The Abortion Debate

Of all the issues involved in abortion, none is more important than the status of the fetus: When and how does the fetus acquire membership in the human family?" We know it does not happen automatically. In every pregnancy, there are two remarkable and distinct social events. The first is the discovery that conception has indeed taken place. The second, much more problematic, is the acceptance of the fetus into the human family.

Both sides in the abortion debate ignore the dynamic issue of fetal status, the sole issue that determines whether the pregnancy continues or not. Both sides get lost in the abstract questions of definitions and rights, ignoring the underlying social recognition that give both definitions and rights their substance and meaning.

There are two critical events required to make a human being, the first is the penetration of a human egg by a human sperm. The second is the decision of the human family to welcome and embrace the newcomer into as one of its own. Without that social decision, whether the fetus is aborted or not, it has no chance of surviving. If we know anything for certain, it is that we don't become human until society decides we are human. We don't have rights until society as a whole agrees to enforce those rights.

The Question of Definition

Much of the debate on abortion has centered on the definitions of when a fetus becomes "a human being," or when it becomes a "person," as if the application of those social labels could somehow determine the point at which the fetus acquires the status that would make abortion unthinkable or morally wrong. This argument never gets anywhere, because it is not the labels that create the status, but the status that gives meaning to the labels. The question we should be asking is , "When does the fetus acquire moral standing?" The answer is when society says it does.

What we call a fetus has little to do with improving its status. Calling people blacks, Negroes, or Afro-Americans makes no difference on their status. It is not the name that creates the stigma, but the denial of social and legal standing. It is status that give the labels their force and meaning.

We can create a middle ground for the abortion debate by avoiding the discussion about "when the fetus becomes a human person" by admitting that the fetus is, indeed, a human person from the first moment of conception. We must also recognize, however, that the status we accord persons, even adult persons, are never absolute but vary from person to person. We regularly deny enemies, soldiers, combatants in war, criminals, and the brain-dead rights that others can take for granted. Being a human individual does not always guarantee one the right to life. We regularly deny people rights taken for granted because of their status.

This fact has allowed moralists of all persuasions, including major Catholic theologians, to admit a difference between early and late abortions. Most traditions, including the modern medical tradition, would agree that a near-term fetus has a great deal more status than one recently conceived. That is, society as a whole has already invested a great deal in the near-term fetus and has a much greater interest in its survival and welfare. Not only does society want a return on its investment, but it also identifies more strongly with the fetus. It is about to become a baby: it has intelligence, sensation, emotions, and perhaps the beginning of interests. All societies attribute a greater status to fetus as it grows and matures.

The question remains is not "When does the fetus become a human being?" but "What is it that determines whether the pregnancy continues or not?"

What are Rights?

Besides the question of definition, there has also been much discussion on the rights of the fetusand the rights of the mother. One side feels that the fetus, as a human person, possesses an inalienable "right to life" from the moment of conception. The other side holds that the woman has absolute dominion over her own body.

They have also argued against speciesism, which awards status and rights on the basis of membership in a natural kind. The claim that possession of a genotype, a full set of human genes, is the source of our inalienable rights makes as little sense as saying that being male or Caucasian is the source of moral standing. The recent turn of the Catholic church towards assigning rights on the basis of a human genotype represents a radical departure from traditional Catholic teaching. Speciesism is a decidedly materialistic explanation of rights closely allied with the error of eugenics, which also ties rights to genetic instead of moral capacities.

Rights are always social artifacts, the results of agreements and contracts we have between one another as members of society. As much as we would like to believe that certain rights are fundamental and "inalienable" (as our Declaration of Independence says), what one society may see as fundamental and inalienable, another society may see as trivial. If others do not recognize your rights, they are pretty much meaningless.

We can question, however, whether the problem of abortion can ever be solved on the basis of rights. The whole concept of rights in our society is rooted in Roman law, which sees rights in the terms of ownership and property. When you have two individuals occupying the same space, when one individual is totally and completely dependent on the other, property rights hardly make any sense. The woman's nurturing body is a biological requirement for the survival of the fetus, not a right.

Putting the abortion debate in the context of rights pretty much denies the real-world context of pregnancy and reproduction. Among humans as much as other species, parents do not bear and raise offspring in response to obligation or responsibility, but from love, attachment and caring. Bringing an infant to mature adulthood demands a constant, abiding love that you cannot demand or extract from anyone, the kind of love which, if it is absent, would cause severe psychological and physical impairment. That is why, if the woman does not welcome the fetus in her womb, a major resource for its survival is lacking, and its future is massively compromised. The question of fetal rights is meaningless unless we can oblige someone to offer that commitment of parental love. As we know, love does not admit of obligation.

Women sometimes speak of the fetus "invading" their bodies. Hardly. It is more like the fetus was invited in by the implied but willful consent of not one, but (we hope) two parties. If there was any uninvited "invasion," it was by the sperm and the male member. If rights always entail corresponding obligations, how can the parents contract an obligation with an individual before it even exists? The realities of biology do not lend themselves to the precise language of rights. What we must focus on, then is not the rights of the fetus but its new and emerging status.

Traditionally in our society, only autonomous, functioning individuals can contract rights and obligations. For a long time, children were without rights before they reached the "age of reason," around five or six years old. Contracts with persons under that age were considered worthless. It was only by way of a legal fiction that rights were gradually extended back to the time of birth. As we have already seen much of that development occurred with the intrusion of the state into the domain of the family. Child-labor laws, for example, greatly benefitted children, but at the loss of the authority of the father and the family. The state was forcing its claims on the child, as it is currently doing in the abortion debate.

Pro-life advocates rarely admit the degree to which their political activities further assail the already much embattered integrity of the family, by giving the state new authority in making reproductive decisions that once belonged to the family. Their obsession with rights rather than status focuses on the symptoms rather than the cause of abortion. Everyone's agend should be not how to outlaw abortions but rather how to reduce unwanted pregnancies through education, elimination of poverty, birth control, and family planning. The abortion debate has been a general smoke screen used to ignore and deny deep-seated social and political problems facing all women in all societies.

The pro-life advocates attempt to bolster traducinist theory with new medical technology. It would almost seem as if genes and chromosomes have replaced the religious function of the soul, as it governs with utmost precision the most characteristic function of a living being: the conversion of foreign matter into units of its own production. The genotype provides all the biological equipment needed to carry out the mission of life. No idle passenger, it takes an active role in organizing its world. Ortega y Gasset wrote that it is "a vital program which ... overpowers environment to lodge itself there."

Clinical photography and sonic-scanning devices have revealed the living fetus to our astonished gaze. Once the secret guest of the mother, it has become our fellow voyager in the space of life, representing human life in its most robust biological stage. We cannot but cheer its progress through its awesome trajectory.

Although this biological view of life is persuasive, identifying moral standing with biological functions ironically opens the door to eugenics and the practice of eugenic abortions opposed by pro-life supporters. Such a view also betrays a limited understanding of biology. Genes do not individually determine specific traits such as tallness, hair color, and eye color but rather contribute to such traits. Genes operate as labile enzymes, chemical packages that accelerate the chemical reactions of other chemical packages. They interact with the environment in which they exist. That is to say, environmental factors affect the manner in which the genes affect development. Becoming human is not the result of possessing the right genes, but a long and ordered process demanding complex interactions with one's environment, the first of which is a happy mother's healthy body.

Because of the interactive and developmental nature of fetal life, a prestigious majority of medical personnel and other professionals see a difference between early and late abortions. The earlier the abortion, the more it takes on the character of contraception because it involves a human being lacking sentience and little involvement with its environment. Later abortions, however, take on the character of infanticide and require significantly more justification because they involve human persons with a number of well-developed interests in the fetus, and the fetus itself possesses a biography of social interaction within a community.

Moral Standing and Social Identity

The question of when the fetus acquires moral standing is simply the question of when it acquires a social identity.

While moralists argue about the intrinsic interests of the individual, historians and sociologists also have something to contribute to the debate. For them, the question of when the fetus acquires moral standing is the question of when it acquires a social identity.

What is significant about many European societies is that most of them believed that a person acquired moral standing some time after birth, in some places not until four or five years of age. The process by which European and American societies came to accept the moral standing of children offers some clues to understanding the abortion debate.

Children of Europe had more than the usual share of obstacles to their survival: an unhealthy and swampy climate, disease, plague, war, famine, malnutrition, and the absence of basic hygiene and sanitation all reinforced by a careless and often wretched regard for children.

As a result of these difficulties, Europeans generally regarded infancy as an extension of pregnancy, a state of continued biological dependency on the mother, completely outside the nurturing give-and-take of social interaction. As a result, birth alone did not qualify the infant for the protection that would have maximized its chances for survival.

Only after the child was perceived as having forged a stable bond with its environment did the community bring its powerful resources to bear on the child's behalf. Europeans identified the establishment of a stable bond as the point at which they perceived the individual beginning to respond to social interaction <197> the point at which the interaction of society would make a difference.

The Obstetric Discourse

Within the last hundred and fifty years, medical science has not only improved the fetal chances for survival, but also has pushed back our perception of when the human being establishes a stable bond with its environment and begins its life-long interaction with others.

New studies all challenge Freud's perceptions of life in the womb as a Nirvanic state of suspended animation terminated by the traumatic <B>separation</B> of birth. The uterus is as a very noisy, very changing, and very active place, full of events that the fetus can experience as pleasant and painful, even traumatic. Birth itself is a liberation from what can become for the fetus a crowded, uncomfortable, and sometimes suffocating environment.

We spend an average of 265-1/2 days in our mother's uterus, and our mental and physical development is determined by any number of factors. Already in the mother's uterus the fetus is capable of responding to a large number of stimuli that can affect its development. An emotionally disturbed pregnant woman may measurably affect the behavior of the fetus to the extent of producing a highly irritable child at birth. The common pool of endocrine hormones shared by mother and child are the avenue by which even emotional experiences are transmitted between them.

The factors of the uterine environment that can affect the development of the fetus include the following: 1. physical agents, 2. nutrition, 3. drugs, 4. infections, 5. maternal fitness and stress, 6. allergies, 7. maternal age, 8. number of previous pregnancies.

Science has confirmed what sensitive people have long known: a successful pregnancy and a healthy baby depends on the establishment of an affectionate bond that starts long before birth, even before pregnancy. When a pregnancy starts with a rich emotional and sexual relationship between the father and mother, the mother and fetus continue this pattern. The psychological and physical patterns learned in the parents' relationship with each other have a direct effect on the development of the fetus by transforming the intimate bond that exists between the mother and child.

Studies have pushed earlier and earlier our perception of when the fetus exhibits reactive responses. By the end of the first trimester, the nervous system is so well developed that the fetus responds to stroking of its palm with a hair by attempting to grasp it. It responds to the stroking of its eyes by squinting, and to the stroking of its lips by sucking. The fetus at that age is also sensitive to light and even more sensitive to sound. When the mother smokes, the fetus smokes too, making its heart beat faster.

Fetal learning starts as early as the first trimester. When the mother relaxes to the music of Debussy, the fetus learns to relax too. Later as an infant, it will respond in a particular way to the same music. When the mother is bothered with making dinner and the demands of others, the fetus responds excitedly, learning to add its own demands to the fuss of dinner time.

During the 38 weeks of pregnancy, a profoundly intimate relationship develops between the mother and fetus, the most important and the most intimate relationship of our life. From conception to birth, the mother and fetus deeply affect each other, and their relationship establishes attitudes and modes of interacting that persist for a lifetime.

The most tragic result of the abortion debate has been its ability to distract us from what we now know of the highly interactive and social nature of pregnancy. The bizarre image our society has of pregnancy forms the background of the abortion debate and contributes to our high rates of infant mortality, complications of pregnancy, and infant alcohol-and-drug syndromes.

Many women in the U.S. still resent pregnancy and expect childbirth to be long and painful because our obstetrical procedures are still based on the premise that pregnancy and birth are not social processes but a serious disease of the individual. They experience difficulties in childbirth that uphold their dismal expectations. Women who have been prepared for childbirth, however, and who go through childbirth with minimum disturbance and the support of their husbands experience the delivery quite differently, even those who report a great deal of pain.

What both sides ignore in the abortion debate is <EM>the gradual emergence of the fetus as a responsive actor in society<EM>. It was not until the 17th Century that Europeans discovered childhood. We have yet to discover <B>fetalhood</B> and the influence of social interaction on fetal development. We have yet to comprehend the full significance of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's statement, "The history of man for the nine months preceding his birth would, probably, be far more interesting and contain events of greater moment than all the three score and ten years that follow it."

Abortion and Family Policy

In our resolve to create a flat society where we all stand as equal individuals before one another, we have demolished the authority of the family as the controller of reproduction and nurture. What was one the province of the family and religion is now bestowed upon the individual woman faced with a pregnancy.

The new awareness of self so unique precious to all of us seems to place obstacles in the way of solving the abortion problem, because it takes the whole topic of pregnanccy out of the natural context of family and community of which it is always a part and tries to force it into a context of legal rights and prohibitions among which it can never be a part.

The essentially social nature of all life is the result of the special relationship between genitor and offspring. The profoundly psychological and largely subconscious relationship between mother and child that develops during pregnancy is a result of our evolutionary past and the reproductive relationships that all organisms experience up to and including human beings.

Studies have confirmed what sensitive people have long known: a successful pregnancy and a healthy baby depends on the establishment of an affectionate bond that starts long before birth, even before pregnancy. When a pregnancy starts with a rich emotional and sexual relationship between the father and mother, the mother and fetus continue this pattern. The psychological and physical patterns learned in the parents' relationship with each other have a direct effect on the development of the fetus by transforming the intimate bond that exists between the mother and child.

If in ancient times, reproduction was organized around the distribution of property or the war needs of the state, in our day, it is organized around the growth and happiness of the individual. The question is not only whether abortions should be allowed or not, but how we can re-establish and heighten the relationships between child, parents, and community so necessary for the proper development.

Many feminists have begun to say that the right to abortion is no more an answer to women's control over their bodies than busing is an answer to racism. Abortion does not provide better salaries, food, or housing, better education for the women who need to break out of poverty. Nor does it advance the cause of children in our society.

What women today are lacking, especially working women, even more than access to abortion is the ability to guarantee their unborn children an open future with all the conditions required for optimum development. Nothing degrades the status of women more than child abuse, poverty, homelessness, malnutrition, high rates of infant mortality, and the careless regard of children.

It is highly likely that we cannot effectively address these formidable problems without radically altering how we view ourselves as a society. North Americans think of themselves as being child-centered, but the high rates of poverty, infant mortality, and child abuse indicate otherwise. Although we have come a long way since our European ancestors regarded children as worth less than farm animals, the status of children in our society is still deficient when compared to other societies.

We could do worse than study those child-centered and extended-family societies that have achieved a balance between resources and demands. In those societies, the chief relationship is not the sexual relationship between the husband and wife but the relationship between the child and the rest of the community. They give the highest priority to the health of children and the strength of pregnant and nursing women. They treat pregnancy not as a disease but as a cause for ritual celebration and pampering of the expectant mother. They also celebrate childbirth with elaborate feasts that may last weeks.

They dedicate the most prestigious networks to the tending of infants, children, and mothers, with responsibilities shared by parents, older children, unmarried adults, and the aged. Because the whole community shares in the responsibilities of child care, the parents are relieved of much of the stress of discipline and retain a relationship with their children remarkable for its life-long tenderness and absence of conflict.

The anthropological record is full of descriptions of such societies, and none was more revealing than Margaret Mead's description of the Arapesh of New Guinea. After describing the way in which older children and adults were constantly fondling, carrying, or playing with infants whenever they were not nursing, Mead wrote:

To the Arapesh, the world is a garden than must be tilled, not for one's self, not in pride and boasting, not for hoarding and usury, but that the yams and the dogs and the pigs and most of all the children may grow. From this whole attitude flow many of the other Arapesh traits, the lack of conflict between the old and young, the lack of any expectation of jealousy or envy, the emphasis upon co-operation.

© 1996 William H. DuBay

The Abortion Debate Part I
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