Politickled.com

Firstly, this is not a partisan piece and within it I do not take a position with regard to abortion. Instead, this is a philosophical piece with the intention of elevating an important debate that has become overly politicized to the detriment of us all. Secondly, I want to be transparent about my own background as a way of explaining why this issue is of interest to me. I was raised Roman Catholic (and received a Catholic education through high school) in the Deep South and now work in a world-class stem cell research laboratory on the West coast. My PhD is in cellular, molecular and biophysical studies, but I majored in philosophy as an undergraduate. Finally, I should note that while my positions have changed over the years on many topics, I have remained throughout strongly sympathetic to arguments for maximizing the freedom/rights of the individual. So that, in a nutshell, is where I’m coming from.

The abortion debate is possibly the most inflammatory social issue confronting America. Let’s begin by trying to understand both sides. (The world would be a much better place if, in communicating, the people speaking think hard about the effects their words are likely to have on others and if the people listening make serious efforts to understand what the speakers mean by their words rather than jumping to the most inflammatory interpretation.) For people on the right, it is no exaggeration to say that abortions represent a government sanctioned holocaust. Those on the left would make a grave mistake in failing to recognize how serious this issue is for social conservatives. One need only look to the current election cycle to see the truth of this: despite the fact that America is undergoing an economic crisis AND is engaged in two wars, the conservative base made abortion the primary issue on which it would not compromise in McCain’s selection of vice president. To those on the left this might seem to reflect a failure to prioritize the issues (not to mention being potentially politically suicidal), but it does not: stopping abortion is a top, if not the top, priority for social conservatives.

On the left, women (and the men that support them) are incensed that anyone would have the paternalistic gall to make life altering decisions about what they do with their own bodies. Overturning Roe v Wade would represent an absurd backsliding in the advancement of women’s liberties. Related to, and compounding, the women’s rights aspect, is the left’s concern for the societal effects that restricting abortions has on the prospects for socioeconomic advancement among the poor, working and middle classes, especially with respect to teen pregnancy. The left is further outraged that in addition to opposing abortion rights, social conservatives also support abstinence only sexual education: a two-hit recipe for disaster. In many respects, in fact, the abortion debate is an extension of the contraception debate of the 1960’s, because contraception liberated women in a similar way and legalization of contraception was opposed by social conservatives at the time. Some suspect that the conservative position on the matter has more to do with making people “pay” for the consequences of their sinful actions (sex without procreation as the primary objective), than it has to do with the rights of an embryo.

Ironically, given the importance of the debate to both sides, the main point I want to address is the ignorant way in which we denigrate and disrespect the questions that lie at the heart of this issue and as a consequence continue not to understand one another. Now that I’ve explained why people on both sides are so angry, let me tell you what makes me angry…at both. The title of this piece is “Ask not ‘when does human life begin?’” because it is precisely that way of phrasing the question that I want to discuss. The extent to which this way of asking where people stand on the abortion debate is so commonplace and accepted by both sides and journalists as “the question” is absolutely astonishing to me. Below I will explain why it is not “the question,” but first let me say that the question you ask determines the answers you get and that if we really care about our answers, we have to start by caring about the questions.

“When does (human) life begin?” conflates a question of ethics with a question of biology. Specifically, it places a question of biology where a question for ethics belongs. Biology already has an answer to that question. The answer is that life only ‘began’ once and that all living things are related to one another. Since then, all living things have come from other living things. They came to include “human life” when Homo sapiens evolved. That’s it. ‘Life’ is a set of balanced chemical reactions that self-perpetuate and ‘human’ is a species of living organism. Even if you choose not to believe in evolution, still you would have to admit that people do come from other people (nowadays at least). It is precisely the fact that people come from people that raises the real ethical question, which I’ll get to in a moment. First I want to show the absurdities that result from attempts to answer this misleading question of when human life began. Even if we give the only apparently easy answer that might be defensible and we seem to be naturally led to (there’s a reason why this is so that I’m coming to) that human life begins at conception, we are stuck with the position that sperm and eggs (the immediate precursors to conception) are either not alive and/or not human…both of which are manifestly wrong. Moreover, despite being both alive and human, no one is shedding tears for the unfertilized ova that are flushed every month or for the teeming multitudes of sperm that die and fail to fertilize them. Something must be wrong here: what’s wrong is the question.

The real ethical question is “When do you as an individual acquire your human rights?” Well, you may say, “That is semantics: after all, didn’t we know what the other question was driving at? All you’ve done here is reiterate it in a less down-to-earth (and might I say rather pedantic) sort of way.” Nope. It makes a big difference for a number of reasons. In the first place, the phrasing “when does (human) life begin?” is a trap for people on the left (we walked into it in the last paragraph). How people on the left could be so blind as to debate this topic on those terms is completely beyond me. Specifically, the question sets up a straw-man, a rhetorical devise in which you present your opponent’s position as something resembling their position in order to trash it easily. Here the straw-man is the pseudo-left position that a human embryo (before some point in development to be stated) is not human and/or not alive. These positions embody obvious contradictions: if it’s not human, what species is it? In what way do they not meet the criteria for life? Easy victory for the right, see? However, as I have pointed out, both terms apply equally to sperm and egg…meaning that there is NO point before which an embryo is not human and living. But now note how the argument has been degraded from the important question of human rights, as the debate devolves into a shouting match between “Pro-Life!” and “Pro-Choice!”. And that’s how politicians on both sides would prefer it: nuance and parsing don’t win elections.

Now I want to go one step further to point out how this critically important question about human rights unfortunately gets narrowed by phrasing the question as “when does human life begin?” In the first place, it limits the debate to abortion and stem cell research because of the temporal nature of the question. Even my attempt to rephrase it as “when do you acquire your human rights?” falls prey to this limitation. This is because the really real question (are you ready) is “What are the necessary and sufficient conditions that entitle human rights?” If the implications of the broadening of this topic are not readily apparent, let me spell out just a few (then let your imagination go to work). Asking for the conditions under which human rights should be recognized, encompasses not only the abortion and stem cell debates, but now also includes the debate about persons in a vegetative state, for instance. It encompasses issues relating to animal rights, sentient computers, extraterrestrials we may discover, etc. Note that this expansion does not make sense with the phrasing “when does human life begin” because swapping ‘begin’ with ‘end’ to deal with the brain-dead leads to the same conundrum as with the fetus. With the sentient computers issue (and other futuristic scenarios) it gets worse, since we have to deal with what is not human and/or not alive.

So that’s my pet peeve. Since I have characterized it as a set-up question from the right to the left, I want to do one more thing, which is to show that neither side has a monopoly on the ignorance 

I’m ranting about by giving a recent example of a social conservative NOT asking “when does human life begin” but gratifyingly asking the correct question and a recent example of a prominent politician on the left walking right into the trap I’m talking about.

The first case involves the Saddleback debates with the presidential contenders. Evangelical minister Rick Warren correctly asked Obama, “At what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?” and McCain, “At what point is a baby entitled to human rights?” Very good (we’ll forgive the fact that he did use the odious version in his preface to McCain’s question because the question itself, when he asked it, was the right one [I'm also letting the ‘baby' as opposed to ‘fetus/embryo' thing go, which in my opinion really is semantics]). Let’s all remember it would have been easier to ask the unfair question and the minister did the right thing, undoubtedly because he thinks about this issue more than we might expect and/or realizes the problematic aspect of asking “when human life begins”.

Our second example comes from an interview with Nancy Pelosi. Tom Brokaw was asking if she could give advice to Obama, who had replied to the question Rick Warren asked him above with the ‘above-my-paygrade’ answer that has become a source of ridicule for the right (see what I mean about nuance and parsing). Here is what Pelosi said, “I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time,” Pelosi began. “And what I know is, over the centuries, the doctrines of the church have not been able to make that definition. … St. Augustine said at three months. We don’t know. The point is, is that it shouldn’t have an impact on a woman’s right to choose. … I don’t think anybody can tell you when life begins, human life begins.” Note that even though the wrong question was not asked, she walks right into the conflation on her own! Before she even gets there, you can intuit the conflation when she says, “We don’t know.” I know that “we.” She’s talking about the “we” that is me and my colleagues; the royal “we” of scientists, whose job it is to “know” stuff. Confirmation comes in the last line “I don’t think anyone can tell you when life begins”…that may have sounded dumb even to herself, hence the correction, “human life begins.” Now she just needs to replace ‘life’ with ‘rights’ to extricate herself from her self-imposed trap. So there you have it. The trap wasn’t even set: she dragged it along with her! The result is more fodder for ridicule on the right.

Finally, I want to end with a call to elevate this (and other) debates by giving the questions the respect they deserve rather than rushing to give the rhetorical answers. The question of the conditions under which human rights become entitled is crucial and worthy of the intense passion surrounding the debates encompassed by it, but not worthy of the politicization and degradation we participate in by asking wrong questions, like “when does human life begin?”