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Second premise: A human fetus is an innocent human being.
Conclusion: Therefore it is wrong to kill a human fetus.
The usual liberal response is to deny the second premise of
this argument. So it is on whether the fetus is a human being
that the issue is joined, and the dispute about abortion is often
taken to be a dispute about when a human life begins.
On this issue the conservative position is difficult to shake.
The conservative points to the continuum between the fertilised
egg and child, and challenges the liberal to point to any stage
in this gradual process that marks a morally significant dividing
line. Unless there is such a line, the conservative says, we
must either upgrade the status of the earliest embryo to that
of the child, or downgrade the status of the child to that of
the embryo; but no one wants to allow children to be dispatched
on the request of their parents, and so the only tenable
position is to grant the fetus the protection we now grant the
child.
Is it true that there is no morally significant dividing line
between fertilised egg and child? Those commonly suggested
are: birth, viability, quickening, and the onset of consciousness.
Let us consider these in tum.
Birth
Birth is the most visible possible dividing line, and the one that
would suit liberals best. It coincides to some extent with our
sympathies - we are less disturbed at the destruction of a fetus
we have never seen than at the death of a being we can all see,
hear and cuddle. But is this enough to make birth the line that
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Taking Life: The Embryo and the Fetus
decides whether a being mayor may not be killed? The conservative
can plausibly reply that the fetuslbaby is the same
entity, whether inside or outside the womb, with the same
human features (whether we can see them or not) and the same
degree of awareness and capacity for feeling pain. A prematurely
born infant may well be less developed in these respects than a
fetus nearing the end of its normal term. It seems peculiar to
hold that we may not kill the premature infant, but may kill
the more developed fetus. The location of a being - inside or
outside the womb - should not make that much difference to
the wrongness of killing it.
Viability
If birth does not mark a crucial moral distinction, should we
push the line back to the time at which the fetus could survive
outside the womb? This overcomes one objection to taking birth
as the decisive point, for it treats the viable fetus on a par with
the infant, born prematurely, at the same stage of development.
Viability is where the United States Supreme Court drew the
line in Roe v. Wade. The Court held that the state has a legitimate
interest in protecting potential life, and this interest becomes
'compelling' at viability 'because the fetus then presumably has
the capability of meaningful life outside the mother's womb'.
Therefore statutes prohibiting abortion after viability would not,
the Court said, be unconstitutional. But the judges who wrote
the majority decision gave no indication why the mere capacity
to exist outside the womb should make such a difference to the
state's interest in protecting potential life. After all, if we talk,
as the Court does, of potential human life, then the nonviable
fetus is as much a potential adult human as the viable fetus. (I
shall return to this issue of potentiality shortly; but it is a different
issue from the conservative argument we are now discussing,
which claims that the fetus is a human being, and not
just a potential human being.)
139
Practical Ethics
There is another important objection to making viability the
cut-off point. The point at which the fetus can survive outside
the mother's body varies according to the state of medical
technology. Thirty years ago it was generally accepted that a
baby born more than two months premature could not survive.
Now a six-month fetus - three months premature - can often
be pulled through, thanks to sophisticated medical techniques,
and fetuses born after as little as five and a half months of
gestation have survived. This threatens to undermine the Supreme
Court's neat division of pregnancy into trimesters, with
the boundary of viability lying between the second and third
trimesters.
In the light of these medical developments, do we say that a
six-month-old fetus should not be aborted now, but could have
been aborted without wrongdoing thirty years ago? The same
comparison can also be made, not between the present and the
past, but between different places. A six-month-old fetus might
have a fair chance of survival if born in a city where the latest
medical techniques are used, but no chance at all if born in a
remote village in Chad or New Guinea. Suppose that for some
reason a woman, six months pregnant, was to fly from New
York to a New Guinea village and that, once she had arrived
in the village, there was no way she could return quickly to a
city with modem medical facilities. Are we to say that it would
have been wrong for her to have an abortion before she left
New York, but now that she is in the village she may go ahead?
The trip does not change the nature of the fetus, so why should
it remove its claim to life?
The liberal might reply that the fact that the fetus is totally
dependent on the mother for its survival means that it has no
right to life independent of her wishes. In other cases, however,