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On Abortion
2004-6-13
Some political topics are best dealt with in essay format: there is a single argument that the author develops in several hundred or thousand words. The topic of abortion is different: the debate on it takes the form of back-and-forth arguments, making dialogs optimal. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Phaedrus complains that Plato’s dialogs use strawmen, and are thus unfair to the Sophists. Luckily, this site is more conducive to feedback, so if you think I treat the anti-abortion side unfairly, email me or post on my forum or even guestbook. My side, the pro-abortion side, is P; the anti-abortion side is A. The terms “pro-life” and “pro-choice,” the former more than the latter, are rhetorical more than discursive and hence I shun them here.
A: Why should abortion be legal?
P: The burden of proof is on you… We always assume that things are amoral and so should be legal, unless we prove otherwise. The alternative is absurd, because it requires explaining why, say, picking your nose in public should be legal.
A: There are many reasons why abortion should be illegal, the primary one being that fetuses are innocent human lives that should be protected.
P: I’ll grant you innocent and human… but why should human life be protected?
A: Because it’s immoral to kill people.
P: But you’re basing this on observing born people, or else your argument is circular. There’s no actual reason to extending this to unborn people just because they in the future will be human. Why do you say that human life should be protected? What separates humans from keyboards?
A: Human beings can think and feel pain, something that is hard to say about keyboards.
P: So can many animals, to a degree. For a substantial part of their development, fetuses’ level of mental activity ranks much lower than many animals we eat freely. Even plants apparently respond to outside stimuli. Being human isn’t in itself grounds for being a rational being.
A: What’s a rational being? Where do you draw the line between “fetuses” that shouldn’t be protected and “babies” that should?
P: A rational being is one that is self-aware, and as of now that includes only human beings – it’s unclear at what exact stage plant-like responding to stimuli becomes self-awareness, but it’s after birth.
A: What about my other question? You never answered it.
P: The line is at birth. It’s not that human beings suddenly become rational at birth. It’s that the cost of not aborting drops tremendously. Before birth, the physical cost is immense, but after birth all this ends in places where adoption is an option – that is, in the first world. In the third world, hence, authorities should turn a blind eye to infanticide right after birth.
A: Isn’t infanticide killing innocent, rational human life?
P: No. It’s killing an innocent, non-rational animal. Doing that just because you want to is as criminal as shooting up cats on the street because you feel like it. But whenever it’s either that or unwanted parenthood, there’s no question about that, just like there’s no question about hunting animals for food.
A: So maybe abortion should be legal at first, but dilation and extraction should not… physically, it involves premature birth, essentially, so by your argument it should be illegal because it’s like infanticide right after birth.
P: There are three responses to that. One is that D & X is used only when actually giving birth would risk the woman’s life, and I’ve already explained to you about killing for food. Two is that anyway, D & X is less taxing on the woman’s body than giving birth except in a few occasions in which doctors will refuse to perform it for precisely this reason. Three is that the fetus is the woman’s property and is in her body so it should be her right to kill it.
A: Three is a completely new argument.
P: I know.
A: Are people in a plane the property of the plane?
P: A plane is not an organism, and they certainly don’t live off it like parasites for nine months.
A: But the woman chose to have sex except for cases of rape, so it’s her fault that she has your “parasite.”
P: Abortion is a fail-safe, if you will… that in itself doesn’t justify making it illegal; the “choice” argument is like saying that once you finish a jigsaw puzzle you shouldn’t be allowed to take it down.
A: But fetuses are living creatures, unlike jigsaw puzzles.
P: I’ve already explained to you why the analogy holds.
A: I recall that slave owners said that slaves were their property, too.
P: Born black people are rational beings that can think rationally and are definitely self-aware. It’s hard to say that about fetuses – honestly, at least.
A: Slave owners would make a similar argument about how blacks weren’t people, either.
P: They’d also say that 1 + 1 = 2.
A: But that’s trivial, whereas the questions of abortion now and slavery then are not.
P: You’re right. So lets’ go for the facts: born black people are self-aware, and are no different from white people except in resistance to sunburn. That’s what facts today show and what facts then showed. Facts today say the opposite about fetuses. Two arguments may be very similar in form, but when you plug different facts into them, they can have different truth-values.
A: So, by the same token, should we kill all mentally retarded people?
P: No, because they aren’t a burden on anyone.
A: They’re a burden on the government, which needs to support them from people’s tax money. In other words, mentally retarded people are actually a burden on everyone else, albeit indirectly.
P: They’re a burden on the government, not on any individual, and there’s a big difference, just like there’s a big difference between declaring pandas endangered and requiring every citizen to adopt one as a pet.
A: Now, suppose that abortion should be legal. Shouldn’t men have an input, too? P: Why should they? Remember that the burden of proof is on you, because absent any arguments to either side, we get that there should be no legal restrictions on abortion, and that includes restriction on abortion when males don’t approve.
A: The male, in case you haven’t noticed, contributed half the DNA, and is essential to reproduction, so he should have feedback.
P: When males get pregnant, they should have feedback – otherwise, it’s just like giving blood donors rights over the people they donate blood to.
A: But if the male wants an abortion and the female doesn’t, the male is forced to pay child support. Is that fair?
P: Does it mean abortion shouldn’t be legal?
A: No, but it does mean that males should have feedback.
P: All it means is that if the male agrees to forfeit all parental rights, including visitation rights, he should not need to pay child support.
Tell me if you spot any strawman arguments here (the fathers’-rights part is composed entirely of things I heard on the Internet while debating anti-abortionists).
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