At What Age Is It Morally Permissible to Kill the Unborn?

By Stephen E. Parrish and Elenn’ E. Parrish

The question is, of course, facetious (or it should be). But it illustrates an important point. Whatever else it is, an abortion[1] is the killing of a child, usually with the consent of the mother, and often of the father.

I have encountered people who seem to think that it is okay to have an abortion because the unborn baby is merely a mass of cells. Apparently, they think that the massy blob of cells magically becomes a baby when it is born. Because of modern technology, we can now see that the unborn baby is much more than just a blob of cells; it has a human structure from the beginning. This has affected some people’s thinking on the issue. However, even were it the case that unborn babies were just a mass of cells that magically transformed into a baby at birth, this would not change the fact that this human being is someone’s child.

Others seem to think that it is okay to have an abortion when the baby is young, but at some point, it becomes murder and should be banned. Indeed, many people believe this. In this essay, I will argue that because the baby is a human being and the child of the mother and father, it is wrong to kill him/her at any stage.

It is sometimes argued that killing an unborn baby is not homicide, because it is not a person. Whether that is true or false depends upon how the word “person” is defined. If we take the view that a person is someone with the ability to reason, then unborn babies, along with born babies at the earlier stages of development, some people in comas, and people in an advanced stage of Alzheimer’s are not persons. If we count a person as being a member of the human species that is in the normal process of development, then our unborn babies are persons. But whether we count an unborn baby as a person or not, it is indisputably a human being. With the “not a person” argument, the question then becomes, “At what stage is a human being considered a person? Therefore, up to which point would it be morally permissible to kill a human being?”

A “human being” is different from merely being human. A person’s hair is human, as is a skin tag. Every cell in a human being’s body is human. But the individual cells are not human beings.

When the abortion controversy began in earnest about 65 or so years ago, it was sometimes said that abortions would be legal only in the so-called hard cases: deformity, rape, and so on. Some years later, it was sometimes said that it would be legal only during the first months of pregnancy, and that no one was thinking about making it legal in the later months. At present, abortion on demand is legal in my own state of Michigan, and many other places, until the moment of birth. Once the principle is established that it is okay to kill an innocent human being, it becomes increasingly difficult to declare a definite time for when it is wrong to kill.

When thinking about abortion, people seem to have one of two different intuitive reactions to it. One is to think that the unborn baby at some stage is not developed enough, and that therefore there is nothing morally wrong in killing it. People with this intuition consider themselves “pro-choice.” Many of this group would agree that at some point in the pregnancy it becomes morally wrong to kill the unborn baby. Others will perhaps think that there is no wrongness in killing delivered infants up to some stages of development after birth.

People with the other intuitive reaction are known as anti-abortionists, or pro-lifers. They believe that the baby in utero is a human being and that therefore it is morally wrong to kill him/her no matter what his/her state of development is, except perhaps for some extreme set of circumstances (such as anencephaly), in which case it is at best just the lesser of evils.

It cannot be that both intuitions are right. Either the pro-choice stance is wrong, or the pro-life stance is. The bulk of this essay will be to argue that the pro-life thinking is right and the pro-choice is wrong. The main argument will be that the pro-choice intuition is false, that the intrinsic value of a human being exists no matter what stage of development there is.

There may be two different strategies that the pro-abortionist may take in attempting to justify killing unborn babies. One is to say that the more developed that a baby is, the less plausible or acceptable that it is to kill it. The other approach is that there is some point of change in the baby that justifies the permissibility of killing it. Neither, I will argue, succeeds.

Regarding the first, the general idea is that a human being’s value increases with development. As a newly fertilized egg, it has low value. The value increases with the growth of the baby, becoming more valuable as the fetus grows and develops, until the point at which it is born. The value increases in life, until in old age, when it decreases as the person loses different abilities. Thus, we see a demand for abortion, killing unborn babies, and euthanasia—the killing of old people and the seriously ill and handicapped. This is reminiscent of Hitler’s extermination of the infirm and handicapped.

There are, clearly, several problems with this view. Here I wish to show that there is a confusion of “value” as it relates to the intrinsic value of a human being. First, even granting for the sake of argument that people gradually accrue some sort of value with development and the gaining of abilities, there is, in a deeper sense, the value that they have from being human. Each person is still one being, one human being, from beginning to end. How does one determine the notion that at some point in this growth there is a time when killing this human being is permissible morally? Simply put, one can’t. Some countries or states have laws that permit abortion up to a certain period, like 5 months or some other gestational age. Yet assigning such a time element is arbitrary. For example, take 5 months. The day before the 6 months’ mark, the baby is just as much a living human being as he/she is one day later. At this one point, this one day, the situation passes from permissible homicide to impermissible. Just the passage of time and the growth of the individual gives no clue as to when the “value” changes such that terminating a life becomes murder. It is absurd to say, for example, that at 3 months and 16 days it is okay to kill the baby, but at 3 months and 17 days it is not. Even if there were some such time, it is impossible for us to know it, and hence all such permissions and restrictions are arbitrary. At every stage of development, the baby is still a human being and the mother’s and father’s child.

Some advocates of the permissibility of abortion say that at some point the baby has some attribute that is a dividing line between abortion’s being morally permissible or not. Allowing abortion up to the moment of birth is the same state of affairs. A baby an hour before birth is not essentially different than a baby one hour after birth. Yet in some areas, such as Michigan, it is lawful to kill the unborn, yet killing it after it is born is first-degree murder. This thinking apparently makes sense to some people. Nevertheless, here we also see a movement to legalize infanticide, at least in some cases. Regardless, in all these cases what is being done is the deliberate destruction of a human being.

Suppose one takes the view that it morally acceptable to kill an unborn baby up to one point in development, where some sort of change occurs. When is the stopping point, and how can one know what it is? Several other defining qualities have been proposed besides “reason.” One is viability—that it is wrong to kill the baby only when it can live outside the womb. Besides the fact that determining if a baby can survive outside its mother’s womb is dependent upon the technology available, there is no reason for viability to be the stopping point. What does this have to do with whether or not the baby is a human being? The definition of being human does not depend upon being able to survive on one’s own.

The baby’s life is on a continuum, where there is steady growth. At any point where there is a change in the being of the baby, it is still on a continuum of life. Even when a major change occurs in the development of the baby, it is still the baby, a living human being that is undergoing the change.

Another idea is that abortion is permissible until the time that the baby becomes conscious. However, we do not know when consciousness exists in an unborn baby, though at some stage of development consciousness seems obvious. Besides the fact that we do not know when the baby becomes conscious, and may never know, why is consciousness the stopping point to permissible abortions? The question of relevance is still there. This is like the notion that abortion is only wrong if the baby can reason. The question is, why is being conscious, at whatever level, the key to permissible abortion? How do we know that the baby has or has not some level of consciousness after conception? Nowadays it seems that panpsychism, the view that fundamental physical objects are conscious, is becoming more popular. If an electron or a quark can be thought of as being conscious, why not an embryo? Indeed, the embryo seems much more plausible.

There is no necessity in drawing the dividing line at “consciousness,” any more than “reason” as the dividing line. Whatever state the unborn baby is in, it is still that person. Human beings are creatures made up of a body and mind, or soul. Our bodies are part of who we are.

It seems quite plausible that reacting to feeling pain shows consciousness. Unborn babies are seen on ultrasound to avoid the probes during abortions. They evidently feel pain. However, even if there were no signs that the baby feels pain, this does not mean that he/she doesn’t feel pain, or that it is completely unconscious. It is strange that there is uproar over cruelty to animals, or using fetal pigs for science classes, but many of those same objecting people feel nothing is wrong with terminating a human life in utero.

Other proposed points fare no better. No matter what, an unborn baby is still a human being, and a child with two parents. Already in the DNA there are many genes determining the child’s personality, what color hair he/she will have, his/her ability to play sports or to do mathematics. Yes, the environment certainly has an impact too, but environmental factors work on what is there in the genes. We are all conceived with inborn capacities. It is a tragedy that for many, their capacity will never be realized.

Notes

[1] The definition of “abort” is to terminate early. Medically, an “abortion” is understood to be an interruption and termination of the gestation of an intrauterine pregnancy. Many abortion advocates argue for lifesaving abortions for women with ectopic pregnancies, molar pregnancies, etc. This is total misdirection. Ectopic pregnancies are life threatening but they are NOT in the uterus, by definition. Abortions are not even the treatment for these, as the fetuses are in fallopian tubes (usually) and will need abdominal surgery if presenting for care too late for oral medication to shrink them up. Molar pregnancies are not babies. They never were. These are tumors that look like bunches of grapes and can lead to cancer if not cleaned out of the uterus well.

— Dr. Stephen E. Parrish is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University in Ann Arbor Michigan, where he taught for 23 years. He received his Ph.D. from Wayne State University in Detroit. He is author of God and Necessity, The Knower and the Known, and most recently, Atheism? A Critical Analysis. At present he is working on a book on metaethics. He has three grown daughters, and lives with his wife, Elenn’, and cat.

— Dr. Elenn’ E. Parrish was born in Taiwan to a missionary family and raised in Hong Kong before moving to the United States at age 11. She earned her M.D. from the University of Minnesota and served for 18 years as a missionary doctor at the Christian Hospital Tank in Pakistan, near the Afghan border. She continued to return annually to the hospital for more than a decade after her marriage to Stephen in 2009. She now practices medicine in Southeast Michigan.

Image by Petra Šolajová from Pixabay

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