Mr. Hume:\u00a0 A great deal of what is said about abortion is, it seems to me, empty word-play. “It’s a person!” says Megan McArdle.\u00a0“We all agree, don’t we, that killing a person, other than an enemy in war or convicted criminal, should not be permitted. Therefore killing\u00a0fetuses should not be permitted! What’s the problem?”<\/p>\n
The problem is, of course, that a fetus is a rather particular kind of person: one sharing the body resources of another human being. It is\u00a0manifestly not<\/em> the case that we all agree the killing of this particular kind of person<\/em> should not be permitted. Stamping your\u00a0foot and yelling “But it’s a person! It’s a person!” doesn’t advance the argument.<\/p>\n Supernaturalists can of course point to divine ordinances, scripture, the Tao, and so on. That’s great, except that we are not all\u00a0supernaturalists, so these appeals fall on a lot of stony ground. Since a great majority of people claim to be supernaturalists, these appeals might\u00a0none the less form the basis for a consensus; but there is no sign that that is happening. The supernaturalist case seems to be unconvincing even to a\u00a0lot of supernaturalists.<\/p>\n I’d guess that all the noise and confusion has origins within the scope of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. Our brains evolved to\u00a0cope with commonplace features of the world: physical features (water flows downhill) and social features (every human group has gradations of\u00a0status). Fetuses\u00a0\u2014 and embryos much less\u00a0\u2014 just were not a feature of everyday experience until recently. The brain has no\u00a0developed categories for coping with them, either as physical or social objects.<\/p>\n The imaging techniques that have come up this past few decades have\u00a0introduced a new thing into human experience: the living, moving fetus, obviously growing in a continuous way into a human baby. How do we deal with\u00a0this new thing? Nothing in brain phylogeny has supplied us with common perceptions. When we kill a grown, independent human being, or even a born baby, we have\u00a0well-formed ideas about what we are doing. Of course we have: we’ve been doing it for 200,000 years. When we kill a fetus, what are we doing?\u00a0We just don’t have that solidity of experience wired in to our faculties, so we fall back on words, on supernaturalism, and on emotions like\u00a0generalized disgust.<\/p>\n Might the killing of fetuses and embryos just come to seem barbaric and be shamed out of civilized life, as slavery, public executions,\u00a0cock-fighting, corporal punishment, and traveling freak shows have been, and as capital punishment has very nearly been? I can’t think of any reason\u00a0why this couldn’t<\/em> happen; but it seems to me we’re a long way from it yet. Since plainly great numbers of people don’t\u00a0<\/em>currently think the killing of fetuses and embryos should be banned, the best we can hope for is some consensus on the restrictions. It’s hard to\u00a0understand why anyone needs an abortion later than three months, though I suppose there might be extraordinary cases. I find it very<\/em> hard\u00a0to understand the need for, or even the demand for, partial-birth abortions. An arbitrary cutoff date for legal abortions, with later abortions\u00a0permitted on the authority of a panel of doctors, is probably as close to consensus as we can hope to get. Certainly I would vote for that if it\u00a0came to referendum, though I think my cutoff date would be earlier than most.<\/p>\n Pinker thinks that the next thing to be shamed out of civilized life will be the mass slaughter of large animals for food. I’d bet on that before\u00a0a total abortion ban. You never know, though; public sensibilities change in unpredictable ways. Promiscuous tobacco smoking was frowned on by the\u00a0Victorians; 100 years later it was universal\u00a0\u2026 and now once more it’s frowned on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mr. Hume:\u00a0 A great deal of what is said about abortion is, it seems to me, empty word-play. “It’s a person!” says Megan McArdle.\u00a0“We all agree, don’t we, that killing a person, other than an enemy in war or convicted … Continue reading