—Mahatma Gandhi
Based on numbers reported by the Guttmacher Institute 1973-2017, with 3% added for GI estimated possible 3-5% undercount for 1973-2014.
Another 12,000 per year added for 2015-2021 for abortions from “providers” GI says it may have missed in 2015-2017 counts.
I don't believe in the government telling me what to do and I believe in the separation of church and state.
—Josef Stalin
In a pro life world both parties win
Those who care significantly can keep it
Those who are indifferent can choose not to keep it for whatever reason in the world.
It's important to notice right off that Parker assumes something that is at stake in the disagreement between pro-life and pro-choice advocates, namely the question that the living thing growing inside of the womb is a human baby. I’ll set this issue aside for the moment (I’ll return to it in next month’s installment), and concentrate on a different one: the question of whether those who think of the unborn as a clump of cells, fetus, or product of termination thereby commit an act of dehumanization.
Here, a complication arises, because “dehumanization†does not have a single, straightforward meaning.
In my last blog I discussed how some opponents of abortion misappropriate my work on dehumanization to support their position. [B[They claim that abortion advocates dehumanize the unborn, and that abortion is analogous to genocidal murder. I explained why this argument doesn’t work.[/B]
My theory of dehumanization—as described, for instance, in my most recent book On Inhumanity—is that dehumanizing others boils down to conceiving of them as subhuman creatures in human form. But even the most ardent supporters of a women’s right to choose do not conceive of the unborn as vicious monsters or filthy vermin. So, my account of dehumanization can’t do the work that some right-to-lifers want it to do.
To be human, they say, is to be a member of a certain biological species—Homo sapiens—and that embryos are, as a matter of scientific fact, members of that species. It follows that aborting a fetus is snuffing out the life of a human being, and therefore morally aberrant.
At this point, philosophical defenders of the right to choose often step up to say that biological species membership is a red herring. They say that the fact that human embryos belong to our species isn’t relevant to the ethics of abortion. What really matters is that embryos are not persons, and because they are not persons, it’s morally permissible to abort them.
I think that this response is deeply problematic. It’s not clear (to me, anyway) what personhood is supposed to amount to, how we can clearly distinguish persons from non-persons, and why personhood (whatever it is) is so morally significant. Traditional criteria for personhood, such as rationality and autonomy, exclude many members of our own species from this coveted status. And if killing embryos is acceptable on the grounds that embryos aren’t persons, doesn’t this license infanticide, the killing of mentally disabled people, and other atrocities?
As important as these considerations are, I don’t want to linger on them. I want to explore a deeper objection. I want to argue that both the right-to-lifer and her philosophical opponent share an error. They both incorrectly assume that being human is equivalent to being a member of the species Homo sapiens.
“Human†is not a term used by biological taxonomists, and it does not name any set of biological properties. Homo erectus and Homo sapiens are genuine biological categories. Biological anthropologists can examine a fossil jawbone and determine that it belongs to Homo erectus. But there’s no amount of evidence that would allow them to figure out whether Homo erectus was human. Ask yourself how scientists could test the proposition that all and only Homo sapiens are human? What tests could they perform? There’s no conceivable test, because human is not a scientific category—it’s a social one.
What exactly is it to think of another being as human? A good starting point for answering this question is the fact that people generally take their own humanity for granted. “We†are human, but “they†may not. We see this in some autoethnonyms (names that ethnic groups use to designate themselves). Although by no means universal, it’s common enough for ethnic groups to refer to themselves as “the human beings,†or “the real human beings.†As the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss observed, tribal names are often “not formal designations, but merely equivalents of the pronoun ‘we.’â€
In the earlier essays, I explained that some people think that referring to the unborn as “embryos†dehumanizes them, and just like the dehumanization of racial and ethnic minorities, this way of speaking is used to legitimate their murder. This analogy is mistaken. To dehumanize others is to think of them as dangerous animals or evil, monstrous beings. That’s not the case with embryos. Describing a being as an embryo is a far cry from considering it to be a creature akin to a cockroach or a beast or a monster.
Even so, opponents of abortion can still argue that if embryos belong to our species—which they obviously do—then they are human embryos, and they are therefore human beings. And if that’s right, they can argue that because killing innocent human beings is morally wrong, abortion is morally wrong.
I briefly explained in the previous installment why this argument doesn’t hold water.
Now I want to dive deeper into why it doesn’t work and offer a diagnosis of what’s really at stake when people argue about the morality of abortion. This will open up basic questions about what it means to be human.
The problem with the pro-life argument that I sketched above is that being human and being a member of our species aren’t the same thing. Consider an alien from a distant planet that looks and behaves just like a member of our species. Is that alien human? You might answer, “No, of course not. She’s similar to a human, but she can’t be human, because she’s not a member of our species.†Or you might answer “Yes, the alien’s human. She’s just not an Earth human.â€