Is Abortion Women’s Right To Control Their Bodies?

Do women’s rights, which include their right to health and to make fully informed decisions regarding their bodies, extend to other beings with future of values like ours inside them? Is it true that the right of women to decide what they can and cannot do with their bodies extend to foetuses existing inside their bodies? Does women’s rights to control their own reproduction include induced abortion?

Granting the notion that our bodies are our own properties; does it follow that women can choose to kill their foetuses inside them because foetuses are also their own properties? Or if we grant that foetuses are separate individuals with future of values like ours, does it follow that women can choose to kill these trespassers?

These questions help us to critically examine the claim that abortion is permissible because women’s do have the right to control their own bodies, primarily the right to control their own reproduction.

Women do have the rights to control their own bodies. They do also have rights to control their own reproduction through contraception, abstinence of intercourse on dangerous days, et cetera. Do these rights extend to foetuses inside of them? I do not think so. Imagine the following:

Jane decided to chop off the legs of her foetus, at week 7. Grant that she has the right to choose what happens in and to her body, Dr. John, with help of modern technology, performed the operation and chopped Jane’s foetus legs off. In week 10, Jane decided to chop the hands of her foetus off and John performed what is reasoned to be Jane’s personal choice and right. Taking it to an extreme Jane decided to pluck her foetus’ eyes out, et cetera. Two alternative endings could be that of (i) Jane in her final trimester decided to perform prostaglandin or (ii) Jane decided to give birth to an eyeless-amputated child¹.

If it is true that women’s right to control their own bodies’ extent to their foetuses, then Jane’s moral actions are permissible.

If our moral sentiments, assuming we are not morally blind, toward Jane’s action are of not only disapproval but also of condemning Jane’s actions as inhumane, then it is clear that Jane’s right to choose what happen in and to her body does not extend to her foetus. Jane’s moral actions are not permissible. Therefore it is not true that women’s right to control their own bodies’ extent to their foetuses inside them.

This is the reason I think it is not true that induced abortion is women’s rights to control their bodies. Women’s rights over their own bodies do not extend to foetuses inside them.

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[1] An eyeless-amputated child shows that Jane action where not only done to her own body but also another separate individual.

Abortion and A Flawed Brain-life Theory

Tracking Baruch Brody’s view, brain-life theorists claim that being fully human, a being must possess properties “such that their loss would mean the going out of existence (the death) of a human being”(Brody 1975, 102). The property of being human, they argued, is human brain function. J Savulescu, for example, contended:

If we cease to exist when our brain dies, we only begin to exist when our brains start to function. Consciousness does not begin until after 20 weeks’ gestation. Thus we do not begin to exist as persons, as morally relevant entities, until at least 20 weeks of fetal gestation. The question of when and if killing occurs does not even arise until at least 20 weeks’ gestation. (Savulescu 2002, 134).

Brain-life theorist John M. Goldenring¹ concisely put it this way: “Whenever a functioning human brain is present, a human being is alive.”(Goldenring 1985, 200).

Before acquiring this property, a fetus has not yet come into existence. Killing it is not like killing an existing human being. Thus aborting a fetus before it acquires brain function, so argued brain-life theorists, is morally permissible. In this article, I contended that this criteria, which “rests in symmetrical view of the beginning and end of human existence”(ibid. 202), defended by Brody, Goldenring and Savulescu is deeply flawed².

“Brain death” wrote Eelco F.M. Wijdicks,  “is the vernacular expression for irreversible loss of brain function.” He continued,

Brain death is declared when brainstem reflexes, motor responses, and respiratory drive are absent in a normothermic, nondrugged comatose patient with a known irreversible massive brain lesion and no contributing metabolic derangements. (Wijdicks 2002, 20)

The irreversible loss of brain function indicates that a patient is dying, or in a common parlance ‘as good as dead’, but not that the patient is dead. Don Marquis correctly argued that even if “death is, strictly speaking, defined in terms of the irreversible loss of brain function, the mere absence of brain function is not a sufficient condition for the absence of life.”(Marquis 1996, 8)

Moreover it is not simply the absence of brain function that is in play in pronouncing a person dead, but irreversible lost of brain function. If a person was reasonably expected to resume or come to have brain function in the future, then that person cannot be pronounced dead. Pre-brain-function fetus is a being that is reasonably expected to come to have brain function for it “ has the natural capacity to bring on the functioning of the brain.”(Varga 1984, 62)

Though I disagree with Peter Singer’s stance on the issue of abortion, I do share his verdict on this view. He correctly concluded that this view is a “convenient fiction that turns an evidently living being into one that legally is not alive. Instead of accepting such fictions, we should recognize that the fact that a being is human, and alive, does not in itself tell us whether it is wrong to take that being’s life.”(Singer 1994, 105)

Bibliography:

Brody, Baruch (1975) Abortion and the Sanctity of Human Life: A Philosophical View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Goldenring, John M. (1985) The brain-life theory: towards a consistent biological definition of humanness. Journal of Medical Ethics Vol. 11:198-204

Marquis, Don (1996) Abortion. Appeared in Donald M. Borchert (2006) ed. Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2^nd. Thomson Gale.

Savulescu, J (2002) Abortion, embryo destruction and the future of value argument. Journal of Medical Ethics. Vol. 28: 133-135

Singer, Peter (1994) Rethinking Life & Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional
Ethics. New York: St. Martin’s Press

Wijdicks, Eelco F.M. (2002) Brain death worldwide: Accepted fact but no global consensus in diagnostic criteria. Neurology Vol. 58:20-25

Varga, Andrew (1984) The Main Issues in Bioethics. 2^nd ed. NY: Paulist Press.

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[1] Goldenring believed that 8 weeks fetus has an EEG activity. He boldly asserted, “one cannot advance any logical argument to show that that fetus is not a living human being”(199) from a medical point of view after brain activity.

[2] One could also argue brain-life theory, as defended by Brody, Goldenring and Savulescu, mistake the qualitative identity of a developing human being with the numerical identity of being a human being.

NB: I would be thankful for short(<300) and concise comments and critics.

Silent Voices, Tearless Cries

They call me a baby when I am wanted and just baby in Latin when I am not wanted,
They say I am part of the one carrying me, she has a choice to do with me as she pleases,

If she pleases, she could stop my heart that began to beat 24th day I was formed,
If she pleases, she could stop my liver from making my own blood cells 8th week I came.

Do they not know, I can breathe already on my 12th week?
Do they not know, my own blood flows in my veins in a month?

Hear me praising God, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Hear me leaping with joy, for He who formed me for His glory.

Why do I deserve to be punished for the wickedness of my father?
Why am I to be sacrificed for the greediness of your selfishness?

Hear my silent voice.
Hear my tearless cry.

See, my inward parts are formed; knitted together by Him who foreknew me.
See, my eternal life in His hands; safely kept by the One who forever loves me.

From my  reflection on the issue of abortion