Abortion and Reppert

I’m going to go over something Victor Reppert recently said to Steve. However, before I get into the minutia, it is important to read the entire paragraph in its context:

Pro-abortion? Come on. I think there is a reasonable doubt with respect to the claim that fetuses before a certain stage have the same right to life that infants have. However, I do think human life has great value at any stage, and once a brain develops there is no morally relevant difference between the life of the fetus and the life on an infant. Given our state of reasonable doubt, I think that we should do all we can to discourage abortions, (24-hour waiting periods are parental notification are just fine with me), but a wholesale legal ban is probably not going to do what we want it to do. (I'm not sure such a law would even be obeyed at this point). Except for late-term abortions. Those should be illegal, unless the life of the mother is endangered. That won't satisfy movement pro-lifers, but I would consider eugenics and infanticide to be morally wrong. If we got the law the way I wanted it, the law would be far more conservative with respect to abortion than it currently is. I don't think this issue has pride of place amongst all issues, but then I asked you about that and you agreed that it doesn't occupy that position.

Now I realize that Reppert is responding to Steve here and wasn’t intending to offer a full-level defense of his views on abortion. However, his summary is still quite damaging to his position, and ultimately exposes many of the weak foundations of the pro-choice movement. In other words, even though this is a shortened “summary” position, the conclusions are no different then what any pro-choice advocate could expand on.

Reppert begins by saying: “I think there is a reasonable doubt with respect to the claim that fetuses before a certain stage have the same right to life that infants have.” As a philosopher, Reppert surely must be aware of the ad hoc nature of this statement. At what time, or what level of development, is that “certain stage” where human fetuses “have the same right to life that infants have” such that before that stage there remains “reasonable doubt” as to the fetus’s rights? If that stage cannot be defined, then the distinction is arbitrary and worthless.

Reppert seems to imply that the stage occurs when the brain develops, for he says, “once a brain develops there is no morally relevant difference between the life of the fetus and the life on an infant.” This, however, just moves the question back one step. Why should the development of the brain make any difference? Why not the development of the kidney or the heart?

It appears that underneath the development issue, Reppert’s idea is that a fetus gains the right to life because of cognitive ability, that is to say when the fetus demonstrates some kind of intelligence (or at the very least has the organ we associate with intelligence). But if that is the case, Reppert has an untenable position regarding basic human rights, for these rights are linked to intellect. Thus, it surely must follow that the smarter the person the more right to life the person has. So in the classic Life Boat situation, the genius must be spared and the imbecile must be thrown overboard (I use “must” in the morally obligatory sense).

Reppert might wish to argue that this sliding scale is not the case; that when an intellect reaches a certain point, all have equal rights (so that the genius is not automatically spared and the imbecile is not automatically drowned). But if he does so, he is left once more with an arbitrary cut-off point to determine when someone has enough intellect. Is it an IQ of 75? 95? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter because whatever point Reppert chooses must be arbitrary. There is no force of logical consistency behind it.

This is also seen in what Reppert says of late-term abortions: “Those should be illegal, unless the life of the mother is endangered.” But what is the tipping point whereby a pregnancy evolves from being “early-term” to being “late-term”? By that I mean what consistent and non-arbitrary feature is there to the late-term pregnancy that protects the life of the fetus that is not present in early-term pregnancies? It’s hard to see how “gestating x number of days” qualifies one for human rights when “gestating x-1 number of days” does not.

This is the classic problem the pro-choice advocate runs into. In an attempt to differentiate between the born and the unborn with regards to human rights, the pro-choice position cannot help but be arbitrary. Put it this way: there is nothing in nature that indicates at what level of development a fetus begins to have human rights. There is nothing in nature that indicates what level of cognitive faculty a fetus must have to gain those rights. There is nothing in nature that indicates where a fetus should be located in order to have the right to life. Each of these “standards” that the pro-choice advocate uses is completely invented by the pro-choice advocate himself.

An additional problem that Reppert has is his continual attempt to frame abortion in a bare legal manner. Thus, he says that “a wholesale legal ban is probably not going to do what we want it to do.” But that presupposes Reppert knows “what we want it to do” in the first place. I assume he means that a legal ban will not stop all abortions. But then a legal ban on rape doesn’t stop all rapes from occurring, yet I doubt Reppert would use that to argue we shouldn’t legislate against rape. So even retreating to bare legal issues (disregarding the fact that that which is moral is not always that which is legal) doesn’t help him.

Contrast that with the consistent position of the pro-life advocate, who argues that regardless of what the law says human rights are determined by human ontology. That is, it is the fact that an object is human that determines the object has human rights. And there is one thing that cannot be denied: an unborn human fetus is still an unborn human fetus.

The pro-life position argues that a human fetus has all the same basic human rights as an infant human, an adolescent human, an adult human, or an elderly human. Indeed, framing the issue in such a manner seems to be the only way to consistently and non-arbitrarily apply ethics to humans across the broad range of various stages of development. If object x is human, then object x has all basic human rights.