ON THE MORALITY OF ABORTION



Plants bear many seeds, continually, with the aim that some of them will sprout and continue the species. Some do grow; all the other seeds die.

Likewise, in the insect and animal worlds and the kingdom of the sea, though many seeds die, a fortunate few will prosper. Such is the nature of propagation and the probability of survival: though some will die, enough will live to further the species.

Some will argue that man, the most exalted species on the planet, owes a debt to that intellectual status and is morally responsible for the survival of every human "seed". To suggest otherwise is murder, they will say... as if humans hated murder. But we don't. We do it all the time, and have done since before we crawled out of the caves. We're the only species to kill its own with such rampant regularity. Many states still have capital punishment. In times of war, we consign our most vital to the deadly protection of arbitrary political territory. Elimination of our fellows has never been so abhorrent for us to eliminate the practice.

But comfort in killing is no argument for abortion. We're smarter than that. And abortion is killing, without a doubt. The elimination of a multicellular organism in its formative stages.

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The operative question is, of course, when is a person a "person"? Six weeks, four months, when? Is it murder after the fingers are formed, or earlier, when the tiny heart begins to beat?

With some thought, it should become readily apparent that such questions are academic. Life is life. If we are violently opposed to the death of a human embryo, in whatever state of growth, we cannot be less opposed to the death of that embryo's precursors. Can we shudder at the extinction of two billion cells and feel no pain for the death of only two? Is an egg or sperm less important than the product of their union?

But that's precisely where this argument fails. Living female cells are disposed of with monthly regularity, and no one cries. Nocturnal emissions and other means equally eliminate countless male cells with the same regularity and lack of remorse. Can we so hypocritically claim that a multicelled human is more potentially viable than its two original cells? No, for we are aware of the identical genetic codes common to every human cell -- the RNA and DNA, which preconstruct every human being.

The question, then, is not: How many cells does it take to establish our "humanity", whether two, or billions; nor, by extension, that the death of either original cell should merit half the repugnance of the death of that cell's later union as a zygote. For the question is academic. Cells are expendable. Zygotes and embryos, too.

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How can we endorse such callous disregard for human potentiality? The answer is not in potential quantity -- what the unborn many might have been, but in realized quality -- what is done with those which are born. This argument is to suggest that, while connected by placenta to the mother and not yet living independently, the unborn child is not yet an independent human being, living apart from the mother. The fact of its placental connection deprives that young human soul of any status beyond that of a maternal appendage: more mother than baby.

As members of the most intelligent species on this planet, we alone, with individual discretion, have the power and the right to decide which of our "seeds" should prosper. It is no moral crime, and no guilt should accompany our private and personal decisions about which of our seeds we have decided to plant. It is the business of no one but ourselves. God knows how many seeds we have planted out of guilt and at great personal sacrifice, only in the name of "preservation at any cost."

As our living space decreases and our available resources become ever more limited, we can no longer afford the luxury of such mindless propagation. We are smarter than that. With the continued practice of such unmitigated reproduction, we face the eventual prospect of consuming ourselves out of existence.

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And we're smarter than that, too. We love life, sure; though we kill it so often. We're trying to be better. And we shall steadily be. A sperm cell is dispensable to us, and so is an egg. We should extrapolate and realize: so is a gamete ... zygote ... embryo ... fetus. We can't hold one stage to be more important than any other. They're all alive; they're all "us". But, with placental attachment, they're not yet new humans, and our decision for their survival is ours alone -- what we produce belongs to only us, personally. Ours to raise or deny. Ours. Yours or mine. No one else can judge ... whatever our decision.

Abortion has assumed a mantle of guilt and shame. It deserves neither; for a decision to produce will often be inferior to that of denial. We owe it to no one to bring forth another human being we can't afford to raise ... whether such poverty is of wealth, love, or ability.

We owe it to our intelligence to abort, terminate, kill ... our further additions to this planet should we decide their arrival would be untimely or burdensome. We can always produce, like the plants and our animal brethren. As the most intelligent species, though, we should be mindful not to produce weeds. Life is a gift, indeed; but unwelcome gifts of life are mistakes we can no longer afford to make.

Or, we could ignore such logic and continue the madness, as ever. In the words of Bell Publication's 1979 edition of Lloyd M. Graham's "Deceptions and Myths of the Bible," reflecting allegiance to the Biblical line, "Be fruitful and multiply": the Catholic church urges its people to multiply regardless of means ... (which makes) irresponsible parenthood a virtue, and irrational proliferation a sacred duty. In spite of the population explosion parents must have six, eight, a dozen, not for society's sake, but for Catholicism's sake. The right to propagate at will ... when exercised by ignorance ... is inimical to social welfare.

"To the intelligent ... an ignorant and prolific female mass-producing humanity is one of the most shocking things in human life. Every child is a potential for good or evil with which all society must deal, yet here is a socially irresponsible creature turning out multiple problems in blissful ignorance of everything save the biological function. Such procreation reduces man to the level of the beast. Instead of a sacred duty, it is one of the greatest of crimes; instead of a 'blessed event', a monstrous impertinence. If the race would solve its crime and social problems, it must begin with these irresponsible problem breeders."

If we consider that abortion is against nature, we might also consider these words from Joseph Fletcher in the 1974 Anchor book, "The Ethics of Genetic Control: Ending Reproductive Roulette": "Nature's drive is only for survival, by means of quantity, not quality, in order to compensate for its waste -- like using hundreds of millions of spermatozoa to fertilize one human egg, and equipping girls with a half million egg cells ... when only five hundred will ever be released and no more than a maximum of forty could possibly be gestated.

"Ashley Montagu explains that babies are not born with a human nature, only with more or less capability of becoming human. In the same vein the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset concluded that people have no nature; they have only their histories. Ethically the core issue is whether an embryo or fetus is a human being, and if so in what sense we call it that .... There is no argument, of course, about a human fetus being a (developmental) stage of the species Homo sapiens .... Nor is there any question of its being alive. Cell division is proceeding."

But, as Fletcher points out, life alone cannot determine the issue, for there is life "in the protoplasm at the start of life and in the 'human vegetable' which is sometimes all that remains at the end." As with abortion, the difficulty of the euthanasia question must also be considered in the light that the voice of choice is common sense, the right to choose life or death. The ability to reason, to make intelligent decisions, establishes our humanity. It is our thinking ability which makes us viable persons and not just living tissue.

Fletcher states that "This is not to say that reason is everything; feeling is an important part of mental function too. But without intelligence the feeling alone is subhuman. The cerebral has to undergird the visceral. Before cerebration comes into play, or when it is ended, in the absence of the synthesizing or thinking function of the cerebral cortex, the person is nonexistent -- or, put another way, the life which is functioning (only) biologically is a nonperson.

"Humans without some minimum of intelligence or mental capacity are not persons, no matter how many of their organs are active, no matter how spontaneous their living processes are. If the cerebrum is gone, due to disease or accident, and only the midbrain or brainstem is keeping 'autonomic' functions going, they are only objects, not subjects -- they are its, not thous. Just because heart, lungs, and the neurologic and vascular systems persist we cannot say a person exists. Noncerebral organisms are not personal. (Accordingly), perhaps something like a score of 20 on the Binet scale of I.Q. would be roughly but realistically a minimum or base line for personal status. Obviously a fetus cannot meet this test, no matter what its stage of growth.

"Nor can a fetus have any of the other traits that make for the full humanum or personal quality, such as curiosity, affection, self-awareness and self-control, memory, purpose, conscience -- none of the distinctive transbiological indicators of personality .... On this basis there is an open and shut case for abortion, obvious and overwhelming; it can be justified very often, sometimes for reasons of human health, sometimes of human happiness.

"Therefore, the question of when a person comes into existence, the timing, has never found any general agreement, or any convincing evidence favoring one opinion over others.

"The most sensible opinion is Plato's, that a fetus becomes a person at birth -- after it is expelled or drawn from the womb, its umbilical cord cut, and its lungs start to work."
      In echo was Antoine Laurent Lavoisier:
"...we can therefore say with the ancients that the flame of life
is lit at the instant when the child draws its first breath...."
(The Coil of Life, page 42, Ruth Moore, Borzoi Books, 1961)