Abortion rights of mother and child

Topic 3: “Abortion involves the conflict between the rights of the mother and the rights of the child.” Discuss.

Abortion is the artificial termination of the foetus before it is able to survive on its own (Feinberg 1993, cited in Hooft 2006). It is morally impermissible to terminate a pregnancy, as it is seen as the unjustified killing of a human being. To abort concerns the rights of the mother over the ownership of her body, her life and her responsibility to take care of her child. It also involves the potential child’s right to life, his or her potential existence and the harm in depriving opportunity for life. The decision to abort is often influenced by the negative or positive effects of the child’s potential existence. However the mother has the power to decide whether a child is born to become a person. Whether the child is invited into the world, or not depends on the mother’s love for it, as she has no responsibility to protect the unborn’s life inside the womb (Thomson 2004). The foetus, that is a potential life has no voice to defend itself and so is reliant on the mother’s willingness to give the unborn child an opportunity for personhood and growth.

Anti-abortionists assume that the foetus is a person and therefore abortion is the killing of a person. The foetus can be seen as a mass of cells or a human being with a full right to life (Hare 1975). It is taken for granted here that the foetus is a child, which has characteristics of a person with certain rights, identity and unique qualities. But can the foetus really be a person thus having rights to life? According to Joyce (2000), the joining of sperm and egg to make a cell otherwise known as zygote is the point at which a human person is formed. The zygote has the natural potential to love, desire, reason and will, however does not always have the necessary capacity to do so. Furthermore, Joyce explains that the potential to become a person is an actuality in which the zygote is a person. We cannot say ‘I will become a person, but I am a person’. In this way, Joyce has determined the stage at which a person exists and the moral impermissibility to kill them. Others believe it is the beginning of brain activity at eight to ten weeks or when the mother can feel movement inside the womb. Such stages determine personhood; the beginning of intelligence, planning and reasoning ability and this is a right from the very beginning (Joyce, 2000).

However, we cannot say that the foetus is already a person even though the foetus is genetically human. Personhood is a developmental process that is created by the social environments around you such as friends and family, along with the choices you make once you are born. Your character can also be determined by your parents’ expectations of you as explained by Hooft. Since personhood is developed gradually, we cannot say the foetus is able to communicate with others, have ideas, opinions and desires. Therefore it makes no sense to say we are ‘already what we going to become’ (Hooft, 2006). The foetus has not developed into personhood to be called a person thus abortion is simply the deprivation of a child’s potential growth into personhood. But is personhood a necessary criteria for the permissibility of abortion just because a foetus is not a person?

An aborted child can be robbed of rights to future life, even though it is not always guaranteed that the prospect of life is promising. Modern technology shows us that a ‘potential child’ can be severely deformed or disabled before it is born. Many women choose to abort for the fact that their child is simply disabled and bearing them would negatively compromise the rest of the mother’s life. Such an ability to control unwanted pregnancies, impact the value of potential human life. Does prenatal diagnosis tell us that disability is so terrible it warrants not being alive? Is it more morally permissible to abort a potential child with Down’s syndrome? Nonetheless, the aborted child is deprived of any future life, by the power of modern science given to women. Possible chances to love, reproduce, hear music, write a philosophical essay, and essentially live are taken away from. In defense of the unwanted child, it can be said that ‘any life is better then no life’, as it would be better for a disabled child to be born than to be killed because the opportunity for life was given. Even though a foetus is not a person and they do not have an identity or unique qualities, it is still a human being that has a right for potential life.

However, it can be said that not being born is not robbing future life like death or killing is. Thomas Nagel (2004) argues that ‘not being born is not a harm to a person who not was born’. Meaning, a life taken by death means a life we could have had, yet a life that was not lived cannot be taken away from and wished for. Nagel is suggesting that if the foetus is not born than we have not harmed or killed a person by depriving it from life. Anything before the moment of birth (zygote and foetus) cannot be harm to its existence and anything that has not been born cannot be a person nor have a right to life.

When an unborn child invades a women’s body, she is the sole provider for the potential child. She has the right to decide what will happen to her body (Hooft, 2006). The body that sustains the life of both mother and child belongs to the mother, so she has greater control over it. One example by Thomson (2004), illustrates the violation of the body, by using a violinist whom is attached to your circulatory system for nine months. If the violinist threatens your life, the only way to survive is to kill him and this would be seen as a form of self-defense. This implies that an abortion to protect a mother’s life is justified killing. Thomson then discusses how the right to life, also means that others have a duty to protect that life. For instance Thomson states if one boy was given a box of chocolates the other boy is not entitled to any of it, and it would be out of generosity for the boy to share the chocolates with the boy who was not entitled to them. This can be applied to a mother’s duty to preserve the life of the foetus. The pregnant mother is not obligated to preserve the life of the unborn child whom cannot live independently. Only when she is willing to voluntarily care and sacrifice for her child, then she is being a generous person or a ‘Good Sumatran’ as Thomson describes. But the foetus has no entitlement to life and therefore a pregnant woman has no duty to sustain it.

The foetus does not display behaviour, attitudes or consciousness. The mother of the child however, can make decisions, and is fully-grown to be called a ‘person’. She has the consciousness to decide whether she wants to give birth. If the child was conceived by rape, it is the mother who chooses whether or not to abort. The unborn child cannot choose whether he or she wants to live. Thus the conflict between mother and child lies with power and control. The mother has the power to ‘play God’; to choose what is best for her body and future because she has the awareness to do so. The unborn child has no power, self-consciousness or freedom and consequently cannot show an interest for its own existence (Tooley 1983 as cited in Hayes 1998). Furthermore, it is the mother that makes the fetus a person, as she is the only person that can give hope for life to the potential child (Maguire 1985 as cited in Hayes 1998). However is it fair to compare the functional ability of a mother to an unborn child?

An unborn child’s fate, also rests upon the past, present and future possibilities that his or her parents bring. The character the parents shape for the child depends on the time before the unborn existed; why he or she was conceived, the financial situation of the parents and family relationships. The identity for the potential child then continues to conception where the views of the parents determine whether the foetus is welcomed or rejected into the world. Family loved ones and the community is affected by its existence and may bring hope, desire and love for its potential life. Without a mother’s willingness to love the potential child, he or she has little right to enter the world and little chance for survival. The mother must consider the responsibility to care for the child once he or she is born, and must consider whether the unborn child will have a negative or positive outcome. For instance a 14-year-old pregnant girl whom is pregnant with a disabled child will most likely abort because of timing, and the pressure of raising a child without support. She may also want to give birth to the child, regardless of his or her deformity because she has the willingness to love and care for it for the rest of her life.

The unborn’s right to life is controlled by the mother that brought the child into the womb in the first place. She whom sacrifices her body to the foetus does not have responsibility over maintaining its survival, yet to voluntarily sustain the unborn child’s life is seen as a generous act of kindness and love as explained by Thomson (2004). Whether the unborn is invited or uninvited to the womb is irrelevant, anti-abortionist will defend the child’s right to life. However the unborn entity cannot be seen as having rights if it is not a person. Furthermore, the unborn child cannot be deprived of life if he or she never had life to be deprived from and therefore is not harmed if he or she never existed (Nagel 2004). Sadly, the unborn child is a human being with potential but without consciousness or freedom to defend itself. The mother is given the choice to abort, which denies the child the right not to be destroyed. Thus conflict does not only exist between mother and child but the social environments that surround the child, its perceived character and the future prospects of the child’s survival.