Is There a 'Middle Ground' on Choice?

Editor's note: This article originally appeared on CampusProgress.org.

Someone must have slipped a textbook on quantum mechanics into the offices of the Democratic Party. Careening desperately toward a more "moderate" stance on abortion rights, centrist Democrats are now hard at work searching for Schrödinger's Fetus: alive and dead at the same time. Indeed in a trend that has been developing for years, a few high-profile anti-choice Democratic candidates, including Heath Shuler in North Carolina and Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, won election on Tuesday.

John Kerry rankled pro-choice activists during the 2004 campaign by suggesting that his party should recruit more pro-life candidates--advice that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee apparently took to heart, offering primary endorsements to pro-lifers such as Casey this year. A speech by Hillary Clinton, describing abortion as "a tragic choice" that she hoped one day would "not ever have to be exercised," won kudos from Slate columnist Will Saletan, who wrote: "Once you embrace that truth--that the ideal number of abortions is zero--voters open their ears."

The idea that abortion should be, in Bill Clinton's memorable formulation, "safe, legal, and rare," is appealing, if only because it would be clearly preferable if effective sex education and broad access to contraception made unwanted pregnancies less common. But framing that worthy goal as a means to the end of reducing abortion would be both a moral and strategic mistake. Solomonic attempts to split the difference will collide unpleasantly with the reality that Schrödinger's Fetus, like its feline predecessor, is always either alive or dead under scrutiny.

Abortion raises deep questions about the origins and basis of moral personhood, so one's position on abortion should be "radical," in the etymologically precise sense of "going to the root." Abortion is a difficult and complex question if we suppose that the fetus is a person with interests and rights that must be weighed against those of the mother. But the proposition that fetuses are not moral persons is both true and worth defending loudly. Even very late in pregnancy, when a fetus may have some sort of rudimentary awareness, it lacks all the features traditionally advanced as moral distinctions between humans and other animals: a sense of self or identity, the capacity for abstract thought and reflection, and the capacity for moral choice. But the vast majority of abortions, about 98 percent, take place before the 20th week of gestation, well before the cerebral cortex is "wired up" to the rest of the nervous system. At this stage, the fetus has nothing that could reasonably be described as conscious awareness.

The only reason for regarding an abortion as more regrettable than a root canal, then, is the belief that moral personhood is not fundamentally about having a certain kind of mind. This is a strange view, when you think about it: If we are ever visited by some alien species, we will decide what kind of treatment we owe them by reflecting on the sorts of minds they have, not by poking at their genetic structure. If the most popular basis for considering fetuses persons is some sort of theory about souls, giving credence to this view tacitly endorses the notion that public policy ought to be tailored to accommodate moral premises whose sole basis is theological.

Treating fetuses as persons has harmful consequences, even if we simultaneously insist that their interests are trumped by women's right to control their bodies. For one, it means endorsing the notion that the one-third of American women who will have an abortion will be killing a child. And in the political realm, how uneasy we are about abortion will determine what measures short of an outright ban we are willing to entertain as means of ensuring that abortion remains "rare." Hillary Clinton, for instance, has suggested that because "religious and moral values" are strong predictors of abstinence, we should "support programs that reinforce the idea that abstinence at a young age is not just the smart thing to do, it is the right thing to do." But if there is nothing seriously immoral about abortion, then this sort of unseemly government-sponsored religious indoctrination would gain little of importance even if it were effective.