Tribute to Moloch: Viragos and Violinists, Part 2

WE HAVE SEEN HOW JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON'S thought experiment of being caught by the Society of Music Lovers and forced to act as a human dialysis machine against one's will is an analogy that suffers deep differences from any pregnancy. The differences between the two scenarios--one real, one thought up--are so vast as to make the thought experiment worthless from the get go. But foregoing that problem--which is fatal to Thomson's argument--we can also look at the thought experiment itself and see that it does not even morally justify the intentional killing of the fetus. We may identify two clear moral disequivalencies between Thomson's thought experiment and a pregnancy. The first relates to legitimate self-defense. The second relates to the difference between direct killing and indirect killing.

Supposing one finds oneself tied to the violinist, what may the unjustly tied person do? Certainly, confronted with the injustice of having been kidnapped, assaulted, and forced into involuntary servitude justifies the use of some force in self-defense of one's rights. The question then becomes: what sort of response or force is legitimate or justified? It would seem that under the circumstances it is rather obvious that one could unplug oneself from the violinist. Of course, it is this hunch that Thomson recruits to analogize in the abortion situation. But an abortion is not analogous to unplugging oneself from the violinist. An abortion is analogous to shooting the violinist in the head: intentionally killing the violinist. It is far from apparent that one has the legitimate right to self-defense that would allow one to murder the famed violinist who, after all, is innocent of the plight one finds oneself in, since he is apparently the beneficiary of a crazed, fanatical group of music lovers and has not cooperated in the felonious activity that resulted in being used as a human dialysis machine. Even if he had tacitly or directly cooperated in the scheme, it is dubious that one is morally justified in shooting the violinist in the head. That, of course, is to commit a wrong to oust oneself from being wronged. Therefore, it would seem that Thomson's own highly-unlikely scenario does not justify abortion, but would argue against the direct, intentional killing that is involved in such practice. The moral dubiousness of directly killing the violinist becomes even less justifiable if one finds oneself in the situation, not as a result of another's wrong, but as a result of neglect or carelessness or even as a result of voluntary assumption. So even if the situation where one is the victim of unjust aggression, the response must be proportionate. In abortion the fetus is absolutely innocent of any unjust aggression against the mother, so it would justify even less force against the fetus. "[I]t is wrong to kill someone in order to escape physical inconvenience, whether that inconvenience lasts for a day or nine months." Oderberg, 26.

In fact, as Oderberg points out, what is involved in Thomson's situation and what is being justified in Thomson's scenario is a sort of "sublimated punishment," or perhaps better transferred punishment. "[W]hat is being advocated . . . is not self defence at all but a kind of sublimated punishment of a third party [the violinist=fetus] for an offence someone else has committed." It is, of course, morally offensive that an innocent party ought to be punished for the wrongful acts of another. And the intentional killing of that innocent party would be an entirely disproportionate response to the situation.

So Oderberg concludes:

Thomson's violinist case, then, rests upon an intuition that is eminently contestable. It is not at all obvious that your plight, being plugged into the violinist, allows you to kill him.

Oderberg, 27.

So the intentional killing of the violinist would be a disproportionate response to being hooked up to him, but does that mean one may not unplug oneself from the violinist even though one can foresee that it would probably result in his death? Using the principle of double effect to analyze the situation, Oderberg thinks not. While uplugging oneself from the violinist is itself a morally unobjectionable act, and though one may intend to unplug oneself, not as a means to kill the violinist but to remove oneself from the unjust physical imposition, there must be a proportionality between the good caused by the morally unobjectionable act and the indirect evil caused by the morally unobjectionable act. It is here that, in Oderberg's view, the analysis would fail. "Hence, you are not permitted to disconnect the tube, unpleasant through the prospect of your confinement must be--and this is really just an explanation of why your self-defensive acts must always be proportionate; in other words, the bad effects of your acts must always be proportionate to the good you are seeking to defend." Oderberg, 28.

It is, in summary, Oderberg's conclusion that Thomson "has not shown that a right to abortion can be grounded in a woman's right over her own body." Oderberg, 31. Indeed, rightfully analyzed, it would seem that Thomson's example (even ignoring the disanalogies of the thought experiment: see Tribute to Moloch: Viragos and Violinists, Part 1) does not justify abortion in the extreme case of rape, much less in those far-more-frequent situations where the woman's pregnancy is the result of her own negligence or where something far less than bodily integrity is at stake, and the good that is sought arises from desiring to extricate oneself from inconvenience, financial hardship, difficulties with the father, and so forth.

Tribute to Moloch: Viragos and Violinists, Part 1

WOMEN HAVE A UNIQUE LICENSE IN CONTEMPORARY LAW, the license at will to kill a certain segment of the population with legal impunity. We might call it "Moloch's law," or the law of materfamilias. The group which is the most rabid defender of the license to kill is the radical Feminists. That group's political influence on the expansion and defense of abortion rights worldwide is nonpareil. This group has been instrumental in ushering in and institutionalizing one of the most magnificent, monstrous, and sublime evils in the history of man, equally nonpareil.

The central motto which underlies the justification for this license over another's life: "Women have the right to do what they want to with their bodies." Regardless of whether that political slogan is true or not (and it clearly is not: surely there are moral or legal constraints that may be imposed on one's use of anyone's body whether a man or a woman?), the very mantra displays a politically astute if not also a massive evasion of the question. It evades the question since it presents only one-half of the issue, as it ignores the clash of another right: the right of the unborn fetus that, through no moral fault of its own, has imposed itself upon and relies upon a woman's body for its life. In other words, there are two rights at stake, not just one.

What is worse is that in the Feminist formulation the right that is ignored is the more important right, as the right to life is more important than the right to bodily determination (since without the right to life there is no bodily determination, and the right to life includes the right to bodily determination). In light of what we know from modern science, the conceptus, zygote, embryo, fetus, however and when you identify this individual human being (these are words describing stages in a human being's life just like infant, toddler, pre-teen, teenager, young adult . . . ), is not part of a woman's body. It is another human being separate and apart from the mother, and one, moreover, that as a matter of natural processes uses the mother's body, relies upon the mother's body, and is served by her body. "So whatever 'the right to choose may mean, it cannot entail that the choice to have an abortion is like the choice whether or not to have a nose job." Oderberg, 22.

Judith Jarvis Thomson: Abortion's Ace Apologist

This supposed right a woman has over her body (read a right to abortion) is, as Oderberg understatedly (and perhaps with purposeful double entendre) puts it, "is hardly one with a venerable history." Oderberg, 22. Not only is it a "right" without a long history, it is a "right" with a sort yet sanguinary history worse than Nazism or Communism put together and multiplied by ten. Confronted with the fact that traditionally, and "as a matter of socio-biological fact, women just do not have only themselves to answer to when fertility is in question," one would have thought that the justifying burden for this new "right" was upon them as innovator, as rebel, as recalcitrant to custom and nature. It was an onus never really met by them, and one avoided through a sort of shrewish academic and political screaming, termagant-like accusations of patriarchy and male chauvinism, nonserviamatic hubris, and just plain bad rationalization for lust and power.

One of the more famous efforts at justification was that advanced by Judith Jarvis Thomson in a 1971 article entitled "A Defense of Abortion," originally published in Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1971), 47-66. In his preface to an anthology of Judith Thomson's essays, William Parent calls it "the most widely reprinted essay in all of contemporary philosophy." Judith Jarvis Thomson, Rights, Restitution, and Risk: Essays in Moral Theory (William Parent, ed.) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), vii. It is ubiquitous: I remember being given it in law school in a jurisprudence class, and finding it singularly unimpressive, in fact stupid. Yet it remains one of the foundational apologias for abortion. As the Canadian philosopher, Donald DeMarco put it in an essay in "The Interim"*:

With her "defense of abortion," however, [Judith Jarvis Thomson] hit, so to speak, the philosophical jackpot. Her article has become the most widely reprinted essay, not only on the subject of abortion, which is a remarkable phenomenon in itself, but in all of contemporary philosophy. Because her article has been reprinted, anthologized, amplified, circulated, read, and discussed as often and as much as it has, it seems reasonably safe to assume that it has had a significant influence, particularly as an apologia for abortion. The article's broad popularity among abortion advocates suggests that it is the best argument that has been put forth as a defence of, and argument for, abortion.

For the sake of argument, Thomson concedes the humanity of the fetus. Her argument focuses not on the minor premise of the Anti-Abortion Syllogism, but on its major premise: that the right to life of an innocent human being is inviolate, and one cannot intentionally kill an innocent human being without grave fault. This fundamental moral principle, Thomson insists, is false. She characterizes the fetus a status which has not been characterized as one of "innocent aggressor" (the term is not Thomson's, but her successors') and proposes that an innocent aggressor's right to life is not absolute.

Thomson, a very clever philosopher at MIT known for her thought experiments, has imported her technique into the the stage of the abortion debate. Jesus taught in parables; Thomson teaches by thought experiment. Thomson's abortion-related thought experiment has become almost legendary in the abortion debate:

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist (who) has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment . . . the Society of Music Lovers . . . kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own . . . To unplug would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months.

There is a superficial analogy between this fiction and the non-fiction of a mother being with child, and, of course, this is what Thomson seizes upon in launching into her argument and explains the success of her venture. But there are also a deep disanalogies between the violinist situation and pregnancy which render the thought experiment stillborn at the outset.** Of the many that could be distinguished, I will focus on three: a natural/artificial disanalogy, a criminal/non-criminal predicate disanalogy, and a relational disanalogy. In my mind, these are fatal at the outset. If a thought experiment is to be used, it has to be based upon an analogy that is more akin to the matter that is sought to be analyzed. Otherwise, the analogy is bound to lead us in the wrong direction, as this one does.

First, the innocent person's attachment to the violinist is palpably artificial, while the mother's attachment to the fetus is patently natural. We are dealing with two different worlds. At the outset, therefore, the analogy suffers from the same discontinuity as an analogy that compares the brain with a computer, and concludes that therefore one can punch a person in the nose and re-boot the brain. The point is that a situation that may be morally offensive if artificially imposed is not necessarily offensive if naturally imposed. Thomson's presuppositions, it might be noted, are also horribly mechanistic, even Cartesian and Hobbesian. "For what is the ‘heart’ but a ‘spring’; and the ‘nerves’ but so many ‘strings’; and the ‘joints’ but so many ‘wheels,’ giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the artificer?" says Hobbes. Thomson carries on in the Hobbesian tradition: "For what is pregnancy, but being used as a hemodialysis machine?" The analogy falters at the get go since it confuses the organic with the inorganic, the natural with the artificial.

Secondly, there is a huge moral distinction between the situation of a pregnancy and the situation of waking up attached to a violinist after being kidnapped by the Society of Music Lovers who act on behalf of the violinist, being assaulted by this Society, and being subject to false imprisonment by it. The difference seems to elude Thomson. Nothing like this is even remotely alike the act of becoming pregnant, and this even if the pregnancy is entirely non-consensual, say, as a result of rape, as the rapist, whose intent is to assuage his lust, generally has no intent to impregnate his victim and tie her to the burdens of pregnancy. Moreover, the rapist's crime is his violation of the woman's bodily integrity; the rapist has nothing to do with the natural processes of pregnancy. The rapist is directly guilty for sexual assault, and only indirectly for the illegitimate pregnancy. This criminal or tortious predicate in the Thomson thought experiment immediately adds a notion of self-defense in the violinist situation that is entirely absent from a pregnancy. As the philosopher Donald DeMarco puts it:

The act of unplugging yourself is justified on the basis of self-defence. It is a legitimate response to assault and battery (and in the example Thomson uses, to kidnapping and unlawful confinement as well). The development of the child in the womb is not an example of assault and battery or anything close to it. Assault and battery presuppose willfulness and malice aforethought, and have always been regarded as criminal acts. It has never been regarded as a criminal act for an unborn child to develop in his mother's womb.

One wonders what sort of psychological sickness would cause Thomson to equate pregnancy with criminal acts of kidnapping, assault, and false imprisonment. There is something deeply wrong, unbalanced, even psychopathic, with such a jaundiced, pessimistic view of what pregnancy is.

Lastly, there is a relational disanalogy between Thomson's thought experiment and motherhood. As DeMarco puts it:

Thomson supposes that the violinist and the victim are unrelated. She adds nothing to their relationship that would mitigate the victim's aversion to being yoked for nine months. The two are presumed to be total strangers. Such is not the case with the relationship between the mother and her child. The victim, by virtue of being yoked to the violinist, does not inherit or attain any specific kind of positive relationship. He does not become his brother, for example. When a woman conceives a child, she is no longer merely a woman. Nor is the child merely her child. Conception confers maternity on the woman and her child is her son or daughter. There is a relationship between the two that is primordial, interpersonal and universally recognized. A mother is expected to do things for her children that strangers are not expected to do for each other.

To equate motherhood, a relation that is by definition nobly sacrificial and intimate, with the coerced relationship between two strangers, violinist and host, should be offensive to any person who is not jaundiced against motherhood, but retains some natural sentiment, some appreciation for the office of motherhood. Motherhood is something other than an artificial womb. John Finnis has characterized Thomson's notion of motherhood as defective, and that this defect stems from a deprecation of motherhood into a form of social contract. "John Finnis is correct when he encapsulates the radical weakness of Thomson's argument by saying that she is trying to reduce the mother-child relationship to a "sort of social contractarianism,'" says DeMarco.*** It seems to me that it is not social contractism that moves Thomson, but a lack of appreciation of the office of motherhood. Thomson is externalizing motherhood and masculinizing or confusing it with a sort of "fatherhood." As John Paul II distinguished motherhood from fatherhood in his Encyclical Mulieris dignitatem:

Motherhood involves a special communion with the mystery of life, as it develops in the woman's womb. The mother is filled with wonder at this mystery of life, and "understands" with unique intuition what is happening inside her. In the light of the "beginning", the mother accepts and loves as a person the child she is carrying in her womb. This unique contact with the new human being developing within her gives rise to an attitude towards human beings - not only towards her own child, but every human being - which profoundly marks the woman's personality. It is commonly thought that women are more capable than men of paying attention to another person, and that motherhood develops this predisposition even more. The man - even with all his sharing in parenthood - always remains "outside" the process of pregnancy and the baby's birth; in many ways he has to learn his own "fatherhood" from the mother.

Mulieris dignitatem, 18. Thomson's thought experiment is wholly oblivious to internal aspect of motherhood. She externalizes it, mascunalizes it, confuses it with process that is "'outside' the process of pregnancy and the baby's birth." Thomson for all her cleverness has not grasped the essence of motherhood. She is shallow, indeed banal, in her appreciation of motherhood. Whatever the source of Thomson's misunderstanding of motherhood, it results in a disanalogy that infects the thought experiment from the outset.

So Thomson's thought experiment itself displays tremendous prejudices and presuppositions that infect its value as a legitimate basis for analysis of the problem of the clash between a woman's bodily determination and the right of life of the child. Thomson shows a highly mechanistic, Hobbesian view of mankind, a sick Feminist perception of pregnancy as something intrinsically based upon torts and felonies and other high misdemeanors, and a complete deprecation and lack of appreciation of the noble and utterly office of motherhood. To compare pregnancy to being attached to a violinist as a natural dialysis machine is fraught with error. The analogy is unsound from the get go. One would only think the argument sound if one's judgment is already unsound.

________________________________________
*Donald DeMarco, "Judith Jarvis Thomson: A Defence of Abortion," The Interim (February 2004).
**In his treatment, Oderberg does not seem to attack the fundamental disanalogies, but concedes the analogy is accurate, and humorously extends it to include other-than-rape situations to include not only ailing violinists, but ailing trombone players and ailing harpsichordists.
***DeMarco is referring to John Finnis's article, "The Rights and Wrongs of Abortion," originally published in Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (2):117-45 (1973).

Tribute to Moloch: Quirks and Personhood

THE PRINCIPLE OF INDIVIDUALITY and identity behind the concept of personhood of the fetus has some potential hiccups arising from some curious qualities of the fetus during the early part of its development. In answering the metaphysical status of the fetus one needs to consider some of the issues arising from the potential for fission (or twinning) and the totipotency of the embryonic cells during the first few days of its existence. Until the formation of the so-called "primitive streak" (a structure which establishes the bilateral symmetry in the embryo formed through a process called gastrulation, which is the precursor of the spinal chord, and which is formed within 10-14 days of fertilization), the embryo has the potential for twinning.

Human zygote showing formation of the "primitive streak"
around 13 days after fertilization

Prior to the formation of the primitive streak, then, the embryo may separate into identical twins, and even these twins have the capacity for twinning. The question arises: how can there by an individual prior to gastrulation and the formation of the primitive streak since there is the potential of more than one individual with identical genetic makeup developing?

Moreover, up until the eight cell stage, each one of the cells in the embryo is "totipotent," which means it has the capacity, if removed from the embryo, to develop into a separate zygote and fetus itself. How can there be an individual human being at this time if one of his cells can be taken from him and develop into another individual that is identical to him genetically? Isn't human personality formed sometime after these quirks are passed and the individual is set?

It is for these reasons that some argue that the individuality of the fetus, and hence its personality, cannot arise until after the formation of the primitive streak. The argument runs thus:

1. Only indivisible entities can have moral status.
2. Twinning means that an embryo divides into several embryos,
   each one a separate entity.
3. Therefore, as long as twinning is possible, the embryo is not
   an indivisible entity.
4. Twinning is possible up to the point when the formation of
   the primitive streak has been completed.
5. Therefore, embryos are not indivisible until after the formation
   of the primitive streak has been completed.
6. Therefore, embryos cannot have moral status until after the
   formation of the primitive streak has been completed.

See Christian Munthe, "Divisibility and the Moral Status of Embryos," Bioethics (2001), 382-97.

Monozygotic twinning

The issue puts us in the middle of an interesting realm demanding the interplay of embryology, metaphysics, and the application of sound moral principles and prudence. In this multi-disciplinary realm, there are some questions that may be not be answerable, at least under the current state of science. What happens to the individual A after twinning? Does the person A "die," replaced by A1 and A2, two new persons so that A is, in a manner of speaking, the sacrificial "parent" of the siblings A1 and A2? Or does A's personal identity continue after twinning as A1, with A2 being a new person? Or, something that does not seem particularly likely, is A before twinning composed of two persons who subsequently split? Or, even less likely, does A not even exist until after twinning when two persons are first conceived? The religious question, separate and apart from the philosophical and moral one, is when does the soul become infused with the body?

As interesting and perhaps insoluble as these questions may be, they do not detract from the fact that prior to gastrulation the zygote remains an actual human individual being, though one perhaps with the potential of splitting into two or more through twinning or because of of the totipotent nature of the stem cells prior to their becoming pluripotent and specialized. In the vast majority of cases, in any event, monozygotic twinning does not occur, and so the question actual versus potential individuality and personhood between fertilization and the formation of the primitive streak is not at issue. Moreover, these issues really do not affect the heart of the matter, as the embryo prior to twinning or while its embryonic cells are totipotent is still an identifiable actual human being, although one with the unique capacity or potential to give rise to others:

In terms of the metaphysics of embryo identity, twinning should be looked at in the same way as any case of division of a cell (or group of cells). The 'parent' cell ceases to exist on division and the 'daughter' cells come into existence. The simple fact is that not all human beings come into existence at fertilisation--some do so a few days later if there is twinning. Twins (identical ones, that is) will not be able to trace their identities back to fertilisation. For them, conception occurs at division (hence one of the reasons why 'conception' and 'fertilisation' are not synonymous).

Oderberg, 17. The fact that post-twinning the two individual persons cannot trace their identity to fertilization does not mean that there is an "indeterminate number of individuals" or that there is no "individual" actual person prior to twinning or during the time that that individual's cells are totipotent. As Oderberg concludes:

The moral of the story as far as fission and totipotency are concerned, then, is that the individuality of the embryo is not influenced by what it might do (for example, twin) or what can be done to it (separation into totipotent cells).

Oderberg, 19.

More, in light of the uncertainty with respect to these matters, we ought to be aware of the great significance of these questions, and ought to be prudently biased in favor of protection of all innocent life from the moment of fertilization which, for the vast majority of births anyway, is the same as conception. As Pope John Paul II wisely taught in his encyclical Evangelium vitae (which purports to state the natural law's voice on the matter):

Some people try to justify abortion by claiming that the result of conception, at least up to a certain number of days, cannot yet be considered a personal human life. But in fact, "from the time that the ovum is fertilized, a life is begun which is neither that of the father nor the mother; it is rather the life of a new human being with his own growth. It would never be made human if it were not human already. This has always been clear, and ... modern genetic science offers clear confirmation. It has demonstrated that from the first instant there is established the programme of what this living being will be: a person, this individual person with his characteristic aspects already well determined. Right from fertilization the adventure of a human life begins, and each of its capacities requires time-a rather lengthy time-to find its place and to be in a position to act". Even if the presence of a spiritual soul cannot be ascertained by empirical data, the results themselves of scientific research on the human embryo provide "a valuable indication for discerning by the use of reason a personal presence at the moment of the first appearance of a human life: how could a human individual not be a human person?"

Furthermore, what is at stake is so important that, from the standpoint of moral obligation, the mere probability that a human person is involved would suffice to justify an absolutely clear prohibition of any intervention aimed at killing a human embryo. Precisely for this reason, over and above all scientific debates and those philosophical affirmations to which the Magisterium has not expressly committed itself, the Church has always taught and continues to teach that the result of human procreation, from the first moment of its existence, must be guaranteed that unconditional respect which is morally due to the human being in his or her totality and unity as body and spirit: "The human being is to be respected and treated as a person from the moment of conception; and therefore from that same moment his rights as a person must be recognized, among which in the first place is the inviolable right of every innocent human being to life."

Evangelium vitae, No. 60 (citations omitted). Between the life of the embryo and the needs of those outside the womb, we are judge. This puts us in a place already perilous to justice: Nemo iudex in causa sua. No one ought to be a judge in his own cause. And if circumstances require that we be the judge of our own cause, we ought to be aware of the inherent conflict of interest, and grant presumption to the party without voice, who has no advocate to advance his cause. In the absence of a pleader, we must appoint our conscience the advocatus ad litem, the attorney at litem. And if we listen to the still voice of conscience, we shall hear the advocatus embryonis humani pleading softly but fervently, vehemently from the moment of fertilization: Vivit! Vivat! He lives! Let him live! For it is אָדָם‎, adam, man, one of us!

Tribute to Moloch: Beethoven From Zygote to Death

IN A SORT OF PERVERSE SLEIGHT OF HAND, some apologists of abortion invoke the concept of personhood only to deny it to the fetus so as to justify morally its slaughter. What these advocates of abortion do is use a functional definition of person (in contrast to a more traditional notion of person as concept of numerical or ontological identity). The functional definition of personhood is vague, and the abortion apologist then exploits the confusion of thought that vagueness can engender. These thinkers are not like a trustworthy Virgil guiding Dante through the Inferno or a loving Beatrice guiding the poet through the Paradiso. Rather, they are more akin to the less reliable, even treacherous guide that Gollum was to Frodo, or that the Nabataean Syllaeus was to the Roman prefect of Aegyptus, Gaius Aelius Gallus in his catastrophic expedition to Arabia Felix. Of the many that could be cited--and their name is Legion--we might mention one of the more notable false guides, Michael Tooley. Unlike Virgil, Tooley does not lead you in and out of hell into heaven, but into hell, the inferno of abortio infelix, to leave you there. Abortion, more than war, is hell, and Tooley is one of hell's minions, hell on earth where women spread their legs and open their wombs for all men to come in, but for no men to come out:

Tantum artes huius, tantum medicamina possunt,
Quae steriles facit, atque homines in ventre necandus
Conducit. Guade, infelix, atque ipse bibendum
Porrige quicquid erit: nam si distendere vellet,
Ex vexare uterum pueris salientibus, esses
Aethiopis fortasse pater . . . .

So great their arts, so powerful the drugs,
Of he who makes them sterile, paid to lead mankind within the womb
To death. Rejoice, unhappy wretch, and give her with your own hand
The stuff to drink whatever it be: for were she willing to let her belly grow
And trouble her womb with bouncing babes, you may be
Per happenstance, the father of an Ethiopian . . . .

Juvenal, Satires, VI.594-99

The artifice of these apologists of death, of feticide and infanticide, comes from their notion of person.* Traditionally, a person was in the category of "is," and not in the category of "has" or "does." A person was something that related to being, to one's substance, and not to one's possession of something or one's activity, one's becoming or doing. Traditionally, one could be a person and not necessarily act like a person or have all the characteristics or qualities of a person. In other words, the notion of "person" was, traditionally, ontological or related to numerical identity. The notion of person was not a qualitative notion (what one "has") or functional notion (what one "does"). Since traditionally a human person was what is, there was no real distinction between a human being and a human person. All men were persons, though not all persons were men (e.g., angels, devils, or most eminently God). Modernly, the functional or qualitative definition of person is the ideal tool to force a separation between a human being and a human person, because a human person is, under the modern view, something one has, or something one does and not something one is. This allows the abortion advocate to slip by the undeniable fact that there is a continuous numerical identity, an ontological though perhaps not functional or qualitative continuity, which is apparent from the first moment of a human being's conception through the entirety of his or her life: from zygote to newborn to adult and into old age there is an identity, an "is"--the "is" is the person--they choose to ignore. Put simply, Christina Rosetti said it best:

I am not what I have nor what I do;
But what I was I am, I am even I.

Christina Rosetti, "The Thread of Life."

In other words, the abortionists avoid the question of personhood, except as they define personhood. They have to, because if they used the concept of personhood used by those who are pro-life, the abortionist would lose the argument:

The argument from continuity of development is about the question of the identity of the foetus--is it the very same thing throughout its development? More precisely, is it the same human being as the baby/child/adult into which it develops? The argument is not based on the setting up of a series of entities that can be compared according to some characteristics admitting of degrees, such as more or less heavy, more or less tall, or more or less bald. The argument is not that the child is a human being because it has some large set of properties and you can (conceptually) go back in time to the foetus, observing those properties dropping away one by one and lessening by degrees, so that because there is no point at which humanity clearly ceases to apply to the gestating entity it must therefore be human all long. The argument is, rather, that there is a single human organism from zygote to adult, because at every stage of development the gestating entity is doing precisely what any organism does in its movement from immaturity to maturity, namely growing, differentiating, taking on a mature shape and form, and acting in a way that shows it to be numerically distinct from its environment. . . . These properties do not shows [sic] themselves to greater or lesser degree in the gestating entity at different stages of its existence: the gestating entity always has those properties. . . . Hence there is one single organism at all stages; that organism can only be human; all human organisms are human beings; hence there is a single human being.

Oderberg, 12-13.

Beethoven's person is one and continuous from zygote to death

That's where the abortion advocates lose the argument: with an ontological notion of personhood. To put it in concrete terms, let us take Ludwig van Beethoven. The zygote of Beethoven was contiguous and one with the infant Beethoven, was contiguous and one with the child Beethoven, was contiguous and one with the adult Beethoven, was contiguous and one with the Beethoven who wrote the Emperor's Concerto (Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 73), was contiguous and one with the Beethoven in his death throes. The Beethoven as a zygote was the same person as the Beethoven shown in his death mask. Beethoven was Beethoven all the way through his remarkable life, from beginning to end, and never anything but Beethoven. Beethoven was the same "I" when he was arrested in Vienna by order of the town's Commissär because he appeared to be a roving bum with no hat, an old coat, and no identifying papers, and defended himself by saying "Ich bin Beethoven." He could also have said "Ich war einen Zygote," "Ich war ein Embryo," "Ich war ein Jugend," "Ich war ein Mann," und "Ich bin Beethoven."**

During the continuum of Beethoven's life, he did not become the person of Beethoven at one discrete moment of time, and then lose his person at another discrete moment of time. He existed at conception, and died, at least physically, at death when Beethoven's soul parted from his body. He was Beethoven the entire time through. But of course, this ontological concept of personhood as identity of being is fatal to the abortion project. To kill Beethoven anytime during the continuum of his life from zygote to the moment before death is to kill . . . the person of Beethoven. If we would have aborted Beethoven's zygote, we would not have ever heard, and wept, at the beautiful second movement, Adagio un pocco mosso, nor have been relieved by following light-hearted and uplifting Rondo, of Beethoven's Emperor's Concerto because the person of Beethoven who wrote this wonderful opus was once the very same zygote in his mother's womb. Beethoven's life began, as everybody else's life, when his father's sperm fused with his mother's oocyte:

It is quite clear that what was known more than 100 years ago, even intuitively before that, is that the fusion of sperm and oocyte begins the life of a new individual human being. In Human Embryology the terms understood to be integral in the common sense language are: human, being, person, individual, human being, life and human life. Unfortunately, every one of those terms has been parsed and corrupted to mean something it is not.

C. Ward Kischer, Ph. D., "When does human life begin? The final answer."

Instead of seeing the obvious identity and ontological equivalency of a human being between zygote and adult, and accepting the moral implications that the zygote is a human being and therefore a human person, these false guides lead us into a vague concept of personhood* which they understand qualitatively or functionally as an amalgam of discrete characteristics and not a matter of numerical or ontological identity. A person is no longer a being, but is something one becomes, or what one does, or what one has. Then, taking advantage of the inherent vagueness of the term person as a functional or qualitative amalgam of discrete characteristics and the "sorites paradox"*** into which any vague term encompassing a group of discrete elements invariably leads, they nimbly excuse themselves from the paradox by advocating arbitrary and result-driven qualitative or functional definitions of personhood that conform to their goal of justifying abortion.

Michael Tooley has put together his morbid apologia for feticide and even infanticide between the densely packed covers of a book (more than 400 pages) called Abortion and Infanticide (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), and we certainly do not intend to tackle a full exposition or criticism of those views in this blog. We shall only give it a glancing blow. But in keeping with the topic of this posting, Tooley steers his reader into a sorites paradox by focusing on a vague functional or qualitative concept of the personhood of the fetus as an abstraction from particular qualities (mainly self-consciousness), side-stepping the status of the developmental numerical identity of the fetus as a human organism or human being. By invoking "personhood" as a functional abstraction of discrete characteristics, (something one becomes) and rejecting a concept of personhood as linked to the numerical identity of a human organism or human being (being), Tooley has led us to a vague term and into the sorites paradox. Surely a zygote is not a human person since it has no consciousness of self that we can measure? If a zygote is not, neither is a morula, or a blastula, or gastrula, embryo, or a fetus, or an infant!

Ahh, but do not despair! Tooley to the rescue! The "absence of significant differences between successive members of some series, or between successive stages in some process, provide no reason at all for concluding that there are no significant differences between non-successive stages or members." (Tooley, 169-70, quoted in Oderberg, 12.) (emphasis added).**** So the fact that we cannot be assured of personhood at any one stage does not mean we cannot perceive personhood at some stage. Or, more precisely, he argues the opposite since he seeks to de-personalize, not to personalize: that "the clear existence of a person at some stage . . . [does not mean] there will be a person at every stage of development." Oderberg, 12. And therefore, we ought to use Tooley's definition of personhood which, Tooley says, doesn't happen until there is a capacity for self-consciousness, rational thought, an ability to envisage a future for oneself, and of remembering one's past, and so forth. This Tooleyan definition of personhood is really or virtually a definition of adulthood, and so it automatically excludes the fetus. Is that result-driven or what?**** The power of definition lies in Tooley's hands, and he uses it against the fetus? What if the fetus held the power of definition? Would he use it against Tooley? Should personhood be defined by the one who has something to gain? Should the definition of person reside with the one that holds power over another?

But those latter questions are to stray from the subject.

People like Tooley do not confront the argument of the opponent of abortion; they avoid it. The argument of continuity of development or numerical identity of a human being, that is, a notion of personhood that is ontological, not functional, does not lead one to a sorites paradox. The issue of a person as an individual substance is vastly different from the issue of a person as defined by the likes of Tooley. This is because the issue is properly one of identity, of contiguity, of a being traveling down the continuum of becoming, not an issue of generalization or abstraction from particulars or discrete instances. It is the difference between the contiguity of a thread or cloth or traveling down a road or a river versus the non-contiguity of abstracting from numerous discrete instances, such as abstracting a heap from many grains or a forest from many trees, or a hirsute man from his many hairs.

Personhood is not something abstracted from particulars, such as a heap from individual grains. Personhood is something that is a contiguous, non-discrete continuum or path. Personhood is not something that we receive at a point in time, as if it were an office like knighthood. We are not dubbed a person once we acquire the enumerated prerequisites, or reach the requisite number of years, an adequate IQ, or ability to speak. Personhood is something that we have from our first moment of conception, and only later discover that we have. Personhood is both being and becoming; it is not becoming alone, and certainly not doing or having alone. Being precedes becoming, doing, or having. Becoming, having, and doing do not precede being.

Personhood is a journey, a thread. Persons grow. Persons are conceived, grow, go through phases, and die their physical death. Persons are threads, threads of Ariadne in the labyrinth of life, threads subject to the Fates. Persons are not heaps composed of discrete parts, living in discrete moments.

Thinking humans are heaps means they end up in heaps by the hands of those who think them so.

Thinking as human as heaps leads to heaps of dead humans

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*The term "person" is not only a philosophical term, but it may also be a legal term, in which case it could be defined positivistically and with greater precision, and it ought to follow the philosophical or moral concept of "person." We focus on the philosophical meaning of the term "person." Philosophically, the term "person" has undergone some significant shift since the Enlightenment, and the effect of the doctrine of the Empiricists, particularly John Locke, on the concept of personhood, and hence the understanding of man, would itself be an interesting study. The result is that often the advocates of abortion are using a different, functional notion of person than the opponents of abortion who rely on a non-functional, ontological notion of person. The word "person" comes to us from the Latin persona and the Greek prosōpon (πρόσωπον), a word originally meaning the mask worn by an actor. Ultimately, the term was used to express the concept of an individual. Boethius is the source for the classic definition of person. In his De persona et duabus naturis, c. ii, Boethius defines person as "naturae rationalis individua substantia," an individual substance of a rational nature. St. Thomas expanded on the Boethian definition, in particular on the notion of substance, and in his Summa Theologiae, explains that the Boethian individua substantia signifies a substantia, completa, per se subsistens, separata ab aliia. S. T. III, Q. 16, art. 12, ad 2. That is, individual substance means "a substance, complete, subsisting per se, existing apart from others." A human being's personhood, therefore, consisted of soul and body conjoined. The concept was ontological, not functional, and therefore no one could be a human being without also being a person. Empiricism's blinders do not allow it to recognize such spiritual or metaphysical realities such as "soul," and so it has tended to define "personhood" by empirical data alone, which has resulted in a functional definition of personhood. For an empiricist, personality was constituted not by any underlying reality which self-consciousness or rational operations revealed (and so one could be a person without self-consciousness, e.g., while asleep, or without rational operation, e.g., a brain damaged individual, or even without all functions operating because of biological limitations, e.g., a fetus), but by the self-consciousness or rational operation itself. Thus Locke defined a person (self) as "a conscious thinking thing (whatever substance made up of, whether spiritual or material, simple or compounded, it matters not) which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends." John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, c. 27, ¶ 17 (emphasis added). So Locke, by his emphasis on personhood as being something functional or qualitative (conscious), appears to have been one of the first to separate the human being from the human person. The result has been nothing sort of bizarre confusion. For example, H. Tristam Englehardt adopts this corrupt notion of personhood in his book The Foundations of Bioethics (Oxford: Oxford University press, 1996), 138-39:

[N]ot all humans are persons. Not all humans are self-conscious, rational, and able to conceive of the possibility of blaming and praising. Fetuses, infants, the profoundly mentally retarded, and the hopelessly comatose provide examples of human non-persons. Such entities are members of the human species but do not in and of themselves have standing in the secular moral community. Such entities cannot blame or praise; they cannot make promises, contracts, or agree to an understanding of beneficence. They are not prime participants in the secular moral endeavor. Only persons have that status. . . . but do not have standing in the moral community. . . One speaks of persons in order to identify entities one can warrant blame or praise. For this reason, it is nonsensical to speak of respecting the autonomy of fetuses, infants, or profoundly retarded adults who have been never been rational.

Tooley's definition of person, which fits with Englehardt's description, simply expands on Locke's, and relies on the existence of psychological characteristics, qualities, or functions, some sort of "mental life," which obviously requires a significant development or maturation in the individual before they exist. "Tooley toys with the idea that there are necessary and sufficient conditions for personhood and provides a list of likely characteristics, but the ones he and other personists such as Singer focus on are (to use Tooley's words): 'the capacity for self-consciousness', 'the capacity for rational thought', 'the capacity to envisage a future for oneself', 'the capacity to remember a past involving onself' and 'the capacity for being a subject of non-momentary interests'." (Oderberg, 32, citing Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide, 349). In his encyclical Evangelium vitae, Pope John Paul II has clearly rejected a functional, qualitative measure of personhood:

Some people try to justify abortion by claiming that the result of conception, at least up to a certain number of days, cannot yet be considered a personal human life. But in fact, "from the time that the ovum is fertilized, a life is begun which is neither that of the father nor the mother; it is rather the life of a new human being with his own growth. It would never be made human if it were not human already. This has always been clear, and ... modern genetic science offers clear confirmation. It has demonstrated that from the first instant there is established the program of what this living being will be: a person, this individual person with his characteristic aspects already well determined. Right from fertilization the adventure of a human life begins, and each of its capacities requires time-a rather lengthy time-to find its place and to be in a position to act". Even if the presence of a spiritual soul cannot be ascertained by empirical data, the results themselves of scientific research on the human embryo provide "a valuable indication for discerning by the use of reason a personal presence at the moment of the first appearance of a human life: how could a human individual not be a human person?"

EV, No. 60 (quoting Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Declaration on Procured Abortion (18 November 1974), Nos. 12-13 and Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation (Donum Vitae) (22 February 1987) In their book Embryo (New York: Doubleday, 2008), Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen attribute this division between body and personhood to philosophical dualism, and advocate a philosophical animalism in equating human personhood with human being. Dualism is eventually self defeating. Id. at 83-111.
**Norman Lebrecht, The Book of Musical Anectdotes (New York: Free Press, 1985), 193.
***The word "sorites" comes from the Greek σωρείτης (sōreitēs) meaning "heaped up," the word, σωρός, (sōros) meaning "heap." The sorites paradox, or paradox of the heap, is called that way because of the first formulation of the problem by the Megarian logician Eubulides of Miletus. The paradox comes from vague predicates such as "heap." If a grain of wheat does not make a heap of grain, then it follows that two grains does not, and so on for three, four, five, etc. grains of wheat. When, then, if ever is there a "heap" of grain? A similar puzzle involves the use of the vague term "bald." If a man with one hair on his head is bald, then a man with only two hairs is bald, as is a man with three, four, five, six, etc. hairs on his head. It follows that a man will be bald no matter what number of hairs he has on his head. This paradox was called the falakros puzzle (from falakros [φαλακρός]=bald man), but since it involves the same puzzle as the sorites paradox, it is usually not accorded a separate existence. The problem, of course, is that the paradox can go either way. ("One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens." Oderberg, 14) For example, if a man with 10,000 hairs on his head is hirsute (the opposite of bald), then a man with 9,999 hairs is likewise hirsute, as is a man with 9,998, 9,997, 9,996 hairs, etc. This means a man with one hair on his head is hirsute also. A similar paradox involves replacement of parts of the whole and the principle of identity, a paradox known as Theseus's paradox, or the paradox of grandfather's axe, Trigger's broom, or Jeannot's knife.
****Note the obvious nominalism in Tooley's thinking. Everything is discrete. In Tooley's thought, there is no reality to a continuity of substance in man during time.
*****In her notorious article, "A Defense of Abortion," published in Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1971), Judith Jarvis Thomson does something similar in arbitrarily defining a "person" to mean essentially a fully or at least virtually adult member of the human species:

Most opposition to abortion relies on the premise that the fetus is a human being, a person, from the moment of conception. The premise is argued for, but, as I think, not well. Take, for example, the most common argument. We are asked to notice that the development of a human being from conception through birth into childhood is continuous; then it is said that to draw a line, to choose a point in this development and say "before this point the thing is not a person, after this point it is a person" is to make an arbitrary choice, a choice for which in the nature of things no good reason can be given. It is concluded that the fetus is. or anyway that we had better say it is, a person from the moment of conception. But this conclusion does not follow. Similar things might be said about the development of an acorn into an oak trees, and it does not follow that acorns are oak trees, or that we had better say they are.

This is like extricating oneself from the sorites paradox by arbitrarily stating that a heap constitutes 5,000 grains of wheat, no more and no less, and a bald man constitutes a man with less than 600 hairs, no more and no less. Who gave Tooley and Thomson the rights arbitrarily to set the standard of personhood to include only adult or at least significantly matured humans so that their argument was a sure win?

Tribute to Moloch: Is Broca Only His Brain?

IN THE MUSÉE DE L'HOMME IN PARIS, atop the hill of Trocadéro overlooking the Seine valley and the Eiffel Tower can be found, Carl Sagan tells us though I have not seen it, in a jar of formalin, the brain of the French physician, anatomist, and anthropologist Pierre Paul Broca (1824-1880). How much of Paul Broca is left in this brain? Carl Sagan asks in his bestseller Broca's Brain.

Perhaps the better question is how much of Paul Broca, if any at all, was ever in his brain? Did Pierre Paul Broca exist before his brain existed?

Was there any of Paul Broca in his body? If Paul Broca's body sans his brain was preserved in a cask of Amontillado, sort of like Admiral Nelson's in a cask of brandy with traces of camphor and myrrh, how much of Paul Broca would have been left in that body without a brain? Would Paul Broca have been split into two: part of it at the Musée de l'Homme in the cask of formalin, part of it in a cask of Amontillado wherever stored? Would there be more of Paul Broca with us if we took the brain from the cask of formalin and incorporated it back into the skull preserved in the cask of Amontillado? The questions seem silly, because Paul Broca is dead, both in his brain and in his body. Taken out of the preservational fluids, the inanimate body and brain would soon spoil, putrefy, and disintegrate into its component elements.

How much of Broca is in his brain?

We cannot say the same thing in the beginning of Paul Broca's life. There was a time, in the beginning of his life, where Paul Broca had no brain, and only the rudiments of a body. He was found not preserved in a cask of formalin or of brandy, but living in an amniotic sack full of amniotic fluid. Was Paul Broca Paul Broca only when his brain waves could be detected at about six to eight weeks' gestation, and not Paul Broca before then? Was Paul Broca at six-weeks' gestation the same Paul Broca whose brain is now in formaldehyde? If not, then why would neither Paul Broca nor his brain have been here had he been aborted as a six-week-old fetus? Why would neither Paul Broca nor his brain have been here had he been aborted at the end of his third trimester? Either way, Paul Broca without a brain or with a brain would not have been, and we would be at the Musée de l'Homme looking at an empty jar that said "the Brain of Paul Broca that never was." We'd shrug our shoulders with little interest and move on to find Descartes's skull to see what we could learn from it. And Carl Sagan never would have written his book, and he would have enjoyed less royalties and less people would have been misinformed by his materialistic philosophy.

Descartes's Skull

Had we taken Paul Broca's one-celled zygote and, instead of putting it in a cask of formaldehyde, cryogenically preserved it for one hundred fifty years, and later implanted it in some willing French rent-a-womb, would we not have Pierre Paul Broca be with us today?

Pierre Paul Broca, though he had no brain, would be in the one cell of that zygote in a manner in which he never was, and never will be, in his separate brain in the Musée de l'Homme. This is because Pierre Paul Broca's zygote--without a brain, without any brain waves whatsoever--would be alive. And Broca's body and brain--without any brain waves whatsoever--is dead.

The absence of brain waves in the beginning of life is clearly different from the absence of brain waves at the end of life. Yet the vast difference between the lack of brain waves at the beginning, and the lack of brain waves at the end appears completely to elude those who suggest that human life really begins only when brain waves are detected. The absence of brain waves when a human being is alive and when their coming is foreseeable is world's apart from the absence of brain waves when a man is dead and their coming is unforeseeable, indeed, barring a miracle, physically impossible.

The brain looms large in the debate between abortionists and advocates of traditional morality. Like Carl Sagan, abortion advocates want to tag one's humanity to the presence of a brain, "brain birth" so to speak, and so they argue that since the fetus has no measurable brain activity for its first six weeks of life, it cannot be human life, and so may properly be snuffed out without qualms of conscience. Since a working brain is necessary for a normally functioning human life, the advocates of abortion argue that the absence of it allows the inference that we are not dealing with anything human. But this is to confuse categories.

While the brain is required for normal human life, and the complete absence of it spells death, the existence of a brain is not equivalent to human life.

We know this by observation: there are human beings that are profoundly and irreversibly mentally disabled: indeed there are infants who are tragically born anencephalic, without a brain, and yet what else are they but human beings? The defect from which they suffer is not unlike any other defect: of limbs, or organs, or anything else. Why should the child without a brain be treated any different from the child without legs? The child was genetically programmed to have a brain, and something has interfered with the normal progress through no fault of his own.

We also know this because a zygote without brain waves is something entirely different than a corpse without brain waves. So the analogy between "brain death" and "brain birth" fails for lack of parallelism. As Professor Raymond J. Devetterre* observes in his book Practical Decisions in Health Care Ethics: Cases and Concepts:

There is a significant difference between a fetus without brain life and a human being who has lost brain life and is brain dead. The fetus is alive and the brain-dead patient is dead. The brain-dad patient is dead because he has suffered the irreversible loss of all brain functions. The fetus has not suffered any such loss and therefore is not dead. A brain cannot be considered dead if it never lived--death always follows life. True, neither the six-week fetus nor the brain-dead individual has brain life, but the former is alive . . . and the latter is dead. The fundamental difference between life and death undermines the analogy between an early fetus and a brain-dead patient.

For these reasons, comparing an early fetus with a whole-brain-dead patient does not seem to be a bad idea. The early fetus is not dead but alive; it simply has not yet developed awareness. . . . A patient declared dead by the whole-brain-death criterion is dead; a developing fetus, or even an embryo for that matter, is living.

Deveterre, 145.

Brain activity it would seem is an inadequate measure of human life in its incipient stages of development. To recruit it in the abortion debate is to ignore the lack of parallelism between "brain death" and "brain birth." It is to ignore the difference between Pierre Paul Broca as a living zygote in his Huguenot mother Annette Broca née Thomas's womb in 1823 and Pierre Paul Broca as a lifeless brain in a jar at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris in 2010.

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*Raymond J. Devettere, Practical Decision Making in Health Care Ethics: Cases and Concepts (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2010) (3rd ed.). I disagree with Devettere's "one of us" test of human life, but his observations on the lack of parallelism between the lack of brain activity at the beginning of life and the lack of brain activity at the end seems accurate and concisely stated. That is the only reason for which he is cited, and no agreement with any of his other views ought to be inferred.

Tribute to Moloch: The Continuum of Human Life and Fetal Pain

THE ISSUE OF ABORTION WILL NOT GO AWAY. It will not go away because of the Christian witness against it; it is part of the Gospel, the Gospel of Life, and Christians, particularly Catholics, shall not tire of proclaiming the truth from the housetops, at curb sides, in politicians' office and chambers, through the internet, or from the Vatican.* But even if all Christian witness were effectively squelched, the issue will not go away because of the natural law's witness against it. Men and women of good will would, like so many stones, rise up and give witness if not as children of Abraham, at least as sons of Adam. (Cf. Matt. 3:9)

The issue of abortion cannot be easily discussed because of vested interests in the institution of abortion. There are--if the abortifacient qualities of modern contraceptive techniques are not considered--approximately 43-45 million abortions annually world-wide,** the actual number being obviously difficult to count. The sheer financial investment in the infrastructure of abortion facilities, the political favor the institution carries with modern media and liberal academia, not to mention the moral baggage and psychological and sociological defense mechanisms which grow out of jettisoned guilt in having justified the institution, all conspire to squelch rational discussion and move it into the realm of ideological fracas. Yet regardless of such powers, dominions, and principalities that jealously guard the heights, if abortion is a moral evil, then it follows we are dealing with a moral failure of massive, historically unparalleled proportion. We are dealing with what may be the most institutionalized evil in the history of mankind, and it may be placed at the foot of the Feminists and their followers or supporters.

[If abortion is morally wrong,] it would be a simple fact, however we dress it up, that homicides are and have for the last few decades been taking place on a scale unprecedented in human history, involving millions upon millions of innocent human beings.

Oderberg, 3. The horror of this brutality pales any form of genocide, mass murder, or institutionalized evil since the beginning of mankind. Since 1922, it is estimated that there have perhaps been as many as 850 million through 950 million abortions worldwide.**

The injustice done to these innocents is irreparable. What will man do if he ever recognizes the great evil he is wreaking and he has wrought? We speak of "German Guilt" for the atrocities of the Holocaust, but, as evil as the Nazi institutions were, and they ought never be minimized, they pale in number before the almost 1 billion killed through abortion. Shall we ever speak of a "Global Guilt" for the atrocities of the abortion Holocaust to Moloch? Under what sort of repression of conscience are we living now to accept this state of affairs with relative equanimity? What sorts of human beings flourish under such a repression of conscience? How shall we ever make amends to the future generations who have never seen light?

The basic argument against abortion--that the deliberate and direct killing of the fetus in his or her mother's womb is wicked and always wicked, indeed a crime against humanity not to mention humanity's God--is very simple. It rests upon two premises. The first, the major premise, is a moral principle: that directly taking an innocent human being's life is always wrong. The second, the minor premise, is a factual principle: the fetus is an innocent human being. "If the foetus is an innocent human being, and if it is always wrong deliberately to kill an innocent human being, then it must be wrong deliberately to kill a foetus." Oderberg, 4. If the major and minor premise are true, the conclusion is necessarily true. All the arguments in support of abortion attack one or both of these premises. We shall call this syllogism, the "Anti-Abortion Syllogism."

The humanity of the fetus, which is the minor premise of the Anti-Abortion Syllogism, is at the front and center of the abortion debate. The most significant feature of the fetus is the continuity of fetal development. No one can deny that there is continuity of development from fertilization or conception through birth. "[T]here is no metaphysically significant dividing line in embryonic and foetal development separating something that is a human being from something that is not." Oderberg, 8. After fertilization or conception (they are usually the same, but in the event of twinning, may not be), there is no dividing line between potential human life and actual human life. All human life after conception is actual, though like all human life it continues to have potentiality related to its development, and it goes through a continuum of phases. What this means, of course, is that any dividing line imposed by advocates of abortion is without any real basis: it is artificial, arbitrary, without grounding in reason. It divides some actual human life in one phase from other actual human life in another phase that is not discrete from the prior phase by nothing other than will, human fiat. It invents a border where there is none.

Try it. It cannot honestly be done. Try honestly to find a reasonable, meaningful boundary to distinguish why and when sometime between a zygote and a child born in full-term (or adult, for that matter) the "thing" is, on one side of the divide, something that can be destroyed, and on the other side of the divide, something that ought to have full protection of moral and positive law. It cannot be done because the process of fetal development, like human life generally, is a seamless continuum.

• The product of conception, the joinder of the gametes, of ovum and sperm, results in a zygote (from the Greek word ζυγωτός, zygōtos, meaning "joined" or "yoked") with a unique DNA formed from the contribution of the DNA of the father and the DNA of the mother. From the perspective of DNA, the zygote has the identical DNA makeup as the fetus, the child, and the adult. The DNA cannot serve as any basis for a dividing line once there is joinder of the gametes.
• As the zygote cleaves and then divides and grows, and there is nothing of any substantive significance between the phases through which it travels: morula (12-16 cells), blastocyst (100 cells), the implantation, embryo, fetus, new-born, where any reasonable dividing line can be drawn. Any dividing line is entirely arbitrary because of the continuity of development of human life.
  

The biological evidence of this continuity of development is so compelling that even the consequentialist and pro-abortion advocate Peter Singer admits two facts: he admits "there is no doubt that from the first moments of its existence an embryo [sic] conceived from human sperm and eggs [sic] is a human being." He also admits that the "liberal search for a morally crucial dividing line between the new born baby and the fetus has failed to yield any event or stage of development that can bear the weight of separating those with a right to life from those who lack such a right." Oderberg, 10 (quoting Singer, Practical Ethics, 86, 142-43). So compelling is the biological process, that Singer has to concoct a category entirely unrelated to the process of human life--his own concept of personhood--to try to build his justification of killing human life.

The proponents of abortion are fiendishly clever, however, as most humans are who want to get their way or rationalize their conduct. And a number of efforts are made by them to try to avoid the moral implication of the continuum of human life by focusing on other factors, such as feeling or sentience, or the existence brain activity, or viability outside the womb, or other more vague metaphysical concepts such as their conveniently vague concepts of personhood, or the false distinctions between potential humans and actual humans applied to actual humans. (Viability is a particularly important standard, from a practical perspective, since it is the legal standard around which Justice Blackmun's opinion in Roe v. Wade revolved and under which our law analyzes when the State may begin to prohibit the process.) Additionally, the proponents of abortion offer other arguments to try to avoid the consequence of that fact human life develops in seamless continuity from conception to natural death. We find such absurdities proposed as that of Stuart Derbyshire, a psychologist at the University of Birmingham in Britain: “A fetus is biologically human, of course,” he says. “It isn’t a cow. But it’s not yet psychologically human.”*** It is hard to believe that someone actually believes that human is a psychological category, and not a real one. But no one said the advocates of abortion are wise, they are just clever, and sometimes just clever fools.

Some advocates of abortion (as well as advocates against abortion) seize on the issue of fetal sentience or fetal pain as the basis for argument pro or con abortion. Fetal pain is what has been at the forefront of fetal pain laws, such as the recently-passed Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act (LB 1103) which was signed into law by Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman in April 2010, and which became effective October 15, 2010. That law aims to change the debate from a "viability" standard which generally drives the U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence under the regime of Roe v. Wade to an earlier standard based upon fetal pain. Based upon scientific evidence that the fetus experiences something that could be characterized as pain as early as 20 weeks from gestation, the Nebraska law prohibits abortions after 20 weeks regardless of the viability of the fetus.

There is huge debate on the matter in terms of empirical evidence and what it shows with regard to fetal pain. A lot of it revolves around the definition one uses for the word pain, and that ends up being a vague standard, easily prone to manipulation and ideological capture, which is one of the problems with such a standard in using it for moral analysis. If pain is defined to require a conscious recognition or awareness to some sort of noxious stimulus, then the onset of fetal pain can arguably be extended as far as the third trimester (29-30 weeks) because it would require fully functional thalamocortical fibres and full cortical processing. (There is, contra, extensive debate as to whether the cortex is related to consciousness of pain, since hydranencephalytic children clearly experience pain, and their cortical development is extremely limited as a result of their condition.)

If pain is defined, however, more broadly to include more reflexive responses to invasive or noxious procedures (such as grimaces, recoiling, or flinching) or hormonal stress responses (e.g., increased levels of adrenaline or cortisol), then one can push back the boundary to as early as the seventh week of gestation. There is, however, vagueness even here, as avoidance responses begin around the area of the mouth of the fetus as early as five weeks and progress to the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet by the eighth and ninth week respectively. Oderberg, 6-7 (citing P. McCullagh). In response to the argument that the cortex must be developed before their is consciousness and therefore pain to be felt, some argue that the fetus's immature physiology means it has less of the mechanisms for inhibiting or reacting to pain and therefore may feel pain more intensely at earlier stages than later stages. These scientists point to the existence of a subplate zone which is fully functional at 17 weeks, and which they believe provides the capacity to process pain signals. For example, Dr. Kanwaljeet ("Sunny") Anand, a pediatrician who specializes in the the care of critically-ill newborns and children, and who has testified before Courts and legislative committees on the issue of fetal pain, is at the forefront of the controversy, and his view is that the fetus feels pain at 20 weeks gestation.****

The issue of fetal pain is naturally important to physicians who perform legitimate surgical procedures on the fetus in utero, and judge on the matter of the advisability of anesthesia. But the fetal pain issue has also been captured by the abortion controversy. Predictably, advocates of abortion generally try to extend out the time period, whereas opponents tend to point to evidence that the fetus feels pain earlier.

There is, perhaps, some value in letting people know that the fetus may feel pain, since it may trigger some feelings of human empathy for the fetus by someone otherwise completely insensitive to the fetus's plight. In other words, the issue of fetal pain, from a subjective standpoint (since objectively it is irrelevant morally) of the actor, humanizes the fetus. There is some value in making the fetus something different than the anonymous Balzacian mandarin whose death is of hardly any moment since it is so far removed from us, shrouded as it were, by time and place.***** It is the Jew Shylock's argument to his Gentile prosecutors:

I am a Jew. Hath
not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will
resemble you in that.

Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, III.1.58-68. If you prick a fetus, does he not bleed?

But even though we may think that the "evidence is overwhelming that the foetus displays at a very early age what would uncontroversially be called pain behaviour in you or me," and the fetus is in "the great chain of feeling" of sentient beings, as Martin Pernick described it in his history on anesthesia, A Calculus of Suffering: Pain, Professionalism, and Anesthesia in Nineteenth Century America, that fact's "moral worth is dubious," as important as it may be for other reasons. Oderberg, 7.

Why is fetal pain morally dubious when it comes to abortion? Why is "sentience, as such," "not the nub of the debate"? Oderberg, 7-8. The reason why the issue of fetal pain is of morally dubious value--in fact is irrelevant to the moral assessment of abortion--is because the moral issue is not whether pain ought to be avoided, but the moral issue is whether the intentional taking of the fetal life is morally licit. The two questions are distinct, and whether or not the fetus feels pain or does not feel pain has nothing to do with whether it can be directly and intentionally killed or not killed. If pain were the issue, then simple anesthetizing of the fetus (or for that matter, any human being, for example, the elderly or those in a persistent vegetative state) before killing it would remove any moral objection. It clearly does not. If pain were the issue, then we would prohibit the intentional slaughter of animals such as chickens, pigs, and cattle, since they are sentient beings who feel pain. Hunting or trapping would be off limits since animals probably feel pain at being shot at or trapped. Moreover, sometimes it is morally legitimate, in fact, morally compelled to inflict pain even on a fetus. Physicians may have to inflict some pain on a fetus to determine its response in order to judge whether certain medical procedures should be performed.

Whether or not the fetus feels pain, therefore, is not at the foundation of moral objection to abortion. While, in general, the deliberate infliction of pain should be avoided, suffering is not the criterion of morality as Bentham and classic utilitarians would suggest. Else, we could anesthetize a human being and justify enormities. Moreover, once we fall into the trap of measuring fetal pain as the foundation for justifying fetal protection, we are bound to measure maternal pain against which to weight it, and he have collapsed our moral foundation and fallen head long into an untenable utilitarianism or consequentialism. Moreover, the fact that human beings feel pain is not what gives us the right to life and the dignity of being human, since pain and the ability to suffer is something shared with brute animals and not something we share with the angels.

The issue of fetal pain or sentience ought not therefore to distract us from the exceptionless rule that the intentional direct killing of the fetus in his or her mother's womb is wrong and always wrong and always gravely so whether there is pain or there is not pain. It is, though the law may not classify it so, homicide. Morally, by the testimony of the natural law, it is murder.

_________________________________
*Pope John Paul II effectively declared the grave immorality of direct abortion in his Evangelium Vitae, the Gospel of Life. The teaching is predicated upon the Church's teaching against murder in No. 57:

57. Therefore, by the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors, and in communion with the Bishops of the Catholic Church, I confirm that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral. This doctrine, based upon that unwritten law which man, in the light of reason, finds in his own heart (cf. Rom 2:14-15), is reaffirmed by Sacred Scripture, transmitted by the Tradition of the Church and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.

Quapropter Nos auctoritate usi Petro eiusque Successoribus a Christo collata, coniuncti cum Ecclesiae catholicae Episcopis, confirmamus directam voluntariamque hominis innocentis interfectionem graviter inhonestam esse semper. Doctrina haec, cuius innituntur radices illa in non scripta lege quam, praeeunte rationis lumine, quivis homo suo reperit in animo (Cfr. Rom. 2, 14-15), inculcatur denuo Sacris in Litteris, Ecclesiae Traditione commendatur atque ordinario et universali Magisterio explanatur (Cfr. Lumen Gentium, 25).

Abortion is treated immediately after murder in the encyclical, indicating its direct link to the prohibition against murder, specifically in Nos. 58, and 61-62:

58. Among all the crimes which can be committed against life, procured abortion has characteristics making it particularly serious and deplorable. The Second Vatican Council defines abortion, together with infanticide, as an "unspeakable crime." . . .(Gaudium et Spes, No. 51: "Abortion and infanticide are nefarious crimes.")

58. Omnia inter ea scelera quae patrare homo contra vitam potest, notas quasdam prae se fert procuratus abortus quibus improbus insignite ac detestabilis evadit. Illum describit Concilium Vaticanum II, perinde atque infanticidium, “crimen nefandum” (Gaudium et Spes, 51: «Abortus necnon infanticidium nefanda sunt crimina»).

61. The texts of Sacred Scripture never address the question of deliberate abortion and so do not directly and specifically condemn it. But they show such great respect for the human being in the mother's womb that they require as a logical consequence that God's commandment "You shall not kill" be extended to the unborn child as well. . . . Christian Tradition -- as the Declaration issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith points out so well -- is clear and unanimous, from the beginning up to our own day, in describing abortion as a particularly grave moral disorder. . . .

61. Litterarum Sacrarum loci, ubi de voluntario abortu numquam est sermo et propterea directis propriisque vocabulis abortus haud reicitur, talem tamen tantamque hominis ipsius exprimunt materno in sinu venerationem, ut tamquam necessariam conclusionem postulent ut erga illum etiam prorogetur Dei mandatum: “Non homicidium facies”. . . . Prout effert probe Declaratio de hoc argumento a Congregatione pro Doctrina Fidei edita (Cfr. CONGR. PRO DOCTRINA FIDEI Declaratio de abortu procurato), consona est atque illustris a principio ad nostros usque dies christiana Traditio, quae tenet ipsum abortum veluti morale quiddam unice inordinatum. . . .

62. . . . . Given such unanimity in the doctrinal and disciplinary tradition of the Church, Paul VI was able to declare that this tradition [regarding abortion] is unchanged and unchangeable. Therefore, by the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors, in communion with the Bishops -- who on various occasions have condemned abortion and who in the aforementioned consultation, albeit dispersed throughout the world, have shown unanimous agreement concerning this doctrine--I declare that direct abortion, that is, abortion willed as an end or as a means, always constitutes a grave moral disorder, since it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. This doctrine is based upon the natural law and upon the written Word of God, is transmitted by the Church's Tradition and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.

62. . . . . Coram simili consensione in tralaticia doctrina disciplinaque Ecclesiae, valuit pontifex Paulus VI adseverare idem magisterium nec esse mutatum nec posse mutari (Cfr. PAULI VI Allocutio ad Italicos Iuris peritos Catholicos, die 9 dec. 1972: Insegnamenti di Paolo VI, X (1972) 1260 ss.; EIUSDEM Humanae Vitae, 14). Auctoritate proinde utentes Nos a Christo Beato Petro eiusque Successoribus collata, consentientes cum Episcopis qui abortum crebrius respuerunt quique in superius memorata interrogatione licet per orbem disseminati una mente tamen de hac ipsa concinuerunt doctrina – declaramus abortum recta via procuratum, sive uti finem intentum seu ut instrumentum, semper gravem prae se ferre ordinis moralis turbationem, quippe qui deliberata exsistat innocentis hominis occisio. Haec doctrina naturali innititur lege Deique scripto Verbo, transmittitur Ecclesiae Traditione atque ab ordinario et universali Magisterio exponitur (Cfr. Lumen Gentium, 25).

Evangelium vitae, Nos. 57, 58, 61-62. The teaching would appear, at minimum, ordinary, if not extraordinary, infallible teaching of the Church. The Church expressly declares that abortion is against the natural law.
**See, e.g., Johnston's Archive: Abortion Statistics .
***As reported in Annie Murphy Paul, "The First Ache," in the New York Times, Feb. 10, 2008.
****See, e.g., his report on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice on the matter of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.
*****