When It Comes To Abortion, Humanity Is Stripped Away Until Only A Womb Is Left

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

In the forced-birth debate, by which I mean the argument over whether people must be mandated to give birth once they are pregnant, we spend a lot of time arguing over the humanity of the clump of cells that eventually become a baby. "At the moment of fertilization, an unborn baby possesses all the DNA-coded information it needs to be a totally separate person," lectures the forced-birth nonprofit Choices.

I find arguing this point tedious because trying to find the moment where a clump of cells becomes a person is an entirely arbitrary process with far more wide-reaching conclusions than the typical forced birther even cares about. This argument about DNA literally applies to all organisms with DNA. Suppose you think that we can pinpoint the exact nature of sentience in the gradation from zygote to embryo, to fetus, etc., and believe that such life deserves protection. In that case, I have bad news for you about the animals we eat, the plants we mow down, and the microbiome in your gut because, depending on the stage of development, a lot of that life is equally as complex.

While these philosophical conversations can be interesting, organizations like Choices don't give a flying f@ck about them. Their arguments are usually more teleological — i.e., that such life is destined to become sentient, or if we are being religious, it has a soul and, therefore, must be protected from harm.

It's an argument that values the idea of a child over a sentient person in the here and now. And even if we take this logic seriously and concede the argument of the zygote, embryo, fetus, etc., being considered a person, we still find that this rhetoric is fundamentally dehumanizing to the pregnant person involved. The starting assumption that the autonomy of a pregnant person must be sacrificed for another being goes against foundational principles of human liberty and freedom and ultimately conceives pregnant people as wombs, not people.

Let's concede the argument

The philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson highlighted this tension in her thought experiment about the unconscious violinist, where she literalized the argument by turning that dependent person into an adult (see her 1971 piece, A Defense of Abortion). You awake to find that you have been hooked up against your will by the Society of Music Lovers to an injured, unconscious violinist because you, and you alone, have the right blood type. You are now plugged into his circulatory system and cannot be unplugged for another nine months. As Thomson asks:

“Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says. “Tough luck. I agree. but now you’ve got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him. I imagine you would regard this as outrageous.”

Pro forced-birth conservatives have struggled with this thought experiment. It's not that conservatives have not tried to refute the "unconscious violinist" argument. It is one of the most debated ethicist papers in the last fifty years, but their counters almost always rely on appeals to nature and authority that ignore the central claim in this thought experiment — i.e., that the right to life allows you to make unjust claims on other people.

For example, a typical counter is that the woman created the child (i.e., became pregnant), so she must take care of said child — i.e., that the person's "natural" function as an incubator means they owe the child said incubation. As forced-birth philosopher Trent Horn writes: "Since children are helpless, their well-being is possible only if adults — making sacrifices if necessary — ensure it. This should be no different for unborn children, created in a consensual act designed to bring about their existence, who have a right to live in the wombs of their mothers, which are naturally designed to accommodate them."

However, Horn's example about communal norms is almost a non sequitur. Parents aren't forced to raise the children they have, even if it's a great kindness to do so, and it can be gratifying. Parents give up their children all the time. That's what makes the act of adoption possible. Further, suppose a parent does a lousy job of childrearing. In that case, the community ultimately doesn't force said parent or parents to raise those children indefinitely, but rather, they take the children away and give them to another family unit. Horn's imposing a mandate that doesn't exist in most areas of our society: one that undervalues pregnant people as mere wombs because, according to him, nature and society say so.

Additionally, his argument doesn't deal with the autonomy point at all. Let's amend the unconscious violinist example and say that you initially agreed to the plan to hook yourself up to them but now want to back out. It doesn't change the fact that your body has been attached to the violinist for nine months. You may have agreed to such a thing out of kindness, but that is not something they are owed. If everything your past self committed to about your own body couldn't be challenged by your future self, then you would likewise not be able to back out of sexual intercourse, leave a job, or end a marriage. Autonomy means doing things to your body as you see fit, at any time.

The other main conservative counter to the unconscious violinist argument is equally unconvincing, believing there is some meaningful distinction in this case between killing someone through direct action or passivity. The argument is that there is somehow a difference between purposefully killing something (i.e., how forced birthers conceive abortion) and just passively "letting it die" (i.e., watching the violinist's organs fail). This is a philosophical distinction that is not settled. Whether letting someone die through inaction absolves someone of responsibility is hotly debated in philosophy.

It also ignores the issue at hand — i.e., the bodily autonomy of the person attached to the violinist. Let's say that you don't have to simply unhook the unconscious violinist but physically separate them from your body. You have to tear the stitching out in a way that causes them to bleed out, killing them in the same way that forced birthers claim abortionists are killing "children." Again, it doesn't change that it's your body the unconscious violinist is dependent on, even if this situation is now emotionally more difficult. Likewise, the experiment doesn't change if the unconscious violinist is now your spouse, mother, or child. In what way is that person owed your very flesh? As Thomson writes:

“…certainly the violinist has no right against you that you shall allow him to continue to use your kidneys. As I said, if you do allow him to use them, it is a kindness on your part, and not something you owe him.”

In claiming that a fetus is owed a womb, what forced-birthers are asking us to do, philosophically, is to create a hierarchy between a sentient person and a clump of cells inside said person, with the latter being positioned above the prior. And if we are engaging in this hierarchy, then it is my sincere belief that the pregnant person's life is higher within it. It's their body this other organism is reliant upon, and I don't believe we should subjugate an entire class of people (i.e., women and other pregnant persons) on the grounds of this other organism's theoretical prosperity.

The logic of forced birth leads to a situation where you are valuing the life of the pregnant person less (who is, again, the sentient organism in this equation). We are seeing this fact play out in real-time with these emerging forced-birth and anti-abortion laws across the country, where the health of pregnant people is increasingly compromised to preserve the future health of the child. In one chilling example in Texas, a woman's terminal fetus could not be aborted because it still had a heartbeat. The woman in question developed sepsis from having to bring the child to term. Her uterus was scarred from the infection, hindering her ability to give birth in the future, and she almost died.

As forced birth laws solidify across this country, these examples are increasingly more common. The heartbeat law we mentioned has been challenged in a lawsuit with over a dozen women who have been likewise denied similar care. Whether we are looking at a woman in Louisiana who was forced to give birth to a baby without a skull or, in Florida, where another woman was forced to go home to give birth to a fetus that would not survive, and she almost bled out from complications, these incidents show us the disposability of pregnant people under this hierarchy.

Even in the most charitable situations where you concede the "is it a baby or fetus” argument, we see how this logic devalues pregnant people on a fundamental level.

People, not wombs

Ultimately, I don't think a lot of pro-life or forced-birth conservatives want to acknowledge these arguments because they don't seem to care about the bodily autonomy of women and other pregnant people. The "child's" life, or at least the idea of a child, always seems to matter more — logic that is rooted in the subjugation of wombs. Politicians and philosophers alike have been pretty consistent in their stated beliefs that pregnant people must sacrifice their bodies for the development of the fetus.

However, if forced-birth conservatives respected pregnant people as people and not just wombs, they wouldn't constantly be asserting that they must sacrifice their bodies for others, but that would require empathy. It would require saying, "Hey, even if other people suffer, you shouldn't have to automatically give yourself over to another person because you are entitled to agency as a human being."

At the core of the forced-birthers belief system is rhetoric that dehumanizes pregnant people. A worldview that doesn't see them as people but as wombs that must carry the fetus through its development to the very end.