Abortion and Personhood

Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism has a section that makes as cogent an argument as I have ever heard in favor of legal abortion.

To my mind, the argument hinges on the question of what is a "person"?

In writing the majority decision in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that made abortion legal in 1973, Justice Harry Blackmun, says Jacoby

... went on to state unequivocally that 'the word "person," as used in the the Fourteenth Amendment [to the U.S. Constitution], does not include the unborn. (p. 345)

The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees "the equal protection of the laws" to "any person." No "person" may have "life, liberty, or property" taken from him or her "without due process of law."

So is an embryo/fetus a person? If it is, its life cannot legally be taken from it by an intentional abortion.

But if it is not a person, then state anti-abortion laws violate the mother's "privacy" in making her own reproductive decisions.

(Though "privacy" is not a word that expressly appears in the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court has a history of interpreting the Due Process clause that does appear there as a "privacy" guarantee. For example, the implicit "privacy" guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment was cited by the Court in striking down state laws against interracial marriage.)

So the question of the "personhood" of a fetus or embryo is paramount to the abortion debate. At least while a fetus cannot survive outside its mother's body, I would say (as would Jacoby — see pp. 344-5) that it is not a person.

And that is exactly what Justice Blackmun found: persons, at least in a legal or constitutional sense, do not include the unborn.

In a previous post, The Pearlescence Principle, I indicated that "personhood" is absolutely central to my (evolving) worldview. It is the human "person" who is capable of making his or her own reality, bridging the divide between pure, unfiltered objectivity and ordinary, unreliable subjectivity. I tried to indicate in that post, and also in another, Verum Factum, what Giambattista Vico, a Neapolitan philosopher, seems to have discovered some three centuries ago: the idea that we make our own truth or reality — for that is what verum factum means.

As a person, each of us is capable of making what he or she deeply believes in, or takes to be an axiom of faith, absolutely real, for ourselves and perhaps for others as well. This is true of Christians and other religious believers, and it is true of freethinkers like Jacoby also. "God-fearing" Christians make God real in their lives. And I have no doubt that Jacoby's naturalistic belief system, just as if it were a religious one, feeds back into her very experience of the world, coloring it, molding it, making it conform to that worldview per se. Atheism, secularism, and rationalism work for her, just as religious belief works for others.

We each have certain "pearls" of faith, belief, and wisdom buried deep within our "souls." Once activated, they cast a "pearlescence" or "opalescence" originating from within out upon the world, changing that world at least as we personally experience it. In Jacoby's case, the "pearls" of her insight are different ones that in the case of, say, an evangelical Christian. But the Pearlescence Principle works just the same. Jacoby, like everyone else, uses the light of her "inner pearlescence" to personalize her private world.

That we can do this amazing, pearlescent thing at all has to do with our being self-aware creatures, I think. Personhood and self-awareness go hand in hand. They may even be the same thing.

A fetus has yet to develop self-awareness. I say this because it is standard psychological opinion, I believe, to maintain that even a newborn baby (much less a fetus in the womb) is not yet self-aware. Only when, after birth, it learns that it is separate from its mother, and also from the world at large, does an awareness of its personal selfhood dawn upon it. Only then is it a person.

Yes, a fetus feels pain. So do my beloved pet cats, Xander (a.k.a. Mr. Pooh) and Willow (Ms. Mouse) — but they are not self-aware (or so say most experts on animal psychology; my kittycats may wish to disagree). I believe that a fetus can be no more self-aware than my Xander or Willow.

Accordingly, believing as I do in the Pearlescence Principle, and believing that it doesn't yet apply to an unborn fetus, I would have a hard time insisting that a fetus is a "person" entitled to constitutional protections.

And so I thank Susan Jacoby for laying out in a mere page or two what the crucial questions are concerning abortion's continued legality: personhood, privacy ... and moral relativism. Yes, moral relativism, which Jacoby says is not at all the bête noire cultural conservatives take it to be.

Some things are moral absolutes, she says — the proscription on murder, for example, which is the unlawful taking of a person's life.

But morality applies to other things in a relative way. What is or is not moral depends on its context ... and who better to determine the contextual morality of a contemplated abortion than the pregnant woman herself?

So, I would say, abortion must remain legal ... and if Roe happens to be struck down by a future Supreme Court, as now appears likely, then state legislatures ought to refrain from passing blanket proscriptions on it in the aftermath of the reversal.