A Defense of Abortion

you were never a zygote

Before I say why I’m not pro-life, here are ten things I think pro-lifers are right about:

1. The life-cycle of a human organism starts at fertilization.

2. This isn’t challenged by twinning.

3. It’s wrong to kill new-born babies, as well as babies in the ninth month of pregnancy.

4. If abortion is murder, it should be illegal.

5. Abortion is sometimes murder, and so sometimes it should be illegal.

6. The bodily rights argument for legal abortion is surmountable (though not for the reasons pro-lifers normally give, which are weak sauce!)

7. Most pro-choice arguments in general are weak.

8. As long as women are appropriately informed, abortion pill reversal should be available pending further research.

9. Buffer zones outside abortion clinics should be legal, as should praying outside abortion clinics (though see Matthew [6:6]).

10. Richard Hanania
    ’s defence of abortion is, how you say, unconvincing, though not as unconvincing as Ayn Rand’s.

I’ve also argued in the past that pro-life activists are morally admirable, and that they are, as they claim, primarily a civil rights movement for unborn human organisms, not a group of hostile misogynists driven by a subconscious desire to control women’s bodies and sexual choices.

I used to be pro-life, and have steel-manned the view in the literature.

Nevertheless, I qualify as pro-choice, because I think early abortion is fine. In what follows, I’ll lay out my case for why. (Note: I do not expect to win any converts. This is a tender issue, and if it gets under your skin to read a young man write about abortion in a surgical manner when he has only the beginnings of a moustache, there is nothing wrong with you, and I encourage you to read something else.)

Are Zygotes People?

According to the canonical pro-life position, zygotes are persons and intentionally aborting them is murder. By calling zygotes ‘persons’, pro-lifers aren’t making any whacky empirical claims about zygotes having feelings or personalities or whatnot; instead, they’re stipulatively defining ‘person’ to mean ‘serious moral status-haver’.

(Note: this not a pro-life semantic trick designed to elicit emotion. In the ethics of abortion literature, this stipulative sense of ‘person’ is fairly ubiquitous. For example, in “Abortion and Infanticide”, pro-choice philosopher Michael Tooley writes that “in my usage the sentence ‘X is a person’ will be synonymous with the sentence ‘X has a (serious) moral right to life’.”)

If killing a zygote is wrong, it’s wrong for the same essential reason that killing a toddler is wrong: killing him would rob him of a valuable future, full of joy and achievement and Substack. As a result, if killing a zygote is wrong, killing it is wrong if, only if, and because, it has a future of value which killing it steals away. (There are other reasons why killing people is wrong, of course. If you killed me, millions would be deprived of valuable newsletters. In addition, my loved ones would not be happy. Nevertheless, the essential reason it’s wrong to kill me lies in the future that, in expectation, killing me would take away.)

Given this assumption, widely adopted by pro-lifers (in place of actual children [jk]), the question of whether killing a zygote is wrong depends on whether you were once a zygote. If you were once a zygote, then killing you would’ve been wrong, since a valuable future lay ahead. If you were never a zygote, no such future lay in store. Of course, a valuable future lay in store for you; just not for the zygote that became your body. (Most pro-life philosophers agree with this framing of the issue — indeed, the best pro-life paper ever written is titled, “I Was Once a Fetus: That is Why Abortion is Wrong”.)

On my view, you were never a zygote. Here are two arguments for that conclusion.

The first argument is the one that originally convinced me when I was googling esoteric facts about conjoined twins back in 2021. The argument runs as follows. In a banging 2020 paper, Alexandria Boyle argues that if we apply the usual tests of biological individuality (i.e., ‘what makes something a single organism?’) to dicephalus conjoined twins (i.e., conjoined twins with two heads), we get the result that dicephalus conjoined twins constitute a single organism, despite their having two minds. Conjoined twins (i) share the same genetic code, (ii) tolerate each other immunologically, (iii) collaborate metabolically, (iv) and their parts are functionally integrated. As a result, on the standard accounts of biological individuality used by theoretical biologists and philosophers of biology, dicephalus conjoined twins will count as a single organism.

The Hilton sisters led fascinating lives in a fascinating time, and this biography is utterly captivating.

Intuitively, though, there are two people in the picture above. As a result, it looks like human persons are not numerically identically to human organisms. If they were, then there’d be one person in the picture above, assuming Boyle is right that there is only one organism: but there are two people pictured above! As a result, we should say human persons are not, at bottom, human organisms, even though we drive them around.

What are we? In my view, we are immaterial souls. Alternatively, one could think that we’re brains, parts of brains, or streams of interconnected psychological properties. Any of these theories would explain why there are two people in the picture above, despite their being two organisms.

But notice: if I am not a human organism, then it looks like the zygote that became my body wasn’t me. After all, all that begins at conception is the lifecycle of a new human organism — but if I am not a human organism, it looks like conception wasn’t the beginning of my life.

In a slogan: biological life begins at conception, but biographical life does not.

Here is another argument for the view that my existence started with my mind (or the contents of my mind, if you’re freaky like that), not the zygote that became my body. Suppose you volunteer for a philosophy experiment where your brain is removed but the rest of your body — the vast majority of your biomass — is kept artificially alive, and quickly fitted with a different brain. Your brain is then placed in the empty skull of another body, which immediately opens its eyes.

Question: where would you go if this happened? Would you stay where most of your organism is, or would you go with a small part of your organism — the brain — and wake up in the other body? (Assume the experiment goes well, and the brain and the body stay alive.)

My answer: intuitively, you go where your brain goes! But this intuition, like the intuition that conjoined twins with two heads are two people, supports the view that you are, at bottom, your mind (or something in your mind), rather than a biological organism.

Are Babies People?

Bravely, I am not on board with killing babies. Cancel me if you want to, but that is what I believe.

At some point in pregnancy — definitely after conception, definitely before birth — the mind begins to exist. (On some views, this is a vague process, with no ‘existential pop’; on other views, such as the correct view, endorsed by me, consciousness sparks into being at a definite movement in time.)

When is this? I don’t know. Most scientists seem to think it’s some time after 20 weeks, but I’m open to being talked into something specific. If I were making the law and the scientific jury was out on when foetal consciousness begins, I would err on the side of caution and ban abortion earlier out of moral risk avoidance. Unjust restrictions on bodily autonomy is very bad, but mass-killing babies is worse.

But what I am pretty sold on is that zygotes are not people: I was never a zygote, and, for this reason, no zygote has ever had any rights. Nor has any embryo or early foetus.

In principle, there might be other reasons why killing an early foetus is wrong, aside from it being a person. Maybe, as a humanoid-looking human organism, early foetuses symbolise humanity, and so we should treat them respectfully for that reason. Alternatively, maybe embryos are intrinsically valuable natural wonders, and so we shouldn’t wantonly kill them for the same reason we shouldn’t wantonly spray-paint a gorgeous redwood.

But even if these claims are right, these seem like moral considerations that are pretty easily overridden when respecting them requires demanding bodily labour. If squashing a biologically ornate sapling or smashing up a humanoid mannequin was the only way to avoid, say, the pain of childbirth and nine months of pregnancy symptoms, there wouldn’t a moral dilemma. Realistically, the pro-life position will only come out true if you were once a foetus. But you never were never a foetus: that is why (early) abortion is fine.

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