Let me suggest a a point of clarification regarding language in the abortion debate. People often frame the central moral question in terms of when "life" begins. This language comes to us from Justice Blackman's opinion in Roe v. Wade, where he speaks, among other things, of "potential life," when describing the fetus in the third trimester of pregnancy.
This is clearly the wrong language. A fetus (or foetus) receives nourishment from the umbilical cord. It uses that nourishment to build and maintain its organic form, and in doing so produces waste that is carried away. Now there are many problems in the philosophy of biology that are difficult, but the question of whether a fetus represents actual or potential life is not one of them. If it eats and goes potty, it's alive. In fact, from the moment of conception we are dealing with a living human organism. To pretend otherwise is a sign of bad faith.
The question with regard to abortion is not when life begins, but when personhood begins. Here one must distinguish between legal (or constitutional) and moral (or metaphysical) personhood. The Supreme Court in Dred Scott, a pre-civil war case, solemnly declared that freed Africans were not constitutional persons. This means that they could not be recognized as parties in any case before a federal court. Even if the Court had been right about the constitutional question (it was atrociously wrong), it would still be the case that freed Africans were in fact moral persons, entitled to the same rights as every human being. The Court in Roe concluded, on no visible constitutional grounds, that the unborn is not entitled to legal personhood at any point in the pregnancy. That is what it meant when using such obviously fallacious language as "potential life."
I am pro-life because I think that the point of moral personhood clearly begins prior to birth. There is no possible moral distinction between a human brain that has left the birth canal, and one that is just about to. I think it clear that moral personhood begins fairly early in pregnancy. But I concede, in contrast to most who are pro-life, that the issue is more complicated in the very early stages. Is a blastocyst, the mass of cells at the moment of implantation in the uterine wall, a person? Unlike pro-choice folks, I think that is a serious question. Unlike most pro-lifers, I do not think it is easy to answer in the affirmative.
A serious attempt to resolve the abortion question would depend on this kind of analysis. I think that a compromise is possible, one that would both protect the woman's reproductive choices and protect the person that comes to be well before birth. But to reach such a compromise, both sides would have to surrender their fondest conceit: that the other side consists of nothing but devils.
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