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argument justified abortion even if we allowed the life of the
fetus to count as heavily as the life of a normal person. The
utilitarian would say that it would be wrong to refuse to sustain
a person's life for nine months, if that was the only way the
person could survive. Therefore if the life of the fetus ~s. gi~en
the same weight as the life of a normal person, the utIhtanan
would say that it would be wrong to refuse to carry the fetus
until it can survive outside the womb.
This concludes our discussion of the usual liberal replies to
the conservative argument against abortion. We have seen that
liberals have failed to establish a morally significant dividing
line between the newborn baby and the fetus, and their arguments
- with the possible exception of Thomson's argument if
her theory of rights can be defended - also fail to justify abortion
in ways that do not challenge the conservative claim that the
fetus is an innocent human being. Nevertheless, it would be
premature for conservatives to assume that their case against
abortion is sound. It is now time to bring into this debate some
more general conclusions about the value of life.
THE VALUE OF FETAL LIFE
Let us go back to the beginning. The central argument against
abortion from which we started was:
First premise: It is wrong to kill an innocent human bein~.
Second premise: A human fetus is an innocent human bemg.
Conclusion: Therefore it is wrong to kill a human fetus.
The first set of replies we considered accepted the first premise
of this argument but objected to the second. The second set of
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Practical Ethics
replies rejected neither premise, but objected to drawing the
conclusion from these premises (or objected to the further conclusion
that abortion should be prohibited by law). None of the
replies questioned the first premise of the argument. Given the
widespread acceptance of the doctrine of the sanctity of human
life, this is not surprising; but the discussion of this doctrine in
the preceding chapters shows that this premise is less secure
than many people think.
The weakness of the first premise of the conservative argument
is that it relies on our acceptance of the special status of
human life. We have seen that 'human' is a term that straddles
two distinct notions: being a member of the species Homo sapiens,
and being a person. Once the term is dissected in this way,
the weakness of the conservative's first premise becomes apparent.
If 'human' is taken as equivalent to 'person', the second
premise of the argument, which asserts that the fetus is a human
being, is clearly false; for one cannot plausibly argue that a fetus
is either rational or self-conscious. If, on the other hand, 'human'
is taken to mean no more than 'member of the species
Homo sapiens', then the conservative defence of the life of the
fetus is based on a characteristic lacking moral significance and
so the first premise is false. The point should by now be familiar:
whether a being is or is not a member of our species is, in itself
no more relevant to the wrongness of killing it than whether it
is or is not a member of our race. The belief that mere membership
of our species, irrespective of other characteristics,
makes a great difference to the wrongness of killing a being is
a legacy of religious doctrines that even those opposed to abortion
hesitate to bring into the debate.
Recognising this simple point transforms the abortion issue.
We can now look at the fetus for what it is - the actual characteristics
it possesses - and can value its life on the same scale
as the lives of beings with similar characteristics who are not
members of our species. It now becomes apparent that the 'Pro
Life' or 'Right to Life' movement is misnamed. Far from having
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Taking Life: The Embryo and the Fetus
concern for all life, or a scale of concern impartially based on
the nature of the life in question, those who protest against
abortion but dine regularly on the bodies of chickens, pigs and
calves, show only a biased concern for the lives of members of
our own species. For on any fair comparison of morally relevant
characteristics, like rationality, self-consciousness, awareness,
autonomy, pleasure and pain, and so on, the calf, the pig and
the much derided chicken come out well ahead of the fetus at
any stage of pregnancy - while if we make the comparison with
a fetus of less than three months, a fish would show more signs
of consciousness.
My suggestion, then, is that we accord the life of a fetus no
greater value than the life of a nonhuman animal at a similar
level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to
feel, etc. Since no fetus is a person, no fetus has the same claim
to life as a person. We have yet to consider at what point the
fetus is likely to become capable of feeling pain. For now it will
be enough to say that until that capacity exists, an abortion
terminates an existence that is of no "intrinsic" value at all.
Mterwards, when the fetus may be conscious, though not selfconscious,
abortion should not be taken lightly (if a woman
ever does take abortion lightly). But a woman's serious interests
would normally override the rudimentary interests even of a
conscious fetus. Indeed, even an abortion late in pregnancy for
the most trivial reasons is hard to condemn unless we also
condemn the slaughter of far more developed forms of life for