The right to refuse still applies.

Wagner here argues that a difference between Mary’s case and the violinist is that the infant needs food whereas the violinist needs medical care. Wagner asks us to shift the location of the violinist scenario a deserted hospital that has plenty of food available. Now, Wagner says you are in a position of a de facto guardian, even though that requires shifting the goalposts so that DFG applies to disabled people as well as children. This is starting to look ad hoc, but we’ll bear with him a little while longer.

Before going on, let’s note that shifting the location to a deserted hospital makes the case look like the original, unmodified scenario. We’ve already established in this original scenario that Mary was entirely justified in leaving. By parity of reasoning you are equally justified in leaving the deserted hospital. So now we have to modify the scenario (again) to get to where we can start saying you and Mary have an obligation to feed the violinist and the infant. So when we get to the “no formula” case, we just wind up in the same position. You can unhook yourself and Mary doesn’t have to breastfeed.

Not so, Wagner asserts, because the difference between medical treatment and feeding and sheltering are such that in the deserted hospital case, you can still unhook yourself: “In this case, you are obligated (morally/legally) to feed and shelter the violinist, but you are not obligated (morally/legally) to give him your body as medical care.” So you can unhook yourself from the violinist but you still have to feed him. Even though he’ll die if you unhook him and therefore he will not need to be fed. Okay. Wagner will have to pardon us if we are confused.

Never mind, though. Even if the application leads to a weird effect, the point itself is clear. The problem is that Wagner does not give us a reason to believe this is a distinction that makes a difference. Supposing parents to have an obligation to feed their children even if that means the direct use of their bodies, we have only reversed the problem. If parents are obligated to feed their children using their bodies, it still stands to reason they are obligated to use their blood, tissue and organs for their children’s medical care as well. Why? Because parents are obligated to provide their children medical care. To say they have to let their bodies be used for food but not medical care is completely arbitrary.

Now let’s turn to the disanalogies between the strung-up violinist and a pregnant person that may have relevance to Mary’s case. In section Vb point B, Wagner discusses the point that kidneys weren’t intended to filter other people’s blood while uteruses are intended to gestate prenates. One could argue a similar difference exists between Mary’s case and Thomson’s violinist in that breast milk is intended to feed infants.

Wagner is suitably cautious about using an argument like this. He points out that accepting this difference has moral relevance requires certain worldviews and would likely be rejected by those who don’t share those commitments. He later acknowledges making this kind of argument into a moral argument is difficult. Nevertheless, he holds this disnalogy should not be rejected just because it is controversial; it could still be useful to those who share their worldview.

However, I am inclined to accept the premises “the purpose of uteruses is to gestate prenates” and “the purpose of breast milk is to feed infants” are true.¹¹ What I take issue with is the implied conclusions: Mary is required to breastfeed and pregnant people are required to bring their pregnancies to term. Wagner is correct to acknowledge this argument is hard to make. I’m going to demonstrate exactly why it is so difficult.

Imagine, if you will, a person with a penis rapes a person with a vagina. The rapist is caught and put on trial. The rapist now offers this argument for their defense: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: the purpose of a vagina is sexual intercourse. Therefore, the ‘victim’ is obligated to allow me to have sex with them.” Except for psychopathic rapists, I would imagine everyone will think this defense is absurd.

This is the problem facing those who would make a teleological argument that Mary is required to breastfeed or pregnant people are required to gestate. The conclusion does not follow from the premise, so the argument itself is invalid. I can accept that the fact breast milk is for feeding infants or that uteruses are for gestating prenates may possibly be a necessary condition for requiring Mary to breastfeed or pregnant people to gestate, but it is not a sufficient one. Unless someone can successfully argue that people with vaginas are not obligated to sleep with every person with a penis that comes along, but that a lactating person does have to breastfeed any and every hungry infant and a person with a uterus has to gestate every prenate that lands in it, the teleological argument fails.

In section VIIc, Wagner proposes we change the scenario so that Mary signed a consent form to participate in the behavior psychologists’ experiment. The fact that she found herself in care of an infant was due to pure random chance. This would raise all sorts of questions on its own, but never mind. Surely now Mary would be obligated to breastfeed the infant, even apart from DFG (or MDS) considerations! And yes, we’ll agree to that—for as long as Mary consented to participate in the experiment.

Wagner forgot that agreeing to be part of such experiments comes with the right to stop participating at any time for any reason. If Mary decided to discontinue her participation in the experiment, the psychologists would have been obligated to release her.¹² If the psychologists failed to release her, Mary acquired the right to escape. The rest of the scenario flows accordingly.

While Minimally Decent Samaritanism would likely apply in the “formula” case, it certainly would not apply in the “no formula” case. If Mary were simply able to call the police, and they said they would be able to get to her the next morning, MDS would almost certainly apply.¹³ If the police said it would take six weeks to get to her, it becomes less certain MDS applies, but given the fact she did have the assurance she would be rescued, it could be argued that the six week period falls within it. If she started having problems breastfeeding, such as developing mastitis, MDS would certainly no longer apply.

But this is not the situation we are presented with. Mary had no assurance she will be freed except the word of her kidnappers. The “no formula” case, if anything, has even more ominous implications than the original. Mary would still have the right to do anything that would allow her to escape if she could. If she breastfeeds the child, her body will continue to produce milk, which means the calories she consumes are not going into anything that may help her escape had the opportunity arisen. And for all Mary knows, she was going to need those resources. Minimally Decent Samaritanism does not apply to this case.

We have saved considering what might change if the infant Mary discovered was her own for last. If we were outraged on our first reading of the original story, we can imagine the outrage would be even more intense if the child were in fact Mary’s. Given that Wagner’s arguments have failed so far, supposing it was Mary’s infant could serve as his Hail Mary pass. So go back to the original story. We are outraged that Mary let the infant starve. When we learn it was Mary’s own child, our sense of outrage doubles.

But when we calm down and start thinking rationally, we should ask whether anything meaningful has changed. Mary no longer had to figure out what happened to her child, but in every other respect, nothing has changed. Mary still had no assurance they would be freed. People trying to find her still would not have known where to look. She would have still been justified in leaving. It would still would have been imprudent to take the infant. And even if leaving meant risking the child will die, for all Mary knew, both were going to die anyway, so her child would have been no worse off if her escape attempt failed. The rest of our argument flows accordingly.

Differences in Our Intuition?

Assuming, as Wagner does in section IVb, our intuitions are different in the violinist and “no formula” cabin stories,¹⁴ what can explain this? Let’s try playing around with the scenarios and see what we discover.

First, let’s have Mary and you switch places. So now, it is Mary that is hooked into the violinist and you are stuck in the cabin. It doesn’t seem like this will change intuitions much, if at all. Wagner would still presumably think that Mary can be unhooked while you would have to breastfeed the infant (assuming of course, that you can). So it seems that this is not a case of sheer hypocrisy.

Just to be absolutely certain this is not about one’s biological sex,¹⁵ let’s take you out and insert Peter back into the cabin. Again, Wagner would still presumably think Peter would have to breastfeed the infant assuming he could. So it also seems this is not a case of sheer sexism. We can probably say the intuition has nothing to do with who is providing the service.

So let’s switch the violinist and the infant. Now, you are hooked into the infant while Mary is faced with breastfeeding the violinist.¹⁶ For the violinist, I think we would have much the same reaction as in the “no formula” case. If there is still a sense of outrage, it probably wouldn’t be as intense as in the case of the infant (see note 6). But if you are hooked up to the infant, I suspect Wagner would now argue you are required to remain attached.¹⁷ I suspect that even some of us might hesitate to say we can demand detachment.

It seems the difference in our intuition for these cases is that we are talking about the fate of a child. This is understandable. We are socially and/or biologically conditioned to regard the death of a child as especially tragic. While we certainly do not want to dismiss that feeling out of hand, if we think about it rationally, we would realize the fact an infant is the one in need of help has no moral relevance to whether we have the right to refuse.

Some of us would argue that the infant is not a person with the right to life, and that is reason enough to show Mary has no obligation in the “no formula” case (and probably the “formula” case as well). However, this contention is itself highly controversial. Even if I were inclined to agree, I don’t think we can or should rest our case there (see note 8). This means even if we don’t think the infant is a person, we should stipulate it for the purpose of discussion.

Instead, I propose we ask ourselves what would be necessary to rationally justify requiring Mary to breastfeed the infant or us to remain attached to the infant. It would require arguing that children have a special right to people’s bodies if they need those bodies to live. In other words, we would have to argue that children have a higher right to life than the violinist. Or me. Or you. Or Wagner.

Even if I were able to make such an argument, I’m not willing to go there. I don’t think we as a people are willing to go there either. Even Wagner himself doesn’t seem willing to go there explicitly, which is why he shifted the goalposts to include the violinist under DFG in the deserted hospital case. So, insofar as there is an intuition that Mary is obligated to breastfeed the infant, we should bite the bullet and allow that Mary had the right to refuse.

We are justified at this point in saying we have defeated Wagner’s argument that Mary was obligated to breastfeed the infant in the “no formula” case.¹⁸ With that defeat, the rest of Wagner’s strategy falls. We need not consider changing the scenario to consider something even closer to pregnancy. Beyond the “no formula” case, Wagner is simply demonstrating that his cruelty knows no bounds.

However, we do have one final point to make.

Legal Intuitions?

In a properly modified scenario, we found some agreement with Wagner that Mary should have fed the infant in the “no formula” case. Suppose Mary had no justification or excuse for letting the child starve in that case; she simply refused to do it out of cold-hearted indifference. Now further suppose our outrage was such that we declared, “There ought to be a law against that!”

Do we need DFG, assuming it could be fixed? Again, the answer is no. We already have a law that could cover that kind of situation: depraved-indifference homicide. Typically such cases involve extreme recklessness with gross indifference to human life. However, with suitable precautions so people’s basic rights are not violated, the depraved-indifference homicide doctrine could be adapted to Mary’s simple refusal to feed the infant along with, for example, not throwing an available line to a drowning person.

Conclusion

Wagner’s argument fails in nearly every way imaginable. His initial story is not the slam dunk he thinks it is. His de facto guardian theory as presented is problematic, perhaps beyond the point of repair, while Thomson’s Minimally Decent Samaritanism explains our sense in the “formula” case equally well if not better. His DFG theory requires us to bite a bullet that Thomson’s MDS doesn’t, and we are just supposed to accept that. When it comes to the “no formula” case, Wagner expects us to just accept there is a difference between feeding and medical care even though the distinction won’t stand under his own theory. His variation on the Responsibility Objection is so abysmally bad that the Responsibility Objection has become self-refuted. His argument can’t be saved even if we assumed the infant was Mary’s child. Wagner simply can’t show Mary was required to breastfeed the infant in his scenario. Insofar as this scenario is supposed to represent pregnancy resulting from rape, we must conclude that people who were raped are not obligated to carry any resulting pregnancy.

Remember, this is one of the best versions of this type of argument available. Lesser versions of this argument, whether we are discussing deserted islands, snowed-in cabins, stowaways on ships, wandering toddlers, or whatever else fail just as badly. No one has the right to use a person’s body without consent. The sooner the slavers realize this, the better off we’ll all be.

1The allusion is to Matt. 19:21.

2Here, Wagner might ask if there is a distinction between leaving the cabin in the original scenario and letting the child starve in the scenario as I modified it. There is. By leaving, Mary is not refusing to feed the child; she is only risking that it will starve given that, for all she knows, both she and the child are going to die anyway. Also, being justified in leaving does not mean she is required to leave. If Mary decided to stay, she would be under the same obligations as in my modified scenario.

3I would go further and say if Mary can’t help, then she has no obligation at all. I’m not going to quibble with Wagner on this point, though.

4Arguably, if the formula had not been provided, Mary’s obligation also becomes less clear. This would certainly be the case with Peter. However, that argument will have to wait until we consider the “no formula” case at length.

5Given that “De Facto Guardian” is primarily concerned with responding to Thomson’s “Defense,” the de facto guardian concept is best read as an alternative theory Thomson’s MDS. Presumably, Wagner believes DFG is a better explanation for Mary’s case then Thomson’s. So, at best, it was intellectually lazy to not even try making that case.

6Of course, people may feel that starving an infant is more outrageous than starving an adult. Our concern here is with the fact the outrage exists, not the intensity of the outrage. While we may not be equally outraged in these cases, we would certainly be outraged in either case.

7Fortunately, the claim that thirty-eight people witnessed the Genovese murder and did nothing is not true. For an overview, see the Wikipedia article on the case.

8It seems to me that, if DFG can be fixed at all, this is going to be the central concept Wagner will want to keep. I would still have grave reservations that a de facto guardian’s obligations toward a strange child would be the same as if they were the child’s parent or guardian. Nevertheless, we have a strong motivation for stipulating this part of Wagner’s theory. Here we are not content to merely offer an alternative account and let the reader decide. We want to avoid a standstill; we want to say our argument is actually the better account and be justified in doing so. This means that if Wagner’s argument can’t stand on its own terms, then we can justifiably say our account is better.

9Technically, this may or may not be true. If Mary opted not to breastfeed her child and took medications to hasten the drying of her milk, she may or may not still be lactating.

10Interestingly enough, Wagner doesn’t consider a middle position that the kidnappers provided a breast pump. Though I seriously doubt it would change the outcome, I can’t entirely exclude the possibility he might have made us fall back and try to hold the line at the “this looks a whole lot like pregnancy” case. Unfortunately, this means that means if someone succeeds in making a plausible argument that Mary’s obligation at least extends to using the breast pump, we would have to revisit the case.

11I am not so inclined to accept the statement “the purpose of human sex is reproduction” as true. I can easily argue against this statement and even if I can’t prove it is false, I can muddy the waters. The above statements are not so easily argued against. Obviously, if someone with a better mind can successfully argue they are false, this slaver argument entirely falls apart.

12Here, I can’t help but note the irony of Wagner’s argument as it supposedly applies to pregnancy resulting from consensual sex. If having consensual sex is indeed like signing up to participate in an experiment, he has just managed prove the responsibility argument has no force!

13Realistically speaking, the infant would not die in one day, but for the sake of argument, we’ll assume that it could.

14As we have already shown, Wagner anticipated the “no formula” case would be more controversial, meaning we can’t take it for granted that our intuitions are going to be the same. The intuition may be different for Wagner and the “Justice for All Philosophy Team,” but my intuition remains the same in both the violinist and the “no formula” cases. I also suspect that for many if not most people on my “team,” their intuition will also remain the same in both cases. If it were just a matter of personal intuition, we could just say, “So what? Go ahead and breastfeed the baby then. We reserve the right to refuse.” However, these slavers want to force us to follow their intuition, so we will stay the course and follow the argument through.

15I hesitate to use this term, but it seems to be the easiest way to convey what I mean. If Peter is a transgender man, he could theoretically be lactating. What I mean to convey here is someone who is normally biologically incapable of lactating. If someone has a better term, I will gladly adopt it.

16This situation is not as absurd as it might appear at first glance. While feeding the violinist breast milk may not be ideal, it certainly would still keep him from starving. This means we cannot automatically excuse Mary because the violinist is not an infant.

17Wagner acknowledges a parent does not legally have to be “a kidney dialysis machine” for their children. However, I suspect that his distinction between medical treatment and feeding would not make so much a difference after all if Mary were strung up to the infant rather than the violinist.

18Incidentally, our thinking here largely answers the argument Perry Hendricks made in “My Body, Not My Choice: Against Legalised Abortion.” Like Wagner, Hendricks draws a straight line from requiring feeding in a case where formula is available (CABIN*) to breastfeeding (CABIN) with very little argumentation. But as we’ve already seen, the conversion is not as straightforward as it may initially seem. Given that Hendricks avoids discussion of what factor(s) beyond personhood might give Sally’s infant the right to be breastfed, we have no clear case that Sally must breastfeed in the CABIN case, even if we were agreed she must feed the infant in the CABIN* case.

Does the “Quadrilemma” Resolve the Abortion Debate in Cases of Doubt?

2021-10-09T17:01:00.002-07:00

Assuming you are unsure about the permissibility of abortion, which side should you err on? An unstated premise in a paper by Mario Derksen suggests a fairly sound principle. Assuming the odds are sufficiently high enough to warrant treating abortion as if it were impermissible, then we should do so just to be safe. This naturally raises the question of how high the bar needs to be for us to have such warrant.

The answer will largely depend on whether we are talking about acting on a personal level or a social level. On a personal level, treating something as if it were impermissible only means not participating in that action. If it turns out that the action is indeed permissible, you do nothing wrong by refraining. This means that on the personal level, you can set the bar as low as you deem necessary to be safe.

However, to act socially as if something were impermissible means demanding no one in your society participate in that action, usually on pain of criminal penalty. Minimally, this means intruding on other people’s business. If it turns out that the action is indeed permissible, you have not only needlessly intruded on other people’s business, you will have denied people the expected benefits of the action. This means that on the social level, the bar needs to be high enough to at least be commensurate with the level of intrusion. The rest of this essay will therefore deal primarily with the question of how high that bar should be before acting socially as if abortion were impermissible.

With regard to abortion, Peter Kraft developed an argument that was subsequently modified and used by Derksen. Following their lead, I will call this argument the “quadrilemma.” While somewhat similar to an argument I’ve addressed already, the quadrilemma poses four possible options which the abortion debate may take. They conclude three of these options involves some serious wrongdoing. Assuming these options have equal weight, there is a 75% chance the doubter should act as if abortion were impermissible. If they are correct, this would be a very powerful argument. It is certainly worth taking the time to examine it carefully.

Here, I’m going to consider both Kraft and Derksen’s versions.¹ I conclude that Kraft’s version is obviously a false choice, since it excludes viable possibilities. While Derksen’s version is much stronger because it eliminates many of the viable possibilities in Kraft’s version, ultimately, it comes to conclusions that do not follow from the premises and is therefore invalid.

Kraft’s formulation of the quadrilemma proposes there are only four possibilities regarding whether the prenate is a person: it is not a person and we know it; it is a person and we know it; it is a person but we don’t know it; and it is a person and we don’t know it. However, in regard to the question of whether abortion is permissible, this hardly exhausts the range of viable possibilities. It simply assumes that if the prenate is a person, abortion is morally impermissible. But that is not a given, meaning the range of viable possibilities also include:

The prenate is a person, but killing it is justified.
The prenate is a person, but killing it is excused.
Other permutations that flow these possibilities, such as “The prenate is a person but killing it is justified and we know/don’t know it.”
Other possibilities not mentioned above along with the permutations associated with them. One possibility might be, “The prenate is not a person, but it is still wrong to kill it.”

When we include the full range of viable possibilities, assuming all these options have equal weight, it seems unlikely all the possible options will involve serious wrongdoing. Thus, it also seems likely the odds the doubter should act as if abortion were impermissible are less than 75%. How low that chance is will depend on the full range of viable possibilities.

Derksen makes a relatively simple change to the formula that results in a vast improvement over Kraft. In his formulation, the possibilities are: “(1) abortion is right and we know it; (2) abortion is wrong and we know it; (3) abortion is right and we don’t know it; and (4) abortion is wrong and we don’t know it.” By formulating the quadrilemma as a question about abortion rather than the status of the prenate, the number of viable possibilities with regard to whether abortion is permissible is significantly reduced. Indeed, this formulation is stronger than perhaps Derksen himself realizes.

By formulating the quadrilemma as a question of whether abortion itself is (im)permissible, Derksen renders the reasoning behind the (im)permissibility of abortion moot. It doesn’t matter why abortion is permissible; indeed, any plausible reason will do. And the same is true if abortion is impermissible; any plausible reason will do. Thus, this formulation appears to avoid the false choice fallacy.

However, the strength of this formulation means the conclusions Derksen asserts do not necessarily follow from the premises. Derksen simply imports Kraft’s conclusions wholesale without examining them in light of the new formulation. So although I am now addressing the argument made by Derksen, the criticisms I offer will largely apply to Kraft’s arguments as well.

If option (1) is true, then there is no problem. Kraft, Derksen, and I are in complete agreement here. But whereas Kraft gives a grossly inadequate rebuttal to the truthfullness of option (1), Derksen can at least claim to have a prima facie refutation: “we know that (1) is false, for, obviously, there is serious controversy about abortion, and hence we do not ‘know’ that abortion is morally right.” Though I will have something further to say about this rebuttal, for now, I will simply stipulate Derksen has successfully refuted option (1).

Derksen’s problem really begins when he simply imports Kraft’s conclusion to option (2): “if (2) obtains, then abortion is murder.” But the conclusion does not follow from the premise. To even get close to this conclusion, you would need to add an unstated premise like all moral wrongs are murder. However, that premise is clearly absurd. Remember, the strength of this formulation is due to the fact that it does not matter why abortion is wrong, only that it is a fact.

But if option (2) obtains, that tells us nothing about what kind of wrong it is. Abortion would be murder if, and only if, the fetus is a person and abortion can neither be justified nor excused. That would simply throw us back to Kraft’s formulation with its attendant problems. Additionally, some philosophers like Perry Hendricks have made serious arguments that abortion is immoral even if the prenate is not a person. Whether such arguments fly is, of course, an entirely different matter. Regardless, if it is true that abortion is wrong even though the fetus is not a person, the kind of wrong being committed is not necessarily murder.

The possibility that abortion might be wrong though not murder will have a serious impact on the doubter who is convinced by Derksen’s overall argument that we should treat abortion as if it were impermissible. If we are going to treat abortion as if it were impermissible, how then should we treat it? Presumably, we would treat it as the kind of wrong it actually is. It might be murder; it might not. Derksen would still have to make the argument that it is.

But suppose I’m wrong, and Derksen is correct that if (2) obtains, abortion is murder. Then it would not matter, since I can decisively show (2) is false. After all, there is serious disagreement about abortion, and we therefore do not know that abortion is morally wrong.

Derksen’s contention that if (4) obtains, then abortion is manslaughter faces the same kind of problem as his conclusion about (2). Manslaughter is a category of murder. So if it turns out that abortion is wrong but not murder, then it certainly isn’t manslaughter either. Again, the putative doubter treating abortion as if it were impermissible would still have to figure out what kind of wrong it actually is before determining how they should act.

And since option (2) is false, option (4) is, at best, doubtful. The quadrilemma is based on the contention that all the options other than (1) involves some level of wrongdoing and has a high degree of culpability attached to it. As such, (4) clearly depends on (2) being true. Option (2) is a paradigm case for full moral culpability. If you do something you know is wrong, you are fully culpable for doing it. If you do something that is wrong but you don’t know it is wrong, you are less culpable. However, if option (2) is false, then we don’t know if abortion is wrong in the first place. Given that option (2) is false, it is unclear if one is doing something wrong and how culpable one might be if option (4) is true.

Derksen again duplicates Kraft’s argument wholesale in concluding that if option (3) obtains, one is committing criminal negligence. A bit of reflection is all it takes to show that Kraft, and therefore Derksen is wrong, and wrong in a way that undermines their entire argument.

Most importantly, Derksen and Kraft completely misconstrue criminal negligence. In order for one to be criminally negligent, one must somehow be negligent in the first place. And to be negligent in the first place, one has to fail to exercise reasonable care in situations where they have a duty to take said precautions. But if option (3) obtains, one doesn’t have a duty to do anything in the first place. So if (3) is true, one can’t be negligent with respect to it, let alone criminally so. Derksen failed to attend to the ramifications of his formulation and makes an invalid argument.

But let’s suppose I’m wrong and Derksen is correct in importing Kraft’s argument. The fact remains that Kraft still misconstrues criminal negligence and the argument itself is contradictory. Again, I’ll use Derksen’s particular formulation to demonstrate this. In Kraft’s formulation, the option is that the prenate is not a person, and we don’t know that. But as with Derksen’s formulation, if the prenate is not a person, then one has no particular duty toward it that they can be negligent about, let alone criminally so.

Derksen and Kraft’s argument that option (3) commits criminal negligence relies on one’s duty to be sure no one is harmed through their actions. In Derksen’s wording:

Suppose you are a truck driver, and while you are driving at night, you suddenly see in front of you what looks like a man lying on the road, although you are not sure that it’s a man, for it might actually be a dummy. From your view, you simply cannot tell. Would it be morally justifiable for you to run over this “person”? Clearly, the answer is no. The very fact that you don’t know whether it’s a human or a dummy obliges you not to run over it in order to be on the safe side, and to do otherwise would be morally reprehensible. This is how we are to understand (3), that not knowing whether abortion is right or wrong when in fact it is right is still morally inadmissible, for the uncertainty obliges us to err on the side of life.

Derksen is certainly correct that the fact we don’t know what the object is entails a duty not to hit it. But the reason for this is precisely because it might be a man, i.e., a person. But the option given specifically states the prenate is not a person. So if we replace the man with a prenate in this example, you do nothing wrong by running it over even if you don’t know the prenate is not a person.

If this analogy applies at all, it applies to Derksen’s option (4). However, since option (4) is already doubtful, it is uncertain whether this analogy applies there either. Derksen has a lot a work ahead of him if he is going to make this analogy work.

Meanwhile, acting as if abortion were impermissible on the social level under option (3) does entail wrongdoing. If one acts as if abortion were impermissible on a social level, this probably means they are going to work to criminalize abortion. And if they are successful in criminalizing abortion, they will be massively violating the rights of every person with a uterus in their jurisdiction for no good reason. Since under option (3) it would in fact be wrong to engage in this massive violation of people’s rights, by acting to criminalize abortion, one would be doing something objectively wrong.

To see how this strikes at the heart of the entire quadrilemma argument, recall that the unstated premise is that, assuming the odds are sufficiently high enough to warrant treating abortion as if it were impermissible, then we should do so just to be safe. However, when we do these kinds of calculations, we need to include all the relevant factors in the assessment.

Derksen and Kraft do not do this. They leave out the most important factor that needs to be considered in the abortion debate—people who can become pregnant. At the social level, the abortion debate is not about whether the prenate is a person. It never was, and it never will be. It is about whether pregnant people can be forced to carry their pregnancies to term. Prenatal personhood may have a significant (though not decisive) part in making this decision, but it is not what the abortion debate is about.

So, now let’s assume Derksen and Kraft are right, and that there is a 75% chance you are doing something wrong if one acts as if abortion were permissible. Is that high enough to justify forcing pregnant people to carry their pregnancies, along with the attendant abrogation of several other rights? YMMV, but personally, I would say no.

However, even if 75% is high enough to warrant acting socially as if abortion were impermissible, this analysis shows Derksen doesn’t reach that figure. The first two available options are false, one is doing something wrong if they act socially as if abortion were impermissible in the third option, and what one is doing wrong and how culpable they are if one acts as if abortion were permissible in the fourth option is unclear. This means, at best, there is only a 50% chance one is doing something wrong if they act as if abortion were permissible. Putative doubters are now back where they started.

We can do better than this if you doubt the permissibility of abortion. Derksen’s dismissal of option (1) and my counter-dismissal of option (2) are both based on the implication that to “know” is to have 100% certainty about something, in this case, that abortion is or is not permissible. However, 100% certainty about anything is extremely hard to come by. And chances are, we are never going to be 100% certain about the permissibility of abortion. Unless and until we become omniscient, we’re simply going to have to make do the best way we can. The questions are how we should go about calculating the odds and determining how high those odds need to be.

First, start by keeping it absolutely clear what the abortion debate is about on the social level: whether or not we can force pregnant people to carry their pregnancies. This entails abrogating, at minimum, their right to life, liberty, and security of person; their right to be free from slavery; their right to be recognized as a person before the law; their right to equal protection under the law; their right to be free from torture; their right to bodily integrity; and their right to decide when and if to have children. It also entails abrogating all these rights without due process even though the pregnant person has done nothing wrong. It also entails accepting the possibility our hospital wards will again be filled by people with uteruses dying from botched illegal abortions.

Remember, if a pregnant person’s rights can be so abrogated, so can yours. So even if you can’t get pregnant, make sure you set that bar high enough that you would agree to have your rights similarly abrogated given the same level of certainty about the impermissibility of an action. You probably don’t need to be 100% certain, but I suspect that bar is going to be very, very high. Now start assessing the arguments for and against (criminalizing) abortion, giving each their due weight. You should only act socially as if abortion were wrong, if and only if that bar is met.

If our object is to guide those who have doubts about the permissibility of abortion, the quadrilemma fails. Though seemingly powerful and based on a relatively sound principle, on closer inspection the quadrilemma at best will only bring doubters back to where they started. When acting socially, we can use Derksen’s principle, but we have to set the bar based on what is actually being debated and what the stakes are. That means actually doing the necessary work and not relying on the quadrilemma’s easy way out.

1Derksen cites a different work by Kraft than the one provided in the link. This presumably accounts for the slight variation in the order of the options.

It should also be noted that neither Derksen nor Kraft make an explicit distinction in their respective articles between acting personally and acting socially. However, given the level of wrongdoing they believe abortion is, along with the levels of wrongness readers are supposedly committing given any option other than the first, it seems clear they expect readers to act socially based on their findings.

Physicians for Life's Fallacious Anti-Abortion Arguments Part 3

2021-07-09T15:49:00.005-07:00

I am continuing my rebuttal of the Physicians for Life (PFL) article, “In Defense of Life: Rebuttals to Abortion Arguments.” In Part 1, I addressed the arguments directed at the bodily autonomy of pregnant people. In Part 2, I addressed arguments directed at prenatal personhood and considered the ethics of forcing one’s religious morality on others. While writing this post, it became obvious that I was not going to be able to mop up the rest of PFL’s arguments. It also became obvious I needed to write something that was more reflective after I was finished with the argumentation. Therefore, as it stands now, I will be writing two more posts in response to this article. This post will cover arguments related to the rights of self-determination, equality and privacy. Part 4 will hopefully wrap up the rest of the arguments. Part 5 will deal with the personal reflections I had while writing these posts.

Section 6 meant to address the popularity of the pro-choice stance. It’s a bit of a word salad. It is also out of date. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a clear majority of the public supports legal abortion in cases where pregnant people do not wish to be pregnant. This appears to be a significant improvement, but it also still means the public still views the permissibility of abortion through the lens of their judgments about pregnant people.ⁱ Among other things, this means we still have a long way to go before people with uteruses are recognized as fully human.

Let’s move on to the meat the PFL’s contention: “We all oppose ‘choice’ in the case of someone wishing to commit rape or wishing to beat up family members. ‘Choice’ is not an applicable concept when there are victims.” I absolutely agree here. The problem with PFL’s argument is that it identifies the victim incorrectly. If the pregnancy is unwanted, it is the pregnant person who is the victim. It is the pregnant person’s body that is being used without consent. And if abortion is prohibited, it is the pregnant person whose rights are violated.

Section 7 presents arguments meant to respond to the pro-choice advocate arguing, “I believe women should have a ‘choice.’” Their first response is that they are choosing to kill. But oddly, as part of this argument, PFL asserts that 90% of people having an abortion felt they were forced into the abortion and regretted it. Tellingly, they give no source for this assertion.

The reason they give no source for the assertion is because it is a lie. In The Turnaway Study, Diana Green Foster reports only about 1% of people seeking abortions in her study reported feeling coercion from others to have the abortion. None cited this as the main reason for having the abortion. This is consistent with other studies and the fact that abortion clinics assess pregnant people to ensure they are making the decision of their own free will. Furthermore, five years after the abortion, 95% of the study’s participants felt having the abortion was the right decision.ⁱⁱ

PFL then alleges “choice” is just a way of society telling pregnant people to deal with the unwanted pregnancy by getting rid of it so society does not have to give them the support they are entitled to. Then they cite Feminists for Life of America, an oxymoron if there ever was one, to much the same effect. These are odd assertions to make considering the slave monger party is also the party that wants to cut whatever support pregnant people can get from society.

Again citing Feminists for Life, PFL tries to address so-called informed choice material required by some states. It cherry picks a quote from the Supreme Court decision in Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that state-mandated material given to the pregnant person seeking an abortion is not “always relevant to the women’s decision, and may serve only to confuse her and heighten her anxiety.” It then accuses the court of patronizing the pregnant person’s ability to decide and forces pregnant people to make their decision in ignorance.

But read in context, the Thornburgh decision does no such thing. The decision explicitly states, “A requirement that the woman give what is truly a voluntary and informed consent, as a general proposition, is, of course, proper and is surely not unconstitutional.” Where the statute under contention went too far was in mandating the pregnant person be given information “not to inform the woman's consent but rather to persuade her to withhold it altogether” and that the mandated information be given “irrespective of the particular needs of the patient.” Rather than patronizing the pregnant person, the Court ruled the state was doing the patronizing and ordered it to stop.

PFL then encourages the slave monger to ask whether the pro-choice advocate supports abortions for sex selection. In the context of the United States, this is a red herring. Several studies of the reasons for having an abortion have been done over the years, and sex selection is not a factor. There is no evidence sex selection abortions is a problem in the United States. So basically the slave mongers are trying to rely on people’s discomfort with a non-existent problem to sneak through a general ban on abortion.

Next, PFL quotes Miriam J. Barth (without citing a source) to the effect that it is “sad” that “radical feminists” see abortion as necessary to women having the right to self-determination. I am not exactly sure what point the PFL is trying to make with this quote, or how it responds to the pro-choice advocate saying, “I believe women should have a ‘choice.’” It does not help their case. Just because something is sad does not necessarily mean it should be illegal.

In any case, however “sad” it may be, “radical feminists” are absolutely right that abortion rights are necessary for female-bodied people to have the right to self-determination. The Turnaway Study provides several lines of evidence showing how having an abortion vs. being refused one impacts the lives of women. On the physical level, those denied an abortion were more likely to have serious complications as a result of their pregnancy, an effect that carried over to subsequent pregnancies. Overall, those denied an abortion were less healthy than those who were able to obtain it. Those who are denied abortions may also have a higher risk of death from the pregnancy than the general population (146-150). Call me a radical feminist, but I think it is self-evident that living is a necessary precondition for the right to self-determination.

Women who are denied abortions significantly downgrade their aspirations. “[D]enying women wanted abortions causes them to scale back their plans for the coming year, while allowing women to have a wanted abortion enables them to set more aspirational plans for the coming year…. Women are changing their plans and dramatically scaling back their non-child-related plan in response to being denied a wanted abortion” (168). Even with these lowered aspirations, those denied an abortion were less likely to achieve those goals (169-170). “Women denied abortions tend to scale back their career and financial expectations, realizing that having a child—or another child—will affect their life trajectory. Women know that carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term will limit their other accomplishments” (170).

In the longer term, those who were denied an abortion became more likely to raise their children alone. Their employment situation is more erratic than those who had an abortion, and it takes four years to catch up, with the expected negative impact on their families’ economic well-being. Those denied an abortion were far more likely to depend on welfare benefits, including food stamps and WIC. They are more likely to live in poverty, and even after five years were more likely to report they do not have enough money for basic expenses (174-177). On top of a 78% increase in past due accounts, those who were denied an abortion also had increased incidences of evictions, bankruptcies, court judgments, and loan defaults (179-180).

Being denied an abortion also has ramifications for future relationships. For example, only 28% of those denied an abortion described themselves as being in a good relationship after two years compared to 47% who were able to get an abortion (235). Even more worrisome, those denied an abortion were more likely to be tethered to abusive partners, often because the partner’s income is their main source of survival. Not surprisingly, those who were denied an abortion were more likely to be physically assaulted by their partner than those who were able to have an abortion (232).

Note I am not saying that those who are denied abortions cannot or will not succeed. The Turnaway Study gives a number of examples of women who succeed despite being denied an abortion. However, a common theme of those successes was that these women had excellent support systems, usually a family that had the means to help. And arguably they would have succeeded much faster had they gotten the abortion they sought because they would not have had to face the socio-economic obstacles associated with being forced to bear and rear a child before they were ready. But for most female-bodied people, most of the time, abortion rights are necessary to fully exercising the right to self-determination.

Shifting away from the Turnaway Study, it has been shown that homicide is a (if not the) leading cause of pregnancy-related death. Often, they are murdered by their intimate partners. Obviously, we cannot how many murdered pregnant people wanted or planned to have an abortion. Still less, we cannot know how many of them would have gotten an abortion had they known they would be murdered. Once again, being alive is a necessary precondition for the right to self-determination.

PFL then returns to slut-shaming, arguing the real choice happens in the bedroom. Female-bodied people are urged to work out an understanding with their partner such that pregnancy is prevented in the first place. In any case, they should not “take out their frustration on a helpless little child.” I can only quote the absurd remark that follows: “Often, abortion advocates portray women as weak, vulnerable wimps who must give men all they want (blame men for their problems); then they turn around and demand that women are totally in charge of their destinies with total ‘control over their bodies’ (blame their babies for their problems) because they allow the abortionist (usually a male) to violate their bodies and destroy their preborn babies. The abortion advocates cannot have it both ways!” I can only at best guess what they are trying to say here.

So, where to begin? As I noted in Part 1, Physicians for Life are against abortion even in cases of rape, a fact we will deal with more fully later. As we will also see, these slave mongers are against abortion in cases where birth control failed. Logically, this means it does not matter what the female-bodied person does. What we have here is a case where the slave monger places the entire onus on female-bodied people to not get pregnant, and then say it does not matter what they do because if they get pregnant through no fault of their own, they are still going to be forced to gestate. And then they accuse the pro-choice side of wanting to have their cake and eat it too. Forgive me if I’m not impressed.

What I would really like to say here is that the slave mongers at PFL need to take off the rose-colored glasses. Rape happens. So does reproductive coercion. People don’t always keep their agreements. And even when both parties honor their agreements, accidents happen. There is no reversible birth control that is 100% effective, 100% foolproof, and 100% tamper proof. People cannot always afford the most effective birth control, and the cheapest methods are also the least effective ones. Do pro-choice advocates say that female-bodied people are weak to the point they have to give male-bodied people whatever they want? No, they just happen to live in the real world.

If these arguments do not work, PFL suggests asking pro-choice advocates why they fight against laws requiring informed consent. This was partly answered above in the discussion of Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The short answer is we do not oppose medically sound information being given to patients seeking an abortion. What we oppose is state-mandated interventions intended to intimidate pregnant people from having an abortion. We oppose states requiring abortion providers to tell lies about abortions causing breast cancer or mental health issues. We oppose mandating medically unnecessary procedures and TRAP laws.

If none of these arguments against choice work, the slave mongers ask what pro-choice advocates do besides providing abortions. Well, let’s take a look at the service categories Planned Parenthood provides beyond abortion, to take an example: birth control; emergency contraception; general health care; HIV services; LGBT services; men’s health services; patient education; pregnancy testing and services; STD testing, treatment, and vaccines; and women’s services. (So much for the remark that their income comes from the number of abortions they do.) Pro-choice advocates also tend to advocate for living wages and strong social safety nets so people who decide to have children are able to care for them. They also tend to advocate expanded medical coverage of pregnancy, up to and including Medicare for All so that people who decide to carry a pregnancy remain healthy and give birth to healthy babies. They also tend to support comprehensive sex education and no out-of-pocket cost for contraceptive coverage to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place. They also tend to fight against pregnancy discrimination in the workplace. They also tend to advocate for paid family leave so parents can bond better with their newborns. I could go on and on, but this should be enough to get started.

Moving onto section 10, the pro-choice advocate is said to ask how women can have equality if they cannot control their reproductive lives. PFL counters with questions like how female-bodied people are seen as needing surgery to avoid their second-class status and why they should have to become like men to be successful. These are strawmen. No one is saying any of this. As detailed above, in terms of just physical health, lowered aspirations, economic well-being, and future relationships, having a child one is not ready for has long-term ramifications on the ability of female-bodied people to live their lives on their own terms. Pro-choice advocates are not saying access to abortion is the only thing they need to overcome second-class status; but it surely is part of the puzzle.

PFL cites the oxymoronic Feminists for Life saying if there are barriers to equal participation of pregnant people and new mothers, that is the fault of society. I agree. But who are the people working to maintain the second-class status of female-bodied people? That would be the so-called pro-life party, as perfectly encapsulated in this cartoon:

The next section tries to address the right to privacy. Physicians for Life contend that the abortion debate is about whether violence is done, and if so privacy has nothing to do with it.

First, let me note that I may not be the best person to address the right to privacy as it relates to abortion. Though the right to privacy surely applies to abortion, I consider it too thin a thread to hang the legal right to have an abortion on. Nor am I the only pro-choice advocate to think there are stronger grounds to affirm the right to an abortion. Ruth Bader Ginsberg argued abortion rights are more properly situated in equal protection. Other arguments have been offered to ground the right to an abortion in bodily autonomy,ⁱⁱⁱ limits on the duty to aid others, and so on.

I myself think abortion rights should be grounded in the Thirteenth Amendement. The argument is simple and elegant. Prohibiting abortion makes the pregnant person the state-mandated slave (or, if you feel this word is too harsh, the involuntary servant) of the prenate. This is clearly prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment. Full stop.

Having said that, Physicians for Life is just plain wrong that the debate is about whether violence is done. An induced abortion forcibly removes or expels the prenate from the pregnant person’s body. No knowledgeable pro-choice advocate would deny this.

The abortion debate is about whether the pregnant person can be forced to carry the pregnancy to term. It’s not about whether violence is done; it’s about whether it is justified. Pro-choice advocates argue, generally speaking, that the violence is justified and that the pregnant person cannot be forced to carry the pregnancy to term. This being the case, the abortion decision is in fact a matter of privacy.

PFL would then ask the pro-choice advocate whether the right to privacy was absolute and whether that right exceeds another person’s right to live. PFL is begging the question of whether the prenate is a person, an issue I already dealt with in Part 2. Having already conceded that I think the right to privacy was a thin thread to hang abortion rights on, I am not going to contradict myself here. However, I think it can still be argued that, given current medical technology, abortion is covered by the right to privacy. I will concede that, generally speaking, the right to privacy does not outweigh a person’s right to life. I will even go so far as to stipulate prenatal personhood for this purpose.

What, after all, is the right to privacy? I think a good definition of the right to privacy is to be let alone by other people and/or the government so long as you are doing nothing wrong. This may not align precisely with the legal definition, but it does seem to be something like the definition most people use in their everyday lives. Already, we can see why, generally speaking, the right to privacy does not outweigh another person’s right to life: unjustly depriving someone of their right to life is wrong. But it is also why we can see that there are some cases where the right to privacy does outweigh another person’s right to life.

Recall my argument for the permissibility of abortion roughly runs as follows. In an unwanted pregnancy, the prenate is using the pregnant person’s body without consent. Because of this, the pregnant person is permitted to use any necessary means to end the nonconsensual use of their body, just as we are permitted to use any necessary means to evade/escape rape, slavery, kidnapping, involuntary scientific experimentation, and forced organ donations.

For a moment, let’s focus on forced organ or tissue donations. I have cited the case of McFall v. Shimp several times in my arguments on abortion. In this case, McFall had a blood condition and required a bone marrow transplant to live. Shimp, McFall’s cousin, consented to an initial test that indicated his marrow was compatible. It was only when Shimp refused to undergo the confirmatory test that McFall sued, asking the court to compel Shimp to undergo the confirmatory test and donate his bone marrow if compatibility was confirmed. Ultimately, the court ruled that, however morally detestable Shimp’s refusal to donate his bone marrow to McFall may be, he was doing nothing legally wrong and was to be let alone. Shimp’s right to privacy in this case did outweigh McFall’s right to life.

One could argue that in the case examples I used in my argument, these are not matters of privacy. If I killed such a perpetrator, I could still be charged with murder and I would have the burden of proof that I acted in self-defense. Further, much of the case would probably center around whether it was necessary to kill the offender. This much is true, but the reason is that there would be questions about whether the perpetrator was in fact trying to do these things and whether it was necessary to kill the offender.

This is not the case with abortion, particularly when procured before viability. In the case of the prenate, that they are using the pregnant person’s body is beyond the shadow of a doubt. By seeking an abortion, a pregnant person has proven they do not consent to that use.^iv There are simply no means of ending a pregnancy before viability without it resulting in the death of the prenate. Lacking any means of transferring the prenate to another person or an artificial womb, the question of necessity is settled. If stopping a rapist always and everywhere meant killing them, then necessity would not even come into play in my case for self-defense. The only thing I would have to prove is that the offender was really trying to rape me, i.e., trying to use my body without consent. Always and everywhere, the prenate is using the pregnant person’s body. Always and everywhere, a person seeking an abortion does not consent to the use of their body by the prenate. Before viability, the necessity of killing the prenate is unambiguous. There is clearly no question about whether the pregnant person is doing something wrong, so the decision to have an abortion is covered by the pregnant person’s right to privacy.

As stipulated in my essay, once the fetus becomes viable, things become more complicated as the necessity of killing the fetus becomes questionable. Let us be clear here. If the pregnant person no longer consents to the pregnancy even past viability, they still have the right to use any means necessary to end the nonconsensual use of their body by the prenate. This part is beyond question.

However, once the fetus becomes viable, options that will not necessarily kill it, like inducing labor and C-sections, become available. In the discussion of necessity, I argued that is not required to take heroic measures to avoid killing the offender. As applied to ending an unwanted pregnancy, this means if inducing labor or having a C-section is riskier than having an abortion, an abortion may still be considered necessary.

At the time I wrote the essay, I admitted I was not a medical expert and could not answer the question of risk definitively. However, the question of just how risky in terms of death from various forms of late-term abortions, inducing labor, and having a C-section came up in the comments. Finding these statistics does help me to start answering the question of necessity. So, let’s list the mortality rates:

There are 8.8 deaths per 100,00 live births. This is the baseline.
There are 4.9 deaths per 100,000 dilation and evacuation abortions.
There are 9.6 deaths per 100,000 for instillation methods of abortion.
There are 60 deaths per 100,000 for hysterotomies and hysterectomies.
There are 13 deaths per 100,000 C-sections.

I could not find any readily available death rate for inducing labor. I found that inducing labor increases the risk of fatal embolisms and postpartum hemorrhage, but not a solid deaths per 100,000 cases of induced labor. I would presume that heightened risks of potentially fatal complications translates into at least a slightly higher risk of death than the baseline, but I cannot verify it. Nor do I know how the potential benefits weigh against the risks. So I will stipulate for the sake of this discussion that inducing labor is no more risky than the baseline.

Looking at these statistics, two things stand out. First, a C-section is far riskier than the baseline. A pregnant person cannot be required to have a C-section in an effort to avoid the death of the fetus. However, a D&E is still far less risky than the baseline, and presumably inducing labor. In terms of my argument, an abortion can still be considered necessary because the other options would be considered heroic. A pregnant person does nothing wrong in requesting a D&E, and properly trained personnel do nothing wrong in providing it. And this falls within the right to privacy.

I have already dealt with section 12 in part 2, so before closing this post, I will comment on section 13. In response to the pro-choice argument, “The government should not interfere in this highly personal issue,” PFL responds by saying the real issue is about the government preserving and protecting life. This response still begs the question of whether the prenate has the right to life in the first place, which, as I explained in part 2, they have failed to show. Beyond that, it also begs the question of whether an abortion unjustly deprives the prenate of their right to life, assuming they have it. PFL does not even try to make a case here. In light of these two basic, fundamental failures, PFL’s assertions about what the “real issue” is falls flat.

Perhaps realizing this, PFL urges slave mongers to divert to the issue of the government paying for abortions. They think they have caught pro-choice advocates in a contradiction. Pro-choice advocates are said to both want the government stay out of abortion but also pay for it. However, a pro-choice advocate would be more likely to actually say something like, “The government should not interfere with decisions pregnant people make about their pregnancies.” Once the strawman has been dealt with, the apparent contradiction disappears.

I should note here that not all pro-choice advocates think the government should pay for abortions beyond the normal rape and maternal health exceptions already contained in the Hyde Amendment. One can hold without contradiction that abortion should be legal but that it should not be paid for using taxpayer money. They are in fact separate issues.

While I can only speak for myself, what follows is the general sense I get from those who do advocate the government should pay for abortions. Abortion care is health care. I have already already discussed some of the findings from The Turnaway Study regarding the health effects of being denied a wanted abortion. I have also shown that even late-term abortions are far safer than childbirth. In this post, I have not discussed the effect being denied an abortion has on children (those who already exist, the one the pregnant person is forced to bear, and/or future children). Spoiler alert: It’s not good.

Furthermore, the earlier one has an abortion, the easier and safer the procedure. But as The Turnaway Study notes, “Needing time to raise money to cover travel and procedure costs was the most common reason for delay among our study participants, with nearly two-thirds of women who showed up close to the clinic’s gestational limit reporting such costs as a reason for delay” (65).

So it is in everyone’s best interest that the government pay for abortions should the pregnant person decide to have one. But more than that, as I already mentioned, pro-choice advocates tend to advocate expanded medical coverage of pregnancy. I myself advocate Medicare for All, so that everyone can receive the medical care they need regardless of their individual situations and choices.

Edited on 2 Nov 2021 to fix bad hyperlinks.

iPollitt, Katha. Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights (p. 46). Picador. Kindle Edition. Pollitt appears to be dealing with attitudes toward the reasons pregnant people abort in general, and not just legal permissibility. It is possible, and even likely respondents who think abortion should be legal for people simply not wanting to be pregnant would still disagree that it is morally permissible. Therefore, I am not going to attempt a reconciliation between the Kaiser survey I cited and Pollitt’s figures.

iiFoster, Diana Greene. The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion (p. 42-43, 124-126). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

iiiManninen, B.. “Rethinking Roe v. Wade: Defending the Abortion Right in the Face of Contemporary Opposition.” The American Journal of Bioethics 10 (2010): 33-46.

ivA slave monger may try to appeal to implicit consent, but Holly M. Smith refuted that notion nearly forty years ago. It is sufficient to say that in a case of a theoretical argument the pregnant person consented by having voluntary sex and an actual person saying here and now they do not consent, the actual person wins.

Thoughts on the Sentencing of Derek Chauvin

2021-07-01T17:08:00.003-07:00

I have wanted to write about the conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd since the verdict came in on 20 April 2021. I hoped we were about to witness the dawn of justice, but I knew I should wait until Chauvin was sentenced. So I waited. Beyond cheering about the conviction with my family, I said nothing. I deliberately avoided reading commentary about the conviction while I developed my own thoughts. And I hoped. And I waited.

On 25 June 2021, Chauvin was sentenced to twenty-two and a half years. And my hopes were dashed. Again. I have still avoided any commentary on this decision. I discussed it with a few of my Black workmates, most of whom knew about the decision. I wanted a sense of how they felt and to see if my disappointment was misplaced. I do not offer this as a scientific survey. When I asked those who knew about the sentence what they thought, all felt the sentence should have been heavier, though their reasons varied. It took most of the morning to articulate just to myself exactly why I was disappointed with Chauvin’s sentence.

Explaining what I hoped for and why I am disappointed will take some time. What follows is my personal reflection. If it is not already obvious, I am writing from the perspective of a white man who considers himself an ally of the Black community. As such, I have my blind spots. For my Black readers, I am pretty sure those blind spots are obvious and that you will point them out to me. I have been stopped by the police for being poor, but I do not and cannot know the sheer terror many members of the Black community feel when they are stopped by law enforcement. I can only talk about George Floyd’s murder in the abstract, however enraged and horrified I feel about it. But it is not visceral in the sense I seriously wonder whether I am going to be next.

Before going on, I have a confession to make. I have not watched the video, and I will not link to it here. I have seen enough videos of police brutality toward Black people, whether it includes outright murder or not. The written descriptions are and have been enough for me to be horrified and enraged by Chauvin’s treatment of Floyd. And for all intents and purposes, I have watched a person die horribly in real time. Next to that experience, simply watching a video…. I don’t need to see it.

I followed the case as closely as I could. I followed the protests and the police brutality used against them. I watched as the media dragged Floyd’s name through the mud—as if anything could possibly justify the nine and a half minutes of sheer torture he endured while dying. I watched when Chauvin and his accomplices were indicted for unintentional murder and became enraged. For God’s sake! Chauvin pressed down on Floyd’s neck and back for nine and a half minutes while he was handcuffed and the crowd was shouting for Chauvin to back off! How many fucking minutes would it have taken for it to be declared intentional? Ten minutes? An hour?

I calmed down eventually. I let myself have faith the prosecutors were taking things cautiously to ensure a conviction. That was why they added the charges of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Give the jurors some options and (hopefully) they will convict him of something. It may not have been what I would personally like to see, and it almost certainly would not have been what the Black community would like to see. But something was better than nothing, which is all the justice Breonna Taylor is likely to get.

I followed the trial as closely as I could, mostly through the Guardian. On the morning of 20 April 2021, I was doing something on the computer when I heard the television in another room announcing the verdict was about to be read. I went to that room to watch. And I found myself holding my breath.

It isn’t hard to understand why. The subject of police brutality, especially toward Black people, first truly burst into my consciousnessⁱ when the video of the Rodney King beating became national news in March 1991. I was not quite twenty years old at the time. To say I was shocked by the video footage would be an understatement. But it was still nothing compared to the shock I felt when the four officers charged in the case were not convicted, with three officers being acquitted outright.

And then to see it happen time and again. I cannot possibly list all the names here. Here are some that have prominent places in my memory: Amadou Diallo. Abner Louima. Jannie Ligons. Eric Garner. Michael Brown. Tamir Rice. Freddie Gray. Sandra Bland. Philando Castile. Sometimes, there was video in these cases; sometimes not. Few of these cases resulted in convictions, assuming anyone was charged at all.

I was holding my breath because I genuinely feared Chauvin would be acquitted of all charges. We had been through this before. Indeed, I suspect part of the reason Chauvin tortured Floyd to death was precisely because we had been through this before, and he thought he would get away with it. What else could possibly explain the brazenness of Chauvin’s actions? Chauvin acted in full view of a crowd, his accomplices keeping them from intervening, with at least one camera capturing everything. These are the actions of someone confident they will not face any serious consequences of their actions.

I also feared what an acquittal would mean. It would be an announcement to law enforcement that they are literally above the law. If Chauvin can get away practically scot-free with such a brazen and egregiously cruel murder—on camera—what do they have to fear? It would also be an announcement to BIPOC communities that no matter how brazen, no matter how outrageous, no matter how cruel law enforcement is toward members of their communities, they can’t even hope for justice. At least, not until we start seeing more white mothers crying on TV.ⁱⁱ And even then….

So when Judge Peter Cahill read the guilty verdict for the most serious charge of unintentional second-degree murder, I explosively shouted, “Yes!” Then guilty for third degree murder. “Yes!” And finally guilty for second-degree manslaughter. “Yes!” I never expected Chauvin would be convicted of all the charges. I expected that, at most, he would have been convicted for second-degree manslaughter. Maybe there was hope that justice had dawned.

But I still knew it was not over yet. Yes, the jury got it right, and thank God for that. But while waiting for sentencing, another case kept coming back to my mind: Brock Turner sexually assaulting Chanel Miller. I do not want to overemphasize the similarities between these two cases; there are significant differences between them. However, these are the things that came to my mind:

There is a racial component to both cases. Miller, who is half Chinese, was raped by a white male. Floyd, an African American, was murdered by a white police officer.
Bystanders at the scene intervened or tried to intervene. In Miller’s case, graduate students Peter Lars Jonsson and Carl-Fredrik Arndt caught Turner red-handed, successfully stopped the assault and captured Turner. In Floyd’s case, at least one bystander was physically held back from helping Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Tou Thao.
In both cases, Turner and Chauvin’s defenders resorted to blaming-the-victim tactics as if Miller and Floyd got what they deserved for whatever perceived or real crimes they may have committed.
In both cases, the juries rejected those arguments, rightly finding Turner and Chauvin guilty of the most serious crime they were allowed to consider.

So in Miller’s case, so far so good. The bystanders intervened and stopped Turner. They got it right. Stanford University banned Turner from the campus, getting at least that part right. USA Swimming banned Turner from competing. They got it right. The prosecutors pressed the most serious charges they could. They got it right. The jury rejected Turner’s lies. They got it right.

And then that fucking judge let Turner off with a slap on the wrist.

Could this have happened in Floyd’s murder? Yes—easily. Remember a prime similarity in these cases: in both cases the offender is white and the victim was a person of color. While neither Turner nor Chauvin had pristine records before these particular criminal acts, this was their first criminal conviction. Both also have class privilege and were represented by private attorneys. And judges have wide discretion in sentencing.

Then on 12 May 2021, Judge Cahill ruled that four aggravating factors applied to the case. I began to hope that Chauvin would indeed get a heavy sentence. A sentence that was at least commensurate to the aggravating factors. I did not expect Cahill would sentence Chauvin with the forty-year maximum sentence, but things looked good for Chauvin to get the thirty years the prosecutors requested.

Twenty-two and a half years. Two hundred and seventy months. A little over half the maximum sentence.

So much for the dawn of justice.

I wanted to see a sentence that would make the police sit up and take notice. I wanted a sentence that said, “You’re not going to get away with this shit anymore.” Chauvin’s sentence does not do that. At best, this only tells the cops to be careful about being so egregious. It is a sentence that only means the next Derek Chauvin who tortures the next George Floyd to death will make sure there are no cameras around.

iI did know about police brutality towards Black people during the Civil Rights Era from my history classes, of course. In my naivete, I thought that era was over.

iiThe allusion is to the opening portion of Chris Rock’s Tamborine (2018).

TRULY SHOCKING NEWS!

2021-04-16T15:08:00.001-07:00

From the 19 April 2021 issue of the National Enquirer:

When I saw this headline I was flabbergasted! When investigating the origin of COVID-19, who would have ever thought to look at facilities developing and testing dinnerware?

This is why the Enquirer gets the big scoops, folks!

Nariah Johnson: A Story of a Senseless Tragedy

2021-03-04T11:41:00.002-07:00

This post is going to be far more personal than I usually write. I am going to tell the story of Nariah Johnson, a four-year-old girl who was killed yesterday in a bizarre accident that took place in the parking lot of the Walmart where I work. The accident occurred around 1030 on 3 March 2021.

I was on my lunch period sitting outside when I heard several thunking sounds, followed by what sounded like screaming and shouting. Minor accidents occur all the time in the parking lot, so when I investigated the screaming, my initial thought was that a couple drivers were about to get into a fight. What I saw when I got to the area was something like this:

The screaming was because a child, three-year-old Robert Johnson was still trapped underneath the truck. There were perhaps ten people trying to lift the truck to free the child. As I went to help, I caught a glimpse of another woman who had a bloodied face and was crying in panic. The people managed to free Robert before I found a position to help. Robert walked away with obvious shoulder injuries, so I turned my attention to a little girl lying on the sidewalk where you can see the dark spot on the sidewalk.

The little girl was Nariah Johnson. I knelt next to her. Her head was a bloody mess, and I could not feel a pulse. Two other people and I performed CPR on Nariah, switching as we got tired and continuing until the paramedics arrived. At that point, we still did not have a pulse.

Once the paramedics arrived, I left the area so they could do their work. I was already breaking down in uncontrollable sobs as I gathered my things and went back into the store. I called my nephew to pick me up while I headed to my work area to tell my team leader I couldn't stay. All I knew at that point was that I had failed to save that little girl's life. At the time, I still did not even know her name.

In due time, my nephew arrived. We loaded my bicycle into the truck and he drove me home. Talking about what happened left me sobbing again. My store manager called me later to be sure I got home safely. I was informed at that time that the paramedics had restored Nariah's pulse before taking her to the hospital. I learned it was indeed possible to laugh and cry at the same time.

But whatever hope I had that Nariah might survive was shortlived. By refreshing my news search on the accident over and over, I learned that Nariah died at the hospital of brain injuries. I also learned that Nariah had been dragged completely underneath the truck. I can't even begin to imagine the horror Nariah and her family went through.

At last check, the reason the truck jumped the curb and hit the Johnson family is still under investigation, though the police seem to have ruled out driver impairment. The driver may face charges of reckless driving, which I find hard to wrap my mind around. A child was killed and at most, the driver will have to spend six months in jail. I am one of the last people in the world who would advocate for vengeance, but a mere charge of reckless driving for killing someone in such a horrific way is incredibly shallow.

Once I felt calm enough, I called the Glendale Police Department to give them my information. Although I did not actually see the accident happen, the things I saw and did at the accident scene may still be helpful for any prosecution. As of now, they had not called me back.

Through the news, I also learned that a vigil for Nariah would be held last night. I went back to the store, intending to participate in the vigil. Unfortunately, when I got there, there were a number of mixed messages as to whether and when it would took place. This morning, I learned the vigil happened after all. I deeply regret missing it.

The family has set up a GoFundMe asking funds for Nariah's funeral expenses. As of this writing, they have nearly achieved their goal. Presumably, the Johnson family will also need help with medical expenses. Robert went through surgery, but the last word I've had is that he will pull through.

Before 1030 of 3 March 2021, just yesterday, I did not know Nariah Johnson. She was presumably one of the many young children I made it a point to wave to while asking the adults if they needed any help in my store. After 1030 of 3 March 2021, Nariah Johnson is someone I will never forget.

The following photos come from the Johnson family via fox10phoenix.com.

Post updated 4 March 2021 1430

Physicians for Life's Fallacious Anti-Abortion Arguments Part 2

2020-11-14T20:51:00.008-07:00

My position on prenatal personhood has not changed since my “Why Abortion is Permissible” essay. I still have not found a satisfactory account of personhood that establishes that the prenate is a person with the same right to life as you and me. Likewise, I still have not found a satisfactory account of personhood that establishes prenates are not persons with the same right to life as you and me.

One thing that does strike me about debating prenatal personhood is that, especially for the slave mongers, “personhood” serves as a secular stand-in for ensoulment. This is partly because the anti-abortion stance is pushed almost entirely by religious conservatives, the vast majority of whom would argue God gives people their souls at conception. Or, if one argues that abortion is permissible to a certain point of pregnancy (e.g,. the “quickening”), that person often means this is the point where the prenate has acquired personhood, or in religious terms, a soul. And, usually, a religious person who believes that one acquires a soul either at birth or sometime after birth, if they object to abortion at all, do so on grounds other than prenatal personhood. Physicians for Life, perhaps inadvertently, makes this connection in its article, when it states, “It may not be possible to prove that personhood or 'ensoulment' begins at conception; however, you cannot prove that personhood does NOT begin at conception.”

It also seems to me that even though those who are nonreligious and do not believe in the soul are also, in a sense, using personhood as a secular stand-in for ensoulment. Let’s take Bob Seidensticker’s spectrum argument. If someone has been debating abortion long enough, they will sooner or later run across some variation of the saying, “An acorn is not an oak tree.” Seidensticker develops this saying by pointing out that there are many instances where we know there is a spectrum, and that the thing on one end of that spectrum is certainly not the same thing as that on the other end. While we may not be able to pinpoint exactly where on the spectrum something becomes the other thing, that does not invalidate the fact that, for example, an acorn is not an oak tree. He suggests, and later develops the thought that personhood is an emergent property, rather than an inherent one. But in doing so, he is taking a position that is not that far from what traditional Christianity has said about ensoulment for more than 1900 years.

Given the quasi-religious nature of the term “personhood” and its beginning, I am going to engage the personhood portions of PFL’s article using both secular and religious arguments. In doing so, I am not saying I can prove that God exists, souls exist, and that they are acquired at a particular point. Nor am I making an argument that they do. I am taking this approach for two main reasons. First, I am engaging the slave mongers on the basis of common ground. Second, since I am going to engage the ethics of forcing one’s religious stances on the general public, the contrast between my religious views and the slave mongers is relevant to that discussion.

So, let’s start with defining what a person for the purpose of this essay. A person is a being whom, for whatever reason, it is presumptively wrong to kill. With this definition, I want to highlight two aspects. First, this does not assume that only humans, or even that humans in all stages of life are persons. If that “whatever reason” applies to other species, whether on Earth, other planets, or other dimensions, then those species would be also be persons. It also means that the “whatever reason” has to exist for the individual member of the given species. So if that “whatever reason” does not apply to, say, prenates, then it would not be presumptively wrong to kill them.

Second, to say it is presumptively wrong to kill a person is not the same thing as saying it is always wrong to kill them. It does mean that: 1) if it is presumptively wrong to kill such a being, then such killing has to be justified and 2) the reason for the wrongness of killing such a being is not “because [insert situational circumstances].” In other words, it is not presumptively wrong to kill non-person beings, although there may be reasons other than personhood that will generate moral outrage in the killing, (e.g., excessive cruelty). So if we were to determine that, say, infants, are not persons, and we still want to say killing them is wrong, we would have to do it on grounds other than personhood.

But it also means that killing persons is not always wrong either. It simply means the general rule is that killing a person is wrong. Killing a person may be justified, as in cases of self-defense or the execution of murderers. What this means is that even if we determine it is presumptively wrong to kill prenates, this would not in itself settle the abortion debate. We would still have to determine whether abortions are justified.

In “Why Abortion is Permissible,” I wrote that I believe that humans probably do not acquire personhood until birth. I base that position on Scripture, especially Genesis 2:7//Moses 3:7//Abraham 5:7 and 3 Nephi 1:13. This is consistent with the scriptural view that the “breath of life” is what distinguishes the living from the dead (e.g., Genesis 7:22, Job 33:4, Psalm 104:29, Ezekiel 37:10, and obliquely Ether 15:31). Exodus 21:22-25 only mandates a fine for causing a miscarriage while applying lex talionis should further injury befall the pregnant person. Numbers 5:11-31 prescribes a ritual whereby a jealous husband may make his wife undergo a trial by ordeal that, if she fails, results in her womb discharging and her uterus dropping, with no concern over the fact this will result in a miscarriage if the wife is pregnant. Finally, all those passages that require being born again as a condition of salvation (e.g., John 3:3, Mosiah 27:25, Moses 6:59) presume one was born the first time around. From Genesis to The Articles of Faith, Scripture shows a remarkable lack of concern for prenatal life, especially if we are meant to believe a person has a soul from the moment of conception.ⁱ

This scriptural view comports well with reason. It seems absurd that God would bequeath a soul on a newly fertilized zygote when 73% of them will not survive im plant ation and be flushed out in the next menstrual cycle, and up to 3% more will not make it until birth under normal circumstances. I believe God is rational, and it staggers the imagination that God would be so wasteful in distributing souls.

Furthermore, ensoulment at conception raises unanswered questions. Consider monozygotic twins, where one zygote is split either naturally or artificially into two or more embryos. If ensoulment occurs at conception, that naturally leads to the conclusion that each of the identical twins split the one soul between them. Yet it is usually maintained identical twins are separate persons with their own souls. However, this requires mind-boggling ad hoc explanations when the simpler explanation is that ensoulment occurs sometime after conception.

Or consider tetragametic chimerism, which occurs when two fraternal twins merge into one embryo. If ensoulment occurs at conception, that naturally leads to the conclusion that the tetragametic chimera has (at least) two souls. I have yet to get a straight answer from a slave monger to the question of how many souls a tetragametic chimera has. Hydatidiform moles also form from fertilized eggs, which, if ensoulment occurs at conception, would mean it would be presumptively wrong to kill them. Yet not even the most extreme slave monger goes this far, although they can not give me a straight answer to why hydatidiform moles are not persons.

The simplest answer that would account for all these phenomena is that the earliest point ensoulment happens sometime after conception, and probably sometime after implantation as well. It also seems most reasonable that if ensoulment does occur before birth, it would happen at some point where it is clear the fetus will be born and survive in the natural course of events. A nencephalic fetuses and sirenomelic fetuses, to cite two examples, probably do not have souls.ⁱⁱ

With these preliminaries out of the way, let us turn to the PFL article. In section one, the first argument is the slippery slope argument that if you can not pinpoint exactly when you became a person, you need to accept that you were a person from the moment of conception. This argument is handled quite readily by the spectrum argument outlined above. But given the preliminaries I have established, we may be able to say more.

Recall my definition of a person is a being that is presumptively wrong to kill for whatever reason. Also recall that the “whatever reason” which makes a being presumptively wrong to kill may or may not apply to the being at all stages of the being’s life. The implication of the slippery slope argument presented here is that merely being human is the “whatever reason.” However, this raises all sorts of questions that the slave mongers have problems answering without ad hoc explanations. For example, what about hydatidiform moles, which are also began with fertilization and also has nothing added to it except what is provided by the person with a uterus’ body and the time to grow? But if it is not presumptively wrong to kill the hydatidiform mole, that would suggest that merely being human is not the “whatever reason” that makes something human a person.

My religious mythology points both to the “whatever reason” and provides the cut off date for when a human becomes a person. In the creation stories recounted in the books of Genesis, Moses, and Abraham, God formed Adam from the dust of the ground. Adam had a human body, but it was not a living soul until God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. When Jesus told Nephi that he would come into the world the next day, Jesus’ body already existed in the form of the fetus in Mary’s womb. It was not until birth Jesus came into the world.

Obviously, you do not have to accept my religious beliefs in this matter, and I certainly do not expect Physicians for Life to accept my religious beliefs, either. But this is an exercise you can perform for yourself. If I were to ask you what makes a person a person, most of you would probably respond with a list of traits, e.g., intelligence, sentience, consciousness. Or you might respond by saying it is the physical structures of the brain which gives us intelligence, sentience, consciousness. Or you might have some other response. I am not going to dictate your “whatever reason.” However, I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that however you answer my question, your “whatever reason” either developed or was acquired sometime after conception. And this would mean even though you have been human since conception, you were not always a person.

In the next argument, PFL points out that we can treat fetuses and even directly operate on them for conditions such as spina bifida. It urges the slave monger to ask who the patient is in such cases. I honestly do not see the relevance here. Since I have never reviewed patient listings for such cases, I cannot answer that specific question. However, I have taken my dogs to the vet, and it has always been the dog that is identified as the patient, no matter what vet I go to. Does this mean my dog is a person?

I would leave my answer at that, but there is something I want to highlight about this argument. We should ask the counter question, “How does the doctor get to the fetus to operate on it?” The answer, of course, is through the pregnant person’s body. Notice how the pregnant person is totally ignored here. It’s almost like only fetuses exist according to Physicians for Life. This is a theme we will return to.

Physicians for Life next urges the slave monger to ask pro-choice advocates if they can provide a description of what it means to be viable. Yes, I can—when the lungs are formed enough that the prenate can breathe on its own outside the womb. I call this natural viability because it is the definition that does not rely on medical technology to make it true. Medical viability is defined as the point where, given advanced medical technology, at least half of neonates born at that stage will survive. While I have reservations about this definition, I am not going to challenge it in this essay.

Either way, I am not sure what point PFL is trying to make here. My guess, based on the next question, is that the question is directed toward late-term abortions, which are rarely performed and then for reasons of extreme fetal abnormality or because of serious threats to the health or life of the mother anyway. In the United States, late-term abortions are usually limited to those reasons, thus asking about viability is a moot point. In terms of personhood, the question would only be relevant for those for whom the “whatever reason” applies to pre-viability prenates anyway.

The next argument goes directly into late-term abortion territory by asking pro-choice advocates to consider the case of two people with uteruses, both of whom became pregnant the same day. One gives birth at six months to a premature but healthy (unlikely, but I will grant it for the sake of discussion) baby. The other decides a week later (apparently just because this person is a heartless bitch) that they do not want to have a baby. Then the pro-choice advocate is asked why the first person could not kill the newborn but the second person could be allowed to abort.

For one answer, see the section addressing viability in “Why Abortion is Permissible.” Does PFL seriously think pro-choice advocates have never thought about the question? I’m guessing these slave mongers figure that even if the pro-choice advocate does not believe the personhood does not begin at conception, surely they would have developed or acquired personhood by viability.

Physicians for Life does not want the slave monger to accept the answer that one is born and the other is not on the grounds that this is merely a difference in location. But in my religious beliefs, and speaking directly to personhood, the born infant has acquired a soul while the fetus has not. So for me to say because one is born and the other is not does not just indicate a difference in location. It indicates a difference showing that it is presumptively wrong to kill the infant while it is not presumptively wrong to kill the fetus.

For section one of the PFL article, I have presented, as much as possible, answers to the slave mongers’ arguments with both secular rebuttals and responses derived from my religious beliefs. The secular responses show their arguments do not prove anything about prenatal personhood, while the religious responses help provide the basis for a later argument down the road.

Section two has only one argument, which is meant to address the pro-choice argument that no one can say with certainty when a fetus becomes a person. I quoted this section above while discussing personhood and ensoulment. Acknowledging that ensoulment at conception cannot be proven, the slave mongers’ argument is to “err on the side of life.”

At first glance, this argument seems reasonable enough. But in fact, the argument is deceptively cruel. Let me explain.

What does it mean to err on the side of something? To err on the side of caution means not to take unreasonable risks so we are not injured or killed. With regard to people, it means to give a person the benefit of the doubt in dubious situations. For example, in criminal law, if jurors find a reasonable doubt in the prosecutor’s case, they have the duty to give the defendant the benefit of the doubt, that is, to err on the defendant’s side and find them not guilty. If someone tells you a story that is not intrinsically implausible, you tend to believe that story unless and until presented with evidence the story is not true. Not only is this simpler than radical skepticism, but erring on the side of the storyteller’s truthfulness helps build personal relationships, while explicitly or implicitly accusing the storyteller of lying without evidence assaults their dignity for no good reason. To err on the side of love is to treat others how you would like to be treated instead of what you think they deserve. In short, to err on the side of a person is to respect that person’s rights and dignity.

This is not what Physicians for Life is asking you to do if you doubt prenatal personhood. What they are asking you to do is side with may-or-may-not-be-a-person prenates against unambiguously-a-person pregnant people. What they are asking you to do is deprive pregnant people of their rights, including but not limited to: their right to life, liberty, and security of person; their right to be free from slavery; their right to be recognized as a person before the law; their right to equal protection under the law; their right to be free from torture; their right to bodily integrity; and their right to decide when and if to have children. And they are asking you to do this even though the pregnant person has done nothing wrong, and in cases of rape, even though it is the pregnant person who has been wronged.

Erring on the side of life would be valid if the prenate had an independent existence and all one had to do is let it be for it to develop on its own. But this is not the case, and once again PFL totally erases pregnant people as if they did not exist, did not have rights of their own, and did not have interests of their own. To “err on the side of life” in this case is to deny the personhood of the pregnant people.

When it comes to may-or-may-not-be-a-person prenates and unambiguously-a-person pregnant people, it is clear whose side we should err on: pregnant people.

Section three is meant to address the pro-choice arguments that prenates may be humans, but not necessarily persons. Here, I am going to combine and respond to both tactics pressed here because they are both the same tactic with different follow-up questions. Both tactics encourage the slave monger to detail the differences between a human and a person. Then based on the assumption that the pro-choice advocates responses are also applicable to born people or fails to actually distinguish humans from persons, asks questions like, “What other groups of persons can be killed for any reason?”

I will engage in some “philosophical mumbo jumbo” for a moment, despite the slave mongers’ desire to avoid it. It is exceedingly difficult to get a handle on what exactly constitutes a person. One thing we can be pretty sure about is that human and person are not necessarily synonymous. I am not merely talking semantics here. We can easily conceive of non-human persons and it would not violate the law of noncontradiction. Even if we cannot easily define what a person is, if characters like Kal-El, Spock, Legolas, or E.T. really existed, we would have no problem identifying them as persons. Setting aside these fictional characters, serious arguments are being made that other existing species qualify for personhood, especially bonobos and orca. Indeed, traditional Jews, Christians, and Muslims certainly believe in a non-human person: God. Still, the only beings universally recognized as persons are members of Homo sapiens. Does this philosophical reflection get us anywhere here? Perhaps. I would suggest that even if we cannot necessarily agree what a person is, we would know a person if we interacted with one, once communication barriers like language differences were overcome.

This leads to a practical thought experiment that I think will help answer the questions PFL want the slave mongers to press. Take any ten beings that are universally recognized as persons with the right to life. Now consider a newborn infant and a fetus. For the purpose of this experiment, the infant is not unambiguously a person, that is, an infant's status as a person is questionable. As in real life, the fetus’ status is not settled either. What do all the beings who are unambiguously persons have in common? All are homo sapiens, most certainly. All were conceived by a sperm combining with an egg (at least so far), most certainly. They were all also actually born.

Now, it is easy to see that prenates and infants both have the first two things in common with beings universally recognized as persons with the right to life. Infants, however have that third thing in common with unambiguously recognized persons, whereas prenates do not. Therefore, a neonate, even one born after only 23 weeks gestation, is a person with the right to life, while the prenate, even at 23 weeks gestation, is not. Birth does intrinsically change things.

On the religious level, my answer is fairly simple. A person is a being that has a soul. Not all members of the human species have souls, because souls are acquired at birth. And the answers to the questions flow naturally from there.

I am going to skip the next section for now since it has nothing directly to do with prenatal personhood. Section five presents the pro-choice advocate saying, “The fetus is a potential life.” I do not see this happening very often, and when it does, “life” is usually used as a synonym for “person.”

In any case, the slave monger’s response is to point out such a saying would be insensitive and belittling to a person who has suffered through a miscarriage. And for once, PFL is absolutely right. Any person saying something like this to someone who lost a wanted pregnancy should be chastised. One does not have to believe the prenate is a person to comfort and aid a person who lost a pregnancy they wanted.

As a side note, it is interesting that this is the only place in the entire article where Physicians of Life actually treats pregnant people as human beings. Apparently pregnant people are only persons if they want their pregnancies and would grieve their loss. Either way, the argument itself does not say anything about the personhood of the fetus.

The next argument is that dogs produce dogs, whales produce whales, and nobody has any problem recognizing this. Why do pro-choice advocates have problems recognizing the fetus is a human being since it was produced by human beings? I have no problems in saying that a dog zygote is a potential dog. We just do not have separate terms for dog zygotes as we do with acorns and oak trees. A dog fetus is a potential dog the same way a human fetus is a potential human being. But until personhood is actualized for the human, it is not a human being.

At this point, I am going to skip over the other arguments and address section twelve. I have already dealt with section nine in Part 1. I will come back to the skipped sections in later post(s).

Section twelve deals with the religious argument. Specifically, it is attempting to answer the pro-choice advocate arguing against imposing religious morality on people.

First, let’s get the outright lie out of the way. Susan B. Anthony did not call abortion “child-murder.” If she had an opinion on (the legality of) abortion, she kept it to herself. She was far more concerned that laws about abortion were being promulgated even though those most directly affected by those laws (i.e., women) had no vote on those laws.

Speaking of which, one thing really struck me when I first read Justice Harry Blackmun’s majority opinion in Roe v. Wade. The opinion gave a historical overview of anti-abortion restrictions. Interestingly enough, there were few legal restrictions on abortion until the birth of feminism and anti-abortion measures became more restrictive the more traction arguments for women’s suffrage gained. I cannot definitively say whether this association is causal or casual, but I am convinced that it is not coincidental.ⁱⁱⁱ

PFL does make the point there are also atheist and agnostic slave mongers, but let’s face it, the anti-abortion movement is driven primarily by religious people. Atheist and agnostic slave mongers are so few in number there would hardly be an abortion debate at all without religious conservatives driving it.

Medical textbooks do not define whether something is presumptively wrong to kill, so PFL’s contention they need only consult one instead a church to see if abortion is violently killing a person is merely begging the question.

Now we come to the final question of this section, which directly ties to their main argument: “Would a religious argument favoring the legalization of abortion be treated the same way as a religious argument opposing it?” PFL acknowledges there are religions that allow pregnant people to have abortions. And I certainly do agree that the majority of laws are based on some moral code. But then it goes on to make the absurd argument that legalizing abortion forces immorality on them.

This is why I detailed my religious beliefs in an essay that is already overly long. It should be obviously, painfully clear that my religion supports abortion rights. So let’s say I became king of the world and proclaimed that henceforth and forever abortion is to remain legal. What am I forcing you to do? Nothing. What am I prohibiting you from doing? Nothing. Which of your rights am I violating? None.

So if I were to stake my case for legalized abortion on my religious beliefs, would it be treated differently than a religious case against it? I presume my argument would be treated more favorably, but not because it is a religious argument. It would be treated more favorably precisely because my religious beliefs about abortion forces nothing on no one. Even if my religious beliefs were dismissed by others as crazy, they would acknowledge my beliefs hurt no one.

In contrast, if PFL successfully imposes their religious views into law, it forces pregnant people to gestate, effectively making them state-sanctioned slaves to the prenate. In addition to violating the rights I outlined above, it does so regardless of the pregnant person’s religious beliefs about prenatal personhood. If a pregnant person’s religious beliefs require them to have an abortion in certain cases, PFL would outright violate that person’s freedom of religion. And that would require a damned good secular case if we are going to accept a mass violation of pregnant people’s rights, something PFL does not have.

In my next post, I am hoping to mop up the rest of PFL’s argument, but that will depend on long that essay is. I am hoping that, at most, I will need only two more posts to completely deal with the PFL arguments. Please continue to bear with me.

[Updated 14 Dec 2020; 22 June 2021; 30 June 2021; 26 Oct 2021]

iI am, of course, aware of Scriptures or at least interpretations that may indicate ensoulment happens sometime before birth. It is not my intent here to do more than lay out a general outline of the scriptural case for ensoulment at birth. However, I will note that seemingly contrary passages, even if granted, do not require us to push ensoulment back to conception.

iiIt is not my intent to lay out all the fetal abnormalities that would probably prevent ensoulment given this reasoning. It should also be pointed out that even my stance that ensoulment occurs at birth can be problematic under this reasoning as well. For example, there are numerous birth defects where the infant would not survive for long after birth but for modern medicine. One could ask whether such infants were given souls only after modern medicine made it possible for them to survive. Scriptures like Leviticus 27:6 and Numbers 3:15 may reflect a certain amount of uncertainty given this problem.

iiiKatha Pollitt makes the connection between the anti-abortion stance and “women’s growing freedom and power.” However, she does not make a specific link between Women’s Suffrage and the criminalization of abortion in the late 19^th century. Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights (pp. 32-33). Picador. Kindle Edition.

Physicians for Life's Fallacious Anti-Abortion Arguments Part 1

2020-11-01T22:31:00.003-07:00

Recently, I was involved in a discussion that included the following exchange:

Timothy Griffy Logic&Reason • 4 days ago

No, the zygote does not need to draw up a contract with the woman before implanting itself into the uterine line, even if it were possible. The same is true with your even more absurd notion about the sperm and egg having a binding agreement.

Here are some questions for you. Is rape wrong? How about slavery? Or kidnapping especially for ransom or to further a criminal enterprise? Is it wrong to subject someone to involuntary medical/scientific experimentation? Or to force someone to donate blood, tissue or organs? If you acknowledge these things are wrong, you acknowledge that using someone's body without consent is wrong. And suddenly my comment isn't so dumb after all.

Logic&Reason Timothy Griffy • 4 days ago

You are correct that the notion of contractual agreement prior to fertilization is ABSOLUTELY ABSURD. That was my point ... to your even more absurd statement that the fetus should be ~~aborted~~ killed because it didn’t receive prior “consent”. That is not how life works. Ever.

Perhaps this thoughtful essay written by physicians will answer all your questions regarding this deadly serious topic of pro-life vs pro-death:

http://www.physiciansforlif...
- •

Unfortunately, I was not able to answer Logic&Reason before comments in that discussion were closed. I did, however go to the Physicians for Life link. I can say that the article does not answer the point I was making in my comments and it did not even try. It’s not that the article does not address bodily autonomy; it’s that it fails to address the core issue of the bodily autonomy argument. I would say I was surprised or disappointed, but that would highly exaggerate my expectations. The slave mongers cannot directly address that core issue, and so would rather just avoid it.

The core issue of the bodily autonomy argument, whether expressed as in Judith Jarvis Thomson’s "A Defense of Abortion" or as in the argument I made in "Why Abortion is Permissible", is this: Even if we grant the prenate has the right to life, the right to life does not grant the right to use someone’s body or body parts to keep them alive. This is why we are never obligated to give blood, tissue, or organs to anyone, even if they will die without the donation. For all its talk about pro-choice advocates trying to duck issues, the slave mongers at Physicians for Life themselves duck this core issue in favor of responding with a bevy of irrelevant questions.

Looked at more closely, the questions Physicians for Life want slave mongers to press on pro-choice advocates are not merely diversions, they have already been answered—usually over and over again. I will deal with the other arguments this article poses in later posts. In this post, I will deal with section nine of their argument, where they are attempting to deal with the pro-choice argument “Every woman has the right to control their own body.”

The first argument the slave mongers make is the standard one: Yes, women have the right to control their own body, but the “preborn child” has rights that are violated by abortion. Talk about asked and answered. Even presuming the “preborn child” does have rights, they are not violated if the pregnant person has an abortion because “preborn children” do not have the right to use a person’s body or its parts even for life itself. How do we know this? Because we do not have this right, even though we clearly have the right to life.

Physicians for Life is clearly unable to directly deal with this fact, because everything that follows are exercises in diversionary tactics. First, the article rhetorically asks what kind of control the bodily autonomy argument is about and answers, “A control that allows for violence against another human being …” as if it were the pregnant person who is the aggressor. But what we are in fact talking about is the right to not have our bodies used without consent. Insofar as this allows for violence, it is in defense of that right.

The next argument deserves to be quoted in full so we can tease out exactly how these slave mongers totally ignore the real life situations of people with vulvas:

“OR…What about REPEAT abortions? There are roughly 1.4 million abortions yearly in the U.S. (Alan Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood’s research arm); over one pregnancy in four is aborted. About 43% of abortion patients have had at least one previous abortion, 10% are on their third abortion, and 5% are on at least their fourth abortion. Of about 4300 abortions per day (U.S.), over 210 women are getting their fourth or more abortion per day. If they have the right to control their own bodies, why can’t they control their sexual activities?”

I have yet to come across a slave monger that does not resort to slut-shaming sooner or later, and Physicians for Life is no exception. Notice how the entire burden of not getting pregnant is placed entirely on people with vulvas. Last I heard, it still takes two to tango. People with penises are not expected to control their sexual activities, leaving it to the people with vulvas to be the gatekeepers of sex. And considering that elsewhere the article the slave mongers argue against abortion even in cases of rape, we have to wonder why they even bring up the subject in the first place. The answer is simple: the slave mongers do not want people with vulvas to have control over their own lives, not when it comes to sex, and not when it comes to pregnancy. Forced gestation is a means of controlling both.

But that’s an argument for another day. For now, let’s just look at the cover-up argument.

If we look at it purely from a rights perspective, the answer to the question, “What about REPEAT abortions?” is “What about them?” There is no limit to the number of rapists one is allowed to defend themselves from before one is required to allow themselves to be raped. Likewise, there is no limit to the number of unwanted pregnancies one is allowed to abort before one is required to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term.

Nevertheless, I think it is safe to say that having several abortions is unwise. An abortion is costly in terms of money and time if nothing else. It would be better and cheaper to prevent unwanted pregnancies to begin with. So we should take a look at why some people might have four or more abortions. And when we do that, we find that much of the time, it is because of policies that the slave mongers themselves press.

Take, for example, Cherisse’s story, found in the New York magazine article, “My Abortion.” She had three abortions and said:

I looked in the Chicago Yellow Pages and made an appointment at what I thought was an abortion clinic. They sent a black woman in to talk to me. She told me that she and her husband hadn’t wanted their child at first and tried to convince me to keep mine. Then they showed me a video of a D&E (dilation and evacuation). They assumed I was on food stamps. At that time, I didn’t know how to articulate why that was offensive. I was a 28-year-old paralegal—not the stereotype. They sent me home with a rattle and onesie. This was in 2002, not some bygone era. They sent me to another place to get a free ultrasound. The technician said, “If you have an abortion now, you’ll rupture your uterus and won’t be able to have children in the future.” I had no idea what was true. I didn’t want to regret not being able to have children. I went ahead and had my son. Those people weren’t there after I lost my job and couldn’t afford my COBRA, utilities, rent, food. Since then, I’ve had three abortions. I didn’t understand my body. I had no information. After the third time, I ran into a reproductive-justice advocate who finally taught me how to understand my fertility.

It goes without saying that comprehensive sex education would have made it far less likely that Cherisse would have needed three abortions. Also notice the crisis pregnancy center Cherisse went to also did not provide her with the information she needed to understand her fertility. It is the slave mongers themselves who generally oppose comprehensive sex education, at most offering abstinence-only models that have repeatedly been shown to be ineffective in preventing unwanted pregnancies. Finally, note that Cherisse only got the information she needed from a reproductive-justice advocate, someone who is presumably pro-choice. Between the CPC and the reproductive-justice advocate, who helped Cherisse the most in avoiding an unwanted pregnancy and prevented another abortion?

Let’s dig more deeply. Around half the people who seek an abortion live in poverty, about four times the national poverty rate.ⁱ Forty percent of people seeking an abortion report having trouble accessing contraceptives.ⁱⁱ In The Turnaway Study, about five percent of the study’s respondents reported being in an abusive relationship; about half of them reported the abusive relationship was the primary reason for wanting an abortion.ⁱⁱⁱ Reproductive coercion, including birth control sabotage, is also hardly uncommon.

With these kinds of conditions, it is not hard to see why some people need abortions, including multiple abortions. And particularly when it comes to the provision of contraceptives, we again see it is the slave mongers themselves have the greater share of the blame. As Katha Pollit points out, not one major slave monger organization advocates making contraceptives more readily available.^iv Moreover, slave monger organizations also tend to be against the most effective methods of birth control such as the Pill on the grounds that they are supposedly abortifacients.^v In this respect, it is noteworthy that Physicians for Life is not just silent about making contraceptives more readily available, most of its articles on contraceptives, with the exception of Natural Family Planning, are negative.

It is this negative attitude toward birth control that provides a key clue to the formulation of the final question in this so-called rebuttal: “If they have the right to control their own bodies, why can’t they control their sexual activities?” More than anything else, this question shows that these slave mongers are not simply against pregnant people having abortions, they are against people with vulvas having what they consider unauthorized sex.

The slave mongers next diversion is to ask why drugs and prostitution are not also on the pro-choice agenda. In fairness, I should point out this probably reflects the age of the document. Marijuana legalization, for example, is supported by 67% of Americans today. Similar percentages favor drug treatment over prosecution and think easing sentences for nonviolent drug offenses is a good thing; decriminalization if not outright legalization is probably not that far away. Support for legalizing prostitution is now at about 49% of Americans. Certainly this argument would backfire if a slave monger used it on me, since I do support the legalization of both drugs and prostitution.

Regardless, using drugs and prostitution, along with child support laws,^vi to argue against abortion is a distraction from the core issue. With particular regard to drugs and prostitution, the only similarity is that the right to bodily autonomy is involved. But otherwise, we are not talking about comparing apples to oranges; it is more like comparing apples to moon rocks. One could plausibly argue against legalizing drugs and prostitution despite the right to bodily autonomy on the grounds of public health, for example. Whether such an argument will fly is, of course, a different matter. The point is that it is entirely possible to be against legalizing drugs and prostitution while maintaining abortion should be legal.

If that does not work, the next diversion is to say that pro-choice advocates say that the prenate is part of the pregnant person’s body, and then make arguments that it is not. I am not sure what they think this argument is supposed to buy them. Supposedly, by being aggressive enough, the slave monger should be able to get the pro-choice advocate to retreat to a position where the fetus is different because of the prenate’s dependency to the pregnant person for survival, at which point the slave monger can say this is also true of infants, comatose patients, etc. Perhaps they think a stalemate is enough to win the day.

This argument may also reflect the age of the document. However, as a blanket statement, saying “Pro-abortionists say that the unborn child is part of the mother's body” simply is not true. I do not say this, and based on my admittedly anecdotal experience, it is relatively rare for a pro-choice advocate to use this as an argument. I see this particular argument as weak, too easily refuted, and irrelevant.

What this argument does not do is address the core issue: whether the prenate has the right to the pregnant person’s body. Yes, infants and comatose patients are dependent on others for their survival. But infants and comatose patients do not implant themselves into someone’s body. They do not dampen anyone's immune system. They do not tap anyone's blood supply to obtain nutrients and oxygen. They do not alter anyone's brain chemistry. They do not build their bones by taking the calcium from anyone's bones and teeth. They do not release their wastes back into anyone’s body. They do not cause the symptoms and side effects of pregnancy. They do not endanger anyone’s life and health. The prenate does do all these things to pregnant people. In theory, all of them might be entitled to care. But none of them have the right to do the things the prenate does to the pregnant person.

The next deflection is to have the slave monger ask why they oppose TRAP laws supposedly put in place to ensure the health and safety of the pregnant person having an abortion. It is a diversion because it has nothing to do with the core issue of whether the prenate has the right to the pregnant person’s body. Pro-choice advocates oppose them because, as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists ruled, they are unnecessary and exist solely to limit access to abortion.

The next tactic is to press the pro-choice advocate on whether an abortion is permissible no matter how trivial the reason, and if not, what their limits are. Apparently the point is to paint the advocate as an extremist (even though the organization does not even permit a rape exception, making them extremists even among slave mongers) or set up some kind of “gotcha” argument. Here, they are likely to find a range of responses. Thomson would say that an abortion would be impermissible if it is inconsistent with Minimally Decent Samaritanism, citing a hypothetical pregnant person wanting an abortion in the seventh month to clear the way for a trip to Europe. I would imagine some people would say sex selection as a reason for having an abortion would be positively indecent and should not be allowed on similar grounds.

In my account, abortion is permissible because one is allowed to use any means necessary to prevent or end the nonconsensual use of one’s body. On this account, all that matters is that one’s body is being used without consent. Does it matter why the person does not consent? No. Consider the examples I used to build my case: rape, slavery, kidnapping, involuntary scientific experimentation, and forced donation of bodily parts. Does it really matter why you do not want to have sex? Does it really matter why you do not want to do a job for someone? Does it really matter why you do not want to accompany someone elsewhere? Does it really matter why you do not wish to participate in a scientific experiment? Does it really matter why you do not want to give someone blood, tissue, or organs? No. All that matters is that you do not want to do it and any attempt to force you to do these things allows you to use any necessary means prevent or end these things from happening to you. The reason you do not want to do them is simply none of my business.

We could also look at it another way. Let’s say you ask me why I am writing this essay, and I say it's because I do not like Physicians for Life or some other utterly trivial reason. Would you say that the trivial reason I have for writing this essay invalidates my freedom of the press? Of course not, because our rights are not invalidated based on our reasons for exercising them. Why should the right to not have your body used without consent be any different?

For the final argument of this section, the article would have the slave monger press the pro-choice advocate whether they support abortion throughout the nine months, for whatever reason, allowing minors to have an abortion without parental knowledge, and be funded by taxpayers. The reasoning appears to be an attempt to find some chink in the armor of bodily autonomy they can try exploiting. Failing that, it appears to be an attempt to paint the advocate as an extremist (again, this is an organization that permits abortion only in cases of an imminent threat to the mother’s life, and even then requires some of the riskiest methods of doing even that).

Again, we are liable to find a range of answers depending on the advocate. In fact, my experience in the abortion debate has shown me there is enough variety where pro-choice advocates stand on these sorts of questions that I will not even pretend to speak for anyone but myself.

Let’s take the famous though nonexistent ninth month abortion. Abortions performed after twenty-one weeks gestation are exceedingly rare, and done for extreme fetal abnormality or for serious threat’s to the pregnant person’s life or health. That does not stop the slave mongers from harping on the subject as it were if the typical case. The reason is simple: it heightens the emotional impact both at the thought the fetus being ripped apart and the supposed callousness of the pregnant person for waiting so long. Physicians for Life wants slave mongers to press how late the pro-choice advocate will allow an abortion to set up a slippery slope argument that asks why not earlier.

In fact, it was in anticipation of such questions that I considered post-viability abortions in my essay “Why Abortion is Permissible.” I concluded that nothing has essentially changed post-viability that would give the fetus the right to use the pregnant person’s body without consent. Nevertheless, viability does open options that suggest an abortion may not be necessary to end the nonconsensual use of the pregnant person’s body. I did not come to a definitive conclusion here, saying only the pregnant person need not incur significant cost, let alone take heroic measures to avoid killing the fetus when ending the pregnancy. This means an abortion would still be permissible until other options such as inducing labor or performing a C-section is significantly less costly. If that makes me an extremist, so be it.

The case of whether a minor should be required to have parental consent for an abortion is the only part of the abortion debate where I can genuinely see both sides of the argument. After all, the minor’s guardian will be liable for the costs including, God forbid, those incurred if something goes horribly wrong with the abortion. However, there could also be valid reasons minors might fear informing their parent(s) they are pregnant (e.g., being kicked out of their home). In a perfect world, the minor’s fears would always be unfounded and minor and parent would work together to find the best solution for their particular case. However, until we do have such a world, I have to side with the minor and not require parental consent for the abortion.

I can definitively say that I think taxpayers should cover the cost of an abortion, particularly for those who would otherwise not be able to afford them. Ideally, we would have universal health care covering the cost for everyone, but I am dealing with the present system. This is a simple calculation of comparative costs. The Turnaway Study makes it clear that pregnant people who are turned away from having an abortion have poorer outcomes in terms of both health and finances. Their children also tend to have health and developmental problems. In turn, this is going to wind up costing society a lot more than if it had covered the cost of an abortion.

In this review of Physicians for Life’s arguments against the bodily autonomy argument, we find that it never addresses the core issue: whether the prenate has the right to use the pregnant person’s body without consent. Instead, it only makes diversionary arguments meant to keep the discussion anywhere but the fundamental issue of the abortion debate. They literally present nothing new that has not already been addressed by pro-choice advocates.

In the next post, I will deal with the article’s arguments on prenatal personhood and the morality of forcing one’s religious views on society.

Updated 6 Nov 2020.

iFoster, Diana Greene. The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion (p. 20). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

iiFoster, The Turnaway Study, (pp. 52-53).

iiiFoster, The Turnaway Study, (p. 231).

ivPollitt, Katha. Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights (p. 123). Picador. Kindle Edition.

vPollitt, Pro, (p. 123).

viI have had slave mongers try to use the requirement that fathers pay child support as the equivalent of forced gestation, only for me to respond that one unjust law does not justify another unjust law. While I do believe child support laws as presently constituted are unjust, and I also believe there are overlaps between being required to pay child support and forced gestation, they are hardly equivalent. For one thing, fathers will never be required to give even so much as a drop of blood to their child, even if the child needs it to live. For another, due process is still required before the father can be made to pay child support.

There Is No "Pro-Life" Case Against Trump

2020-10-29T16:41:00.001-07:00

This post is a response to Michael Stokes Paulsen’s article, “The Pro-life Case Against Trump,” found here and here. I encourage my audience to read this post first, since this post will make little or no sense without being familiar with it.

There is no reluctant "pro-life" case for Trump. Anyone who thinks so is just fooling themselves. Indeed, Paulsen is fooling himself in thinking you can have forced gestation without the authoritarianism Trump represents. The "pro-life" cause is entirely compatible with the authoritarianism represented by Trump and cannot be successful without it. The "pro-life" camp does not want a functioning constitutional republic, or at least not one where anyone other than white cisgender heterosexual men has a fair say. It is not about compassion, respect for others, and valuing all human life. It does not care that the political and legal gains on abortion are likely short-term. Finally, they either do not believe or do not care they are making a deal with the Devil.

A core goal of the "pro-life" movement is enslaving pregnant people. It fundamentally sees people with uteruses as less than fully human. We see this in the fact that every argument put forth by the slave mongers has to either (at best) ignore the person with a uterus entirely or resort to rank misogyny in the form of slut-shaming. You cannot make a case for forced gestation by applying the same rules that apply to everyone else to the pregnant person and the prenate, so the slave mongers have to invent special rights for the prenate to the detriment of pregnant people. Where is the compassion, respect for others, and valuing all human life when it comes to the pregnant person? Nowhere. This in itself shows that the prenate’s right to life, if it indeed has one, is not the real point of the "pro-life" movement.

The real point of the "pro-life" movement is to keep women "in their place," to subsume their pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to that of men. What people with uteruses must not be allowed to do is pursue their own lives on their own terms. This is why the "pro-life" movement not only opposes abortion, but usually also oppose the most effective methods of birth control on the supposed (and unproven) ground that they are "abortifacients." People with uteruses have to live under a double-bind: to either give up the right to bodily autonomy or forfeit their right to bodily autonomy. Either do not have sex at all or be forced to carry a pregnancy to term. But even if the person with a uterus did not choose to have sex, they will still be forced to carry a pregnancy to term.ⁱ

So the fact that Trump is a misogynist and a serial sexual abuser is not a bug for the slave mongers, it is a feature. For the slave monger, women are not people, they exist only to serve men’s pleasure. Men get to do what they want, and women are kept in their place. That's the point.

It is also a feature of all the yeses in Paulsen’s "yes, but" cases. Forcing gestation on pregnant people is just one piece of the puzzle in the "pro-life" case for Trump. This can be seen in the fact that the vast majority of the "pro-life" camp not only supports Trump when it comes to forced gestation, but also his racist statements and policies. Trump's racism is also just as much of a feature for the "pro-life" camp as its misogyny. Think of this in terms of Trump's slogan "Make America Great Again." Well, when was America great according to them? Almost to a person, it harkens back to a time when white male supremacy was not just systemic, but systematic. Exactly how far back they want to go may vary, but it is always a time before the Civil Rights Movements.

In other words, we are talking about a time when people of color, women, LGBT+ people, and other "undesirables" were forced to stay in their place. Seen in this light, Trump's incompetent and dismissive attitude toward COVID-19, which disproportionately affects poor people of color, is also a feature and not a bug of Trump's rule. This is what the "pro-life" camp is ultimately working toward: the supremacy of white men and forcing everyone else to serve that goal. This is also why “pro-lifers” also tend to support immigration restrictions, especially from “shithole”countries (read countries whose population is predomninently nonwhite). This is also why they tend to support the Muslim ban. This also why they tend to support voter restrictions that mainly affect people of color. This is also why they tend to want to roll back LGBT+ rights, including overturning the right to marry. Finally, it’s also why they tend to defend police brutality and either identify the Black Lives Matter movement with terrorism or try to dismiss the movement by responding “all lives matter.”ⁱⁱ

Ultimately, you cannot have white male supremacy in a constitutional republic, at least not one where everyone gets a fair say. So of course the "pro-life" camp is willing to excuse Trump's narcissism, his authoritarianism, and his willingness to do anything necessary including using violence to stay in office. At the end of the day, they are getting what they really want.

i Let's not be fooled here. If a slave monger allows abortion in cases of rape, it is done reluctantly to make their stance more palatable for the general public, not because they really think abortion in these cases is morally permissible. Without the need to make their stance more palatable, the rape exception will quickly go away, to eventually be followed by the life of the mother exception.

iiCountering Black Lives Matter with the pseudo-argument “all lives matter” has more than a little resonance with the slave monger’s argument about the prenate’s “right to life.” Ultimately, both stances work to reinforce white male supremacy by erasing the people most affected by systemic racism and forced gestation. This is not a coincidence.

A Matter of Evidence

2017-08-06T23:24:00.002-07:00

Some time ago, I watched the Evangelical movie A Matter of Faith. I figured at worst, I would get a few laughs. And maybe, just maybe, the movie would present some new argument in the evolution vs. creationism debate that I would have to think about. The laughs I got, even if they weren’t intended. My hopes for a new argument were obviously way too high. What follows is not a review as such, but rather some reflections on and about the movie and its themes. I hope the information on the movie’s website and the trailer will be enough to follow my thinking and the reader won’t have to watch the entire movie. Otherwise, see the Godless Wolf’s review, which goes through most of the plot points if you don’t want to watch the movie.

Sexism: The sexism starts near the beginning of the movie when Stephen tells Rachel not to get married until she’s at least 45. This is presented as a joke, but the underlying thought is the theme of the whole movie. Don’t make decisions for yourself and don’t think (especially about sex). Stephen becomes concerned that Rachel is losing her faith based on flimsy evidence. He is so concerned about Rachel’s “changing views” that instead of talking to her about it, he confronts her biology teacher. The biology teacher, Professor Kaman, then challenges Stephen to a debate. Libby Anne points out a contrast here with the similarly themed movie God's Not Dead: “Does Josh Wheaton’s father even appear in God’s Not Dead? I’m pretty sure that’s a no. Why isn’t Josh’s father getting all concerned about the fact that, oh no, he sent his son to a school with an atheist philosophy professor?! Oh right, Josh has boy parts, so he doesn’t need daddy to rescue him, he can stand up for himself thank you very much” (italics as in original).

When Evan asks Rachel whether she thinks God created the world, she refuses to answer, which Evan takes to mean “no.” He never considers for an instant that Rachel might simply have been pushing back against his bullying. The bullying continues later when Evan guilt trips Rachel into seeing the “error” of her ways by questioning her Christianity based on (you guessed it) zero evidence. In what may be an unintentional window into the producers’ view of proper gender relations, the final scene depicts Rachel walking behind Evan into a park. This is where he reveals that they first met eight years previously when he bullied her out of a fifty cent coin she had found. Evan was a bully then, and is a bully now.

We never get to see how Rachel processes the information she receives in Kaman’s class. She shows discomfort at the new information—that is to be expected. Later, she flat out states she still believes God created the world. That is not good enough for Evan, hence the guilt trip. But I would have liked to know what her thoughts were. Was she trying to reconcile evolution to her religious beliefs? Compartmentalizing them? Outright rejecting evolution or the parts of her religious upbringing that conflict with it? Neither Stephen nor Evan care enough about her to explore what she is thinking—they just assume the “worst.” Given their binary view of the topic, perhaps it was impossible for them to ask these sorts of questions. In one of the many ironies of the film, Professor Kaman accurately describes the subject of the movie: Stephen is “a religious dad who doesn’t like his little girl thinking for herself.” For all the talk about “teaching the controversy” at the end of the film, this is exactly what no one except the “evil evolution teacher” allows her to do.

Rachel's mother, Kimberly, contributes nothing to the story. She has few lines, none of consequence, and mostly serves as set dressing. She could have been eliminated entirely from the movie and no one would have missed her. It seems the only point of having her in the movie at all is to demonstrate how a proper woman should act—in deference to her husband and for God’s sake not doing any thinking.

Unintentional hilarity: Stephen is shocked—shocked!--that a biology course in a secular university only teaches evolution. Where exactly did he have his head buried for the last hundred years?

Evan’s confrontation with “Guy in Library” actually makes Evan look like an idiot to anyone who has any real knowledge of evolution. Yes, Evan, my mother looks like an ape. So does my grandmother, and my great-grandmother. So do I. So do you. This is because we are apes!

Evan’s attempt to make Professor Kaman’s policy of giving a C to everyone who simply shows up to class into an evil plan to “get students to doubt their faith in God and the Bible” is absurd on its face. First, none of Kaman’s students need to take a biology class at all, with the possible exception of biology majors.¹ This means someone who wants to avoid having their faith challenged can easily do so. Though Kaman’s grading policy is apparently well known, Rachel’s class has plenty of empty seats. Kaman is never depicted as mentioning God or the Bible in the classroom. In a fortunate contrast to God’s Not Dead, Kaman does not demand students accept evolution. Many, if not most of Kaman’s students would have already been introduced to evolution in the public school systems they came from. They either would have already dealt with any problems evolution caused for their faith or would already be well on their way to doing so. Kaman’s evil plan is a day late and a dollar short for most of his students.

The circumlocutions used to avoid directly saying Nice Guy^TMTyler is just trying to get into Rachel’s pants are embarrassing. Any idiot watching the movie knows what's going on, so why not use forthright language that people actually use? It’s not like the producers would have had to use vulgar language. Just say something like, “He’s only interested in you because he wants to have sex with you.” Or “He just wants to get you in bed.”

Unintentional ironies: The only generally likable character in this farce is Professor Kaman, the designated villain. The father is an overbearing meddler. The “good” Christian boy is a manipulative bully. Boys who have a romantic interest in Rachel turn out to be Nice Guys^TM. Rachel herself is an empty object, being acted upon rather than being an actor in her own life; the writers should have given her the more appropriate name Abelia. Professor Portland remains bitter over his completely just firing for twelve years, but judging from his estate, he wasn’t exactly suffering because of it. The only possible marks against Kaman’s character are the way he goaded Stephen into the debate and then singles out Rachel in class when he announces it. But in the first case, as Kaman pointed out, Stephen did visit Kaman to confront him on the issue, and in the second case, it would have likely become known Stephen was Rachel’s father anyway. Kaman is portrayed as amiable, willing to live and let live, jovial, and reasonable; the movie even goes out of its way to show Kaman’s scientific credentials are impeccable. This is a definite improvement over the caricature presented in God’s Not Dead, but ironically it makes the Christian characters come off much worse when they cast aspersions on him.

The movie continually jumbles all kinds of things together with evolution, including abiogenesis and cosmology. But let’s focus on abiogenesis for the moment. Evan at one point says, “Life comes from life. It doesn’t come from non-life.” Yet ironically this is exactly what Genesis portrays. “Let the earth put forth vegetation:” (Genesis 1:12)². “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures” (Genesis 1:20). “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind” (Genesis 1:24). “Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7). If that is not life from non-life, I don’t know what is.

The debate that wasn’t: When we finally get to the debate, it simply spirals out of control. Even though the debate was supposed to be “Evolution vs. Creationism,” the debate hit on just about every topic except evolution and creationism. Nevertheless, it is hard to avoid the fact that the only character who offered any evidence for their views was Kaman. It quickly becomes obvious Stephen is incapable of presenting any evidence for his view, while Portland does not intend to offer any evidence and would rather preach. Setting aside Stephen and Portland’s infantile views of what science is, presumably they would agree with Kaman that science is about evidence. And neither Stephen nor Portland offer any. All they have are platitudes and in Portland’s case, outright falsehoods. When Kaman declines to continue the debate after Portland’s speech, this is apparently meant to signal capitulation. In Kaman’s final scene, he looks at his rubber chicken with an enigmatic smile, which is apparently meant to signal he is reconsidering evolution. However, both could just as easily be read as Kaman following the Proverb that one should “not answer fools according to their folly, or you will be a fool yourself” (26:4). After all, under the circumstances, what would have been the point in continuing? Preaching is for churches, not debates.

Stephen and Portland try to paint evolution as a matter of faith. Ironically, however, their unwillingness and/or inability to present any evidence for their position only points to the exact opposite conclusion. The theory of evolution is a matter of evidence. Unlike creationism, no faith is needed when it comes to accepting evolution. Either the evidence supports it, or it does not. What would be a matter of faith is any metaphysical reflections the acceptance of evolutionary theory might spark. And this brings us to--

The excluded middle: The movie tries to paint evolution vs creationism as matter of atheism vs. Christianity. Stephen says in his opening statement, “Not only is the teaching of evolution an attack against those well-known first words of the Bible, ‘In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth,’ but it is an undermining assault against the authority of God, which really becomes the main issue here.” Portland accuses Kaman of accepting Freud’s³ views because “evolution leaves no room for a supernatural Creator” and goes on to make the standard slur-by-implication that atheists just want to do whatever they please. Despite a throwaway line that even “some Christian schools” teach evolution (the horror!), the movie completely ignores vast numbers of Christians, including scientists, who accept evolutionary theory without it diminishing their faith. For just a small list of Christian scientists who accept evolution, see the Godless Wolf’s review, linked above. Presumably the producers would deny these scientists are “real” Christians, but that would only raise the question of what gives them the authority to decide who is a Christian and who is not. Regardless, the point is that accepting evolution does not require one to become an atheist.

Why would they accept evolution? Because of the evidence, of course. As Pope John Paul II said:

“Today, more than a half-century after the appearance of [Humani Generis], some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis. In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies—which was neither planned nor sought—constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.”

On “teaching the controversy”: As Dr. Kenneth Miller points out, calls to “teach the controversy” really amount to an attempt to short circuit the scientific method. In real science, it is damned hard to achieve a consensus. In order for a theory to gain a scientific consensus, it must be able to explain the most data, be coherent both internally and externally, provide avenues for further observation and/or experimentation, and do all this over time under the constant criticism of peer review. What “teaching the controversy” does is demand something, say creation science or intelligent design, be taught without going through the process of gaining a consensus in the scientific community. “Teaching the controversy” makes sense in areas where there is still a great deal of scientific debate going on. But when it comes to the broad outlines of evolutionary theory, there is no scientific debate. If intelligent design advocates want to make “teaching the controversy” a viable approach, they need to do the work of making intelligent design a valid scientific approach to biology first.

One must also wonder if we can take the producers at their word that all they want is for schools to “teach the controversy” so people can “decide for themselves.” Remember, the thing that gets the ball rolling in this movie is the fact that Stephen fears Rachel is changing her views, that is, deciding for herself. As Libby Anne also pointed out, it’s not like Stephen didn’t have eighteen years to affect Rachel’s views. Was he “teaching the controversy?” The movie depicts Kaman’s class as Rachel’s first exposure to evolutionary thought, so obviously the answer is no. Both Stephen and Evan’s actions are attempts to bludgeon Rachel into submission and have nothing to do with encouraging her to evaluate differing viewpoints. So it is with “teaching the controversy.” The Christian Right cannot get their religious views force fed to students in public schools, so they use the argument of “teaching the controversy” to make an end run around the First Amendment.

“Teaching the controversy” is subterfuge, and a painfully obvious one at that. Notably, the movie’s own resource page contains links only to creationist sites. Suppose I started demanding schools start teaching a view of Native American origins according to Mormon Scripture.⁴ Failing to achieve that goal, suppose I then demanded that schools “teach the controversy.” Somehow, I seriously doubt those who want to “teach the controversy” when it comes to the origins of life would be very supportive of my demands. In fact, I’m pretty sure there would be a serious uproar on the Christian Right about it. All we need to do is witness how conservative Christians get so fired up when it comes banning Sharia, but have no problems when it comes to imposing so-called biblical law on the country.

Comments are, of course, welcome. Please keep them directed at the movie under discussion. I am not interested in debating evolution vs. creationism as such. Specifically, I will not respond to any attempts to Gish gallop.

1Most universities require all students to take some science classes, but the choice of which ones is usually up to the student.

2All biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version.

3As a sidenote, the fact the writer/director has Kaman rely on Freud mostly demonstrates how far behind the times he is when it comes to religious scholarship.

4Obviously this would be very imaginative scenario.

What the Bible Says About Abortion

2017-02-16T22:51:00.000-07:00

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Who Owns Your Body? A Mormon View

2015-10-27T18:50:00.000-07:00

While debating abortion someone pointed me to “Defusing the Violinist Analogy” by Matthew Lu. I plan to write a substantial response to the article, but there is a point Lu raises that gives me a chance to explore Mormon theology. Since that allows me to set aside the abortion debate for a little while, I'm going to take the opportunity presented.

Lu, oddly, takes the position that “the right to decide what happens in and to my body does not by itself entail I own my body. Counter-examples are readily available: If I am renting a piece of property I have certain exclusive rights of use, but that obviously does not mean I own it. The right of use does not, as such, directly entail ownership” (italics his). I say “oddly” because at this point, Lu drops the subject. However, in the context of the abortion debate, saying that you only have “right of use” as opposed to “ownership” of your body carries with it the implication that someone owns your body—someone who can demand you use it to gestate. And that raises the question of who that someone is. Lu doesn't tackle that question. I suspect that is because his answer would involve “retrench[ing] into a religiously grounded position,” something he otherwise wants to avoid.

However, in this post, exploring a religiously grounded position is exactly what I mean to do. Specifically, I am going to apply the mythology of my tradition, Mormonism, to the question, “Who owns your body?”¹

A standard response in traditional Christianity to that question would be “God owns your body.” This makes sense because in traditional Christianity, God is the creator of your body, and therefore can be said to own it. You possess it rent-free, as it were, but God can tell you what you may or may not do with it.²

There is, however, a startling contrast in Mormonism. In Mormonism, God created neither the matter nor the spirit which comprises your being (D&C 93:29, 33). Your spirit is eternal. In some form or another, you have always existed and you always will. In Mormonism, God cannot in any sense claim ownership over you.

It may be said that God is the creator of your body in the ultimate sense if nothing else. Nevertheless, according to Mormon mythology, the reason you have a body at all is because you passed your “first estate” (Abr. 3:26). God may have created your body and given it to you, but you are in no sense merely a renter. Your body was earned—bought and paid for if you will—by fulfilling the conditions God set for you.

This means that, from a Mormon viewpoint, you in fact do own your body. Just as an employer may not stipulate how you spend your wages, God cannot make demands on how you use your body. In Mormonism, everyone is a free agent—both in body and in spirit.

What, then, of the commandments? Don't they make demands that you do certain things with your body, or conversely, refrain from doing certain things to your body? Yes, but the reason is to get you to the next stage of your progression. That has nothing to do with the ownership of your body. This is perhaps why the Prophet Joseph Smith denied that God gives temporal commandments (D&C 29:34). If you want to progress to the next stage of your development, you will use your body accordingly. But if not, your body is still your own.

1In what follows, I will use the abbreviations for the LDS Standard Works as found here.

2The same argument also applies to your spirit in traditional Christian thought.

Why Abortion Is Permissible

2015-01-12T09:17:00.006-07:00

I'm tired of “defending” abortion. By this I mean abortion is often treated as something that must be defended rather than a positive right. This is implied by the title of Judith Jarvis Thomson's “A Defense of Abortion” and David Boonin's book-length treatment under the same title.¹ Boonin's Defense in particular is a systematic treatment of various arguments posed by abortion critics. Most of the literature I've read (though admittedly my reading is hardly comprehensive) favoring abortion rights is cast as a defense against abortion critics. Such a “defense” basically implies an argument that runs along the following lines:

1. Abortion is permissible only if no valid objections are raised against it.

2. No valid objection has been raised against abortion.

3. Therefore abortion is permissible.

We would never argue for the freedom of expression or freedom of religion in this manner. We press positive cases that speaking freely or going to church is permissible, defending against objections only secondarily.² Yet, so far in my admittedly non-comprehensive reading, I've found only two works that attempt to establish a positive case for abortion rights: Roderick T. Long's “Abortion, Abandonment, and Positive Rights: The Limits of Compulsory Altruism” (and note the term limits in the title) and Katha Pollitt's Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights.

Why should this matter? A “defense” of abortion focuses on arguing “on terms that critics of abortion can, and already do, accept.”³ This is a perfectly valid approach. If you can't defend a stance on your own terms, why should I accept that stance? If the goal is to avoid a standstill, then this approach is probably the best way to proceed.

But, like the debate about biblical inerrancy, I think that debating abortion will always result in a standstill. Abortion opponents will either engage in new levels of sophistry or simply eschew reason and say intuition is the only thing that really matters.⁴ Abortion opponents, like biblical inerrantists, will always find some escape hatch, so the only point in debating them is to benefit third parties still amendable to argument.

If our goal is to benefit interested but uncommitted third parties, then presenting arguments an abortion critic is likely to reject has its place. For example, a third party benefits from having differing accounts of what it means to be a person with the right to life and whether those criteria apply to prenates. Even if this leaves those debating abortion at a standstill, the third party will have clear choices and an idea of the rationale behind the differing arguments.

As it so happens, the argument I am going to make here starts with premises that are generally accepted by the abortion rights proponent, the abortion critic, and the undecided person alike. From those premises, I will derive a principle which I believe soundly unifies those premises. Finally, I will demonstrate that if we consistently apply that principle to the topic of abortion, we will conclude abortion is permissible.

But first, we need to get some of the preliminary issues out of the way.

The Preliminary Issues and Fine Print

Prenatal personhood: I am neutral about whether a prenate is a person with the same right to life as you and me. Personally, I am inclined to believe that humans cannot possibly acquire personhood at least until monozygotic twinning and tetragametic chimerism are no longer possible, and probably do not acquire it until birth. Between these two points, I am open to the possibility, merely considering it doubtful. So far, I have not found any arguments favoring prenatal personhood convincing, though I think there are some promising approaches that may yet be parleyed into a successful argument.

In view of my neutrality, my arguments favoring abortion rights stipulate prenatal personhood. Some abortion rights advocates may think this cedes too much to the abortion opponent, particularly since I don't really believe the prenate is a person. However, Thomson's “Defense” long ago established that it is not enough to show that the prenate is a person with the right to life, the abortion critic must also show that an abortion unjustly deprives the prenate of its life. Abortion opponents have generally accepted that part of her argument, effectively rendering prenatal personhood irrelevant to the abortion debate.

Moreover, I have found time and again that abortion critics do not consistently apply the same rules that apply to you and me to the prenate. In other words, what they try to do is give the prenate special rights that exempt them from those rules.⁵ I've hinted at this in my objections to the so-called responsibility argument, and I may write future posts highlighting those inconsistencies. If stipulating prenatal personhood cedes ground to the abortion critic, it is not a concession that does them any favors.

Meanwhile, stipulating prenatal personhood also allows me to save space. I need not repeatedly say things like “if the prenate is a person” or “the prenate's rights, if any.”

General rules and exceptions: I am making an argument that abortion is generally permissible. In doing so, I will be making reference to rules about the general permissibility or impermissibility of certain actions. Many, if not most rules have exceptions, and perhaps you can think of exceptions to the rules I appeal to. It may be that even if you grant my argument about the general permissibility of abortion, you would still be able think of some exceptions. If those exceptions are justified, I will gladly grant them. However, exceptions do not void the general rule.

Consider this rule: “Homicide is wrong.” I would imagine you agree with this rule. I would also imagine you would also immediately think of exceptions to this rule. Self-defense is an exception that is considered noncontroversial. Other exceptions, like capital punishment and war are more controversial in modern society, but legitimate arguments can be made in favor of these exceptions. However, I think we would agree that even granting the exceptions, homicide is still generally wrong.

Likewise, the general permissibility of abortion does not mean there are specific cases where a woman having an abortion is not legitimately subject to moral criticism. I myself have read accounts that I found morally disturbing. I suspect that many of you have read or heard accounts you found disturbing, even if you tend to favor abortion rights. I am not saying that every woman's decision to have an abortion is above moral criticism; I am saying that she is permitted to make that decision.⁶

Again, this discussion allows me to save space. I will make statements that on its face do not allow exceptions. When I say “X is wrong” or “Y is permissible,” I generally intend those statements to be understood as “X is generally wrong” or “Y is permissible in typical cases.”

With these thoughts in mind, let us proceed.

The Argument⁷

Consider the following propositions:

1. Raping someone is wrong.

2. Enslaving someone is wrong.

3. Kidnapping someone for ransom or to further a criminal purpose is wrong.

4. Subjecting someone to involuntary medical/scientific experimentation is wrong.

5. Forcing someone to donate blood, tissue, and/or organs is wrong.

I think few, if any, people will have major objections to these propositions. We may quibble over the precise meaning of rape, slavery, and kidnapping, but if there are actions that are universally wrong, we would be agreed these actions would be among them. As for involuntary medical/scientific experimentation, Joseph Mengele and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment are widely if not universally reviled.

While debating abortion, I have encountered a few people who are open to forced organ donation--to a point. None openly advocate the practice. The vast majority of abortion critics agree that forcing bodily donations is wrong. Legally, such a practice has been forbidden by the courts in the United States. Meanwhile, China's practice of executing prisoners to harvest organs is roundly condemned by the international community. I think it is safe to say that proposition 5 is generally regarded as sound.

Now let us consider these propositions:

6. One may do anything necessary to prevent or escape being subjected to the actions of propositions 1 through 5.

7. Moreover, third parties may also do anything necessary to aid someone prevent or escape being subjected to the actions of propositions 1 through 5.

Again, I don't think many people will pose serious objections to these propositions. The law already recognizes them in cases of rape and kidnapping. Surely anyone trying to take another person's organs or perform involuntary medical experiments on them poses enough a threat of serious bodily harm that self-defense would be justified.⁸ And surely no one would condemn someone (legally or morally) for killing a slavemaster or Mengele if that is was necessary to escape them.

Now let us consider why the actions in propositions 1-5 are wrong, so wrong that it would justify doing anything necessary to prevent or escape those actions. At first glance, propositions 1-5 are just a random list of acts. They are serious wrongs, to be sure—serious enough to make propositions 6-7 true. Do these acts have something else in common?

Yes. All these acts involve using someone's body without consent. The difference between rape and having sex is that both parties consent to the latter. The difference between a slave and an employee is that the employee can quit. Kidnapping involves holding someone against their will, typically to force a third party into doing something to get their loved one returned. Involuntary medical/scientific experimentation uses a persons body for an end the person does not know and may not care about. And forcing someone to donate blood, tissue, or organs takes something from someone's very body for another's use.

The common factor of using someone's body without consent also explains why these acts are serious enough to make propositions 6-7 true, even if these acts do not physically injure the person. One's body is as close to an absolutely inviolable boundary as it gets. One's body is perhaps the only thing that everyone can truly call their own. To use someone's body without consent is thus a most profound violation of the person.

We can now connect propositions 1-5 together with this proposition:

8. Using someone's body without consent is wrong.

And we can accordingly modify propositions 6-7 as well:

9. One may do anything necessary to prevent or escape another using their body without consent.

10. Moreover, third parties may also do anything necessary to aid someone prevent or escape having their bodies used without consent.

Now, let us turn to the subject of pregnancy. Consider the following proposition:

11. During pregnancy, a prenate uses the mother's body.

Proposition 11 is simply a fact. Even if there were no other considerations, these are some of the things prenates do to women: They implant themselves into the woman's body. They dampen the woman's immune system. They tap the woman's blood supply to obtain nutrients and oxygen. They alter the woman's brain chemistry. They build their bones by taking the calcium from the woman's bones and teeth. They release their wastes back into her body.

When the woman wants to have a baby, she allows the prenate do this to her. In this case, the prenate is doing nothing wrong. When the woman doesn't want to have a baby, what the prenate does to her causes her great harm. Based on proposition 8, we would conclude the prenate is doing something wrong. We'll summarize thus:

12. During an unwanted pregnancy, a prenate is using the mother's body without consent.

13. A prenate's use of the mother's body without consent is wrong.

And based on propositions 9-10, we conclude that the mother or a third party may do anything necessary to escape the prenate's use of the mother's body without consent:

14. The mother may do anything necessary to end the prenate's nonconsensual use of her body.

15. Moreover, a third party may also do anything necessary to aid a woman escape the prenate's nonconsensual use of her body.

All that remains to be asked is whether an abortion is necessary to escape the prenate's nonconsensual use of the woman's body. We can agree that one can do anything necessary to escape the situations described in propositions 1-5. Even so, killing the person doing these things isn't always necessary. We would only say that killing the offender is justified if killing them were the last resort or if killing them was the only means of escape. Surely this applies to the prenate using its mother's body without consent as well. However, given current technology, an abortion is the only means to escape a prenate using the mother's body without consent. Should the technology develop where the prenate can be transferred to another person or an artificial womb without any further cost⁹ to the woman than an abortion, the necessity of abortion would be questionable. Meanwhile, at least during the early stages of pregnancy, the answer is undoubtedly positive.

Another thing that might make the necessity of an abortion questionable is whether the fetus is viable. When the fetus has become viable, it could be argued that an abortion is no longer necessary. One can either induce labor or have a Caesarean section to end the unwanted pregnancy. Here, I must admit I am not a medical expert and therefore cannot answer this objection definitively. I can note that inducing labor or having a C-section both involve significant negative costs to the mother in terms of her total well-being. How do those costs stack against the negative costs of having a late-term abortion? That is a question I will leave to the experts.

However, when we say killing the offender would be justified if killing them were the last resort, we generally do not mean this in an absolute sense. We don't generally require people to take heroic measures to avoid killing those subjecting us to the actions of propositions 1-5. We don't, for example, require people to put themselves into further danger before saying that killing the rapist or kidnapper the last resort. One may do so, which is why we would consider such people heroic, but they are not required to do so. We may say then that insofar as a late-term abortion is less risky than inducing labor or having a C-section, the late-term abortion can be considered the last resort.

We also probably wouldn't require people to incur significant costs to themselves to avoid killing the rapist or slavemaster, even if we aren't strictly talking about physical risk. The question is how much cost one must incur before we can say that killing the offender was the last resort. It seems to me that this can only be decided on a case-by-case basis. I would suggest using something like the reasonable person standard.¹⁰ Are the costs of not killing the offender too much to ask of a typical person? If the answer is positive, then we may affirm killing the offender was the last resort. If not, then killing the offender would not be justified. I suspect mere inconvenience would not qualify. If all a slave has to do to escape is wait an hour for the master to fall asleep before sneaking away, then killing the slavemaster would not likely be justified. Similarly, if the only consideration were that a late-term abortion is faster than the process of inducing labor or having a C-section, then a late-term abortion would not likely be justified. On the other hand, if escaping without killing the offender involves a good deal of pain and suffering, that would qualify. If the choice was between being raped, undergoing torture to avoid killing the rapist, and simply killing the rapist, then killing the rapist would be justified. If the negative costs of induced labor, a C-section, and late-term abortions are roughly equal, then even late-term abortions are justified. And the higher the costs of induced labor or C-sections vs. late-term abortions, the more a late-term abortion is justified. Provisionally speaking, even a late-term, post-viability abortion may be considered necessary for a mother to escape the nonconsensual use of her body by the prenate.¹¹

Let us complete the argument then:

16. An abortion is necessary to escape a prenate's nonconsensual use of a woman's body.

17. Therefore abortion is permissible.

Update 21 October 2022: I originally developed this essay through online discussion in various online forums. Interested readers are invited to examine my comment history on Disqus to peruse the development of my thinking on abortion, though I would warn you that you would have to go through nearly a decade of comments. More recently I started seeing references to Eileen L. McDonagh's Breaking the Abortion Deadlock: From Choice to Consent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). From the descriptions, it was clear she was making a similar argument to the one I made above. Even more recently, I obtained a copy and read it.

The arguments are astonishingly similar. Both are extensions of Thomson's argument in a sense. Both are modeled on self-defense, though I think McDonagh is more full-throttled in asserting abortion is self-defense, as opposed to like self-defense. However, this is probably a distinction that makes no real difference. I had encountered some forms of self-defense arguments in pro-choice circles, but I tended to shy away from them until I had what I thought was a new, central insight on the matter: in an unwanted pregnancy, the fetus is the aggressor. But it turns out McDonagh had that same insight nearly twenty years before I wrote this essay. McDonagh got there first; I merely came to the same place using a different route.

The only substantial difference between McDonagh and my argument is the starting position. McDonagh begins with a consideration of the legal concept of wrongful pregnancy works out from there (7). Under this view, it is the conceptus that causes pregnancy. Of course, I did note that the prenate implants itself into the pregnant person in my essay, but this was in the context of demonstrating that the prenate is in fact using the pregnant person's body. This is a distinction that does make a difference. McDonagh builds on that insight by proposing that sex be decoupled from pregnancy (Chapter 3). This has obvious implications for the Responsibility Objection. To make a long story short, consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy.

In contrast, my argument starts with a consideration what things like rape, slavery, kidnapping, etc., fundamentally are and why that makes them wrong. Under this view, it simply doesn't matter how one becomes pregnant, any more than it doesn't matter how one came to be raped, enslaved, or kidnapped. It is the fact that an unwanted pregnancy is fundamentally the same thing as rape, slavery, kidnapping, etc., and wrong for the same fundamental reason that matters. Since they are the same thing, and wrong for the same reasons, the permitted response to the unwanted pregnancy is the same and justified for the same reason. This also has obvious implications for the Responsibility Objection. To make a long story short, consent to sex is irrelevant.

1David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

2See also Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, (New York: Picador, 2014), 61.

3Boonin, Defense, 2.

4Another approach is to fall back on one's religion, which of course raises the question of why I should be bound by their religion when we live in a secular society.

5It is this fact that more than anything else convinces me that abortion critics' real purpose is to control the lives of women, especially their sexuality. But that is an argument for another day.

6The same may be said about whether a specific person having an abortion acted wisely.

7Astute readers will recognize the general influence of Thomson and especially Long. I am, however, taking a different approach.

8Regan, Donald H. "Rewriting Roe v. Wade." Michigan Law Review 77 (1979): 1611-1618.

9In terms of health risk, pain and suffering, finances, or inconvenience.

10I would argue that the reasonable woman standard is especially justified in this case. Women are the only ones who get pregnant, suffer the effects of pregnancy, and incur the costs of induced labor, c-sections, and late-term abortions. This is not just a differential of effect in unwanted interactions or a case of historical vulnerability as in sexual harassment cases. Pregnancy is a case where men and women are fundamentally different; men simply don't have to face an unwanted pregnancy even in theory.

11Since late-term abortions are rare and are typically performed only in cases where the mother's life or health are threatened and/or cases of fetal deformity, the case I make here about viability may well be moot. Even if I conceded viability as the point where abortion is no longer necessary, I will still have made my case that abortion is permissible in typical cases. I do not so concede because the wrongness of using someone's body without consent does not depend on the duration of use. I am therefore obligated to take viability into consideration when examining the issue of whether abortion is necessary to escape the prenate's nonconsensual use of the mother's body.

Secular Pro-Life's New Double Standard

2014-12-28T18:12:00.002-07:00

Secular Pro-Life (SPL) announced they were going on hiatus for the week of 22-29 December 2014. It appears they have been using the time to systematically ban pro-choice advocates from commenting and deleting their comments. I noticed this today when I was going through my Disqus comments and discovered a string of them had been marked "Removed." So far, at least forty of my posts have been so removed as I write this post. I've been given no warning, no explanation. When I made another post, I was informed I had been banned from posting comments. Again, no warning, no explanation.

Going over several blog entries, I've noticed that at least eight more pro-choice commenters had at least some of their posts deleted. I can't say for certainty the posters have also been banned, but no doubt they will get a surprise when SPL publishes new blogs and they try to comment.

Don't get me wrong here. It is SPL's blog and they can allow or disallow comments from anyone they so choose. And it is certainly no skin off my back if they are so insecure about their position that they have to block opposing viewpoints being left on their blog. If they only want to hear from yes-men, that's not my problem.

What is interesting though is that SPL has posted several blogs complaining about perceived censorship when it comes from the pro-choice side. Take a look here, here, here, and here.

I guess censorship doesn't really bother them that much after all.

Bodily Rights vs. "The Responsibility Argument"

2014-12-11T20:19:00.005-07:00

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time debating the abortion issue.¹ A frequently recurring theme I run into is the so-called responsibility argument. The responsibility argument is usually used by anti-abortion advocates in response to the bodily rights argument put forth by pro-choice advocates. So to understand the responsibility argument, we must first briefly review the bodily rights argument.

The classic statement of the bodily rights argument is Judith Jarvis Thomson's “A Defense of Abortion.” Thomson argued that even if a prenate was entitled to the right to life, that right does not include a claim to using the mother's body in order to sustain itself. Just as we have the right² to refuse anyone our body parts, even when their lives depend on it, so too a mother can refuse the prenate the use of her body. An abortion is therefore permissible in most cases.

The responsibility argument counters that, by virtue of voluntarily engaging in an activity knowing that pregnancy is a foreseeable result, the mother has given the prenate a claim to her body. This is sometimes phrased as “Consent to sex is consent to pregnancy.” Other times, it is more bluntly phrased as “[Choose a snarl word denoting woman] opened her legs, she can pay the price.” However phrased, the argument is that the mother's bodily autonomy has been forfeited³ by the act of having sex. Excluding cases of rape,⁴ abortion is therefore impermissible. Matters such as using birth control are irrelevant so long as the risk of pregnancy is not zero.

I must admit the responsibility argument does make a prima facie case for giving the prenate a claim on its mother's body in non-rape cases.⁵ The idea that people are required to take responsibility for their actions is well established in both legal and ethical reasoning. The consequences may sometimes include the forfeiture of certain rights, including bodily autonomy.⁶ Thus, we cannot simply dismiss this argument out of hand.

The questions that confronts us are: Is the woman really responsible for her pregnancy in a morally meaningful way? Granting the woman has some responsibility for her condition, does that responsibility rise to the level that abortion becomes impermissible when the woman had voluntary sex?

I have already gone through many outlines and started many drafts of this post. But the more I think about the “responsibility argument,” the more objections I come up with. So I've decided that, rather than write an essay that connects all my objections together, I would just make a numbered list. I am not saying these arguments are equally strong, though I do think some of them are decisive.

Without further ado then--

1. Consent to sex may be voluntary, but it is not necessarily free. To understand what I mean here, consider something more than ninety-nine per cent of adults have done at one time or another: getting up in the morning, crawling into their vehicles, and going to a crappy job, working for a crappy employer, making crappy wages. Those actions are completely voluntary—nobody put a gun to their heads and said they must do this. Yet, for all that, are those actions really free? No, they did it not because they wanted to, but because there is a host of pressures and obligations that forced them to do so. To not go to those crappy jobs carried consequences that made having even a crappy job worthwhile. Likewise with consenting to sex. Often enough, a woman consents to sex because of pressures and obligations⁷ that force her to do so.

Why does this matter when it comes to the “responsibility argument?” Precisely because of the rape exception. The rape exception specifically excludes rape victims because she was forced into the act. If being forced into the act is enough to exempt women from a general prohibition against abortion, then we can't limit ourselves to considering the crime of rape. We need to also exempt those who were forced to have sex by means other than physical force.

2. Sex may be necessary,⁸ but it is not sufficient to cause pregnancy. In order to get pregnant, a number of different factors must be in place, most of which are beyond the woman's control. The woman had sex, what happens after that is under the control of nature. The woman's lack of control over whether conception occurs or not also casts doubt whether pregnancy is foreseeable for any given act of intercourse.

3. Granting that objection 2 is wrong, it is still nature's fault that the prenate needs the woman's body to survive. In human reproduction, there simply isn't an option where the prenate can be created and not require the woman's body to survive. The woman is no more responsible for the prenate's condition than a potential organ donor is responsible for the illness or injury that caused the need for a replacement organ. In other words, at most she is simply responsible for the fact the prenate exists, and not for the fact it needs her body to survive.

4. Accepting a risk does not entail that we must accept the result should the worst occur. When we get into our vehicles and start the engine, we accept that there is a risk we will be injured in a car accident. But should an accident occur, it would be absurd to say that we must therefore forego medical treatment.

5. Nor does accepting a risk entail that we automatically give up our rights. If I leave my door unlocked in the knowledge that there are burglars out there, it would be absurd to say I've forfeited my property rights should a burglar actually enter my home and steal my things. If this is true for mere property rights, how much more so when it comes to the right to bodily integrity?

6. The responsibility argument sets a standard of strict liability that imposes extreme burdens on the woman to avoid the punishment of forced gestation. Effectively, her only options are complete abstinence during her fertile years, having a hysterectomy, or having a bilateral oophorectomy. All of these options have severe consequences for a woman's total well-being. There is no other case where we would impose extraordinary burdens on someone to avoid strict liability.

7. The responsibility argument does not address cases where the man sabotaged the birth control.⁹ Though having sex in these conditions cannot be considered voluntary (indeed, in some places sabotaging birth control legally constitutes sexual assault), logically the responsibility argument will not excuse the woman. True, her consent was conditioned upon properly using birth control, but even using birth control does not reduce the risk of pregnancy to zero. Since she would have still voluntarily taken the risk, she must still accept the responsibility and can still be required to gestate.

8. Even a rape victim may not be able to evade the strict liability standard demanded by the responsibility argument. One could avoid being raped by building an impregnable fortress and remaining inside of it. By failing to do so, she assumes the risk of rape and, by the terms of the responsibility argument, is therefore liable for the results. Given that we live in a rape culture where the woman is often, if not usually, blamed for the rape as it is, this argument isn't as absurd as it might appear at first glance.¹⁰

9. The responsibility argument is not applied evenly. The same argument would justify forced donations of blood, tissue, and organs when someone caused the need. Yet anti-abortion advocates deny this implication.

10. Anti-abortion advocates also try to say the responsibility argument isn't about punishing women for having sex. As it is, prohibiting abortion deprives pregnant women of their right to life, liberty, and security of person; their right to be free from slavery; their right to be recognized as a person before the law; their right to equal protection under the law; their right to be free from torture; their right to bodily integrity; and their right to decide when and if to have children, all without due process of law. The responsibility argument goes further than a blanket prohibition of abortion though, precisely by claiming that this wholesale deprivation of rights is justified because the woman had sex. The responsibility argument turns sex into an act of negligence, if not a crime.

11. If abortion is prohibited on the basis of the responsibility argument, it is inevitable that someone will die as a result of an unwanted pregnancy. This means she will have been sentenced to the death penalty for having sex. Even assuming the responsibility argument can be sustained, we should rightly ask if the punishment fits the crime. Death for having sex is completely incommensurate.

The responsibility argument creates a prima facie case that the woman who engages in voluntary sex forfeits her bodily autonomy by giving the prenate a claim to her body. This case does not hold up under scrutiny. Though her participation in sex is voluntary, it does not necessarily mean her choice was free. Even granting that her choice was free, her responsibility for her pregnancy is in itself questionable. The responsibility argument sets up a standard that imposes excessive burdens on a woman trying to avoid punishment. Advocates of the responsibility argument are not consistent in applying the principle. Finally, even if it is granted that the woman is responsible for her pregnancy, the punishment is wholly disproportionate to the act she committed.

Edit: Changed the link to Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion" after one of the comments made me realize the html version here contained an error. The pdf version now linked also retains Thomson's footnotes, also omitted in the html version.

1I wish to make it clear that I am discussing abortion as a political issue, rather than a strictly moral one. My moral stance on abortion, while still comparatively permissive, is more restrictive than my political stance.

2Later recognized in the case of McFall v. Shimp.

3Some proponents will prefer to say that the right has actually been waived rather than forfeited. Holly M. Smith decisively refuted that notion in her paper “Intercourse and Moral Responsibility for the Fetus.”

4Most people using the responsibility argument also exclude cases that pose serious threats to the life and/or health of the mother. Technically speaking, the life/health exception belongs to a different category than the rape exception and is beyond the scope of the responsibility argument.

5Other cases may be exempt given the responsibility argument. For example, a woman who engages in intercourse without the knowledge that sex causes pregnancy would likely be exempt. It is not my object to tease out all the possible exemptions. If my counter-arguments are successful, then exceptions to the responsibility argument becomes a moot issue.

6A convicted criminal, for example, forfeits certain rights, including freedom of movement, an aspect of bodily autonomy.

7I realize that saying a person can be obligated to have sex will put me on thin ice in some circles. While I am prepared to argue that in some circumstances, a person can be objectively obligated to have sex, I need not have recourse to such an argument here. It is enough for the purpose of this argument that the woman feel some obligation to have sex, whether or not that feeling is based on an objective duty.

8Or not, when considering artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization.

9Indeed, in my experience, abortion opponents avoid the topic of reproductive coercion in general. The exception is when the man attempts to force the woman to have an abortion, which they use as a reason to prohibit abortion.

10And let's not forget Todd Akin's comments about “legitimate rape” in this context.

Reviving the Anointed Quorum: An Idea

2014-07-23T13:08:00.001-07:00

In Joseph Smith on Mormon Women and the Priesthood, Fiona Givens argues that, contra some assertions, that Joseph Smith did not necessarily envision granting women the priesthood. Instead, the Relief Society was intended to be an autonomous organization within the Church, parallel to the Priesthood and collaborators in the administration of the Church. As the Relief Society was meant to be an effectual (if not actual) priesthood, Givens implies that restoring the Relief Society to its autonomous position would resolve the problems that lead some women to call for ordination in the Priesthood.

I disagree with that implication. Joseph and Emma's historical vision boils down to a separate but equal status for the Relief Society. But human history has shown over and over again that "separate but equal" is anything but equal. The reason why “separate but equal” schemes don't work is because there is always an unequal distribution of power between the parties being kept separate, and it always works against the party who is declared equal. For example, during the Jim Crow era, the problem wasn't just that the white majority didn't ensure the facilities being kept separate were maintained equally. Jim Crow laws worked because the white majority devised various workarounds to the 15th Amendment that effectively deprived African Americans the power to remedy the inequities.

We can see this dynamic working in the history of the Relief Society. During the preliminary stages of the Relief Society's organization, Joseph said his intent was to “organize the women under the priesthood after a pattern of the priesthood” (emphasis added). As Givens noted, Joseph instructed the Relief Society that “If the sisters needed the prophet's instruction," they were to "ask him [and] he will give it." And notably, the Priesthood shut down the Relief Society, possibly because of the conflict between Joseph and Emma Smith over polygamy.¹

Therefore, restoring the Relief Society would not give women the role of full collaborators in the Church. The Relief Society never gave women the status of full collaborators in Church affairs to begin with. Being full collaborators in Church affairs requires having power, and the Relief Society was subject to the Priesthood, even in its original vision. The Priesthood retained the prerogatives of power while giving the Relief Society the illusion of equality. So long as the Priesthood retains the power, the Relief Society can never be truly autonomous, nor can women ever be equal collaborators in Church administration. The power differential between the Priesthood and the Relief Society must be addressed for this to happen.

If a separate but equal status for the Relief Society doesn't address the power differential between it and the Priesthood, what could? I have an idea. I don't pretend to have fully fleshed out the idea and all its implications, and therefore wouldn't call it a proposal. But if the basic idea is sound, I'm sure others could take it up and work out the details.

My idea is to revive the Anointed Quorum. The original Anointed Quorum existed for the purpose of ensuring the general membership received their temple ordinances. Once that purpose was accomplished, the Quorum was disbanded. For our purposes, the most significant point that should be noted is that the Anointed Quorum was composed of both men and women. Though intended for a specific purpose, the Anointed Quorum was the only governing body in LDS Church history where women were even theoretically made full collaborators with men.

This time, the Anointed Quorum would be vested with the authority to govern general Church affairs. It's membership would be composed of members appointed in equal numbers by and from the Priesthood and the Relief Society, subject to the law of common consent. The Priesthood and the Relief Society would be truly autonomous in the governance of its own affairs, subject only to the general policies set by the Anointed Quorum. The Anointed Quorum would have the power to proclaim official Church doctrine (subject to the law of common consent), administer Church finances, appoint Church courts, and otherwise set policy and procedure governing Church administration.

Women will never be full collaborators in Church governance unless and until the power differential between the all-male Priesthood and the female membership is resolved. The first and most obvious way to accomplish this is to extend ordination to women. Another alternative is to find some way to reorganize the Church's governing structure to ensure women have equal power with the Priesthood in administering Church affairs. Reviving the Anointed Quorum offers just such a possibility.

1. In another conversation, Don Bradley disputes the polygamy theory, noting the reasons the Relief Society stopped meeting in 1844 are not clear. It is not my intent to delve into a historical analysis about why the original Relief Society disbanded beyond noting it is unlikely it would have happened without the Priesthood exerting pressure on it.