This commentary was written by John Orlando, Ph.D. Orlando lives in Williston and has taught ethics and philosophy at a variety of Vermont colleges, including St. Michaels, University of Vermont and Champlain College.
There is a lot of confusion today about the abortion debate that needs to be clarified so that we can have public discourse about the real issues.
For instance, Kamala Harris claimed that the law does not tell men what they can do with their bodies. But this is wrong. Nearly every law tells people what they can do with their bodies. For instance, the law against assault tells me that I cannot use my hand to punch another person. There are even laws that tell you what you can do with your body when nobody else is a victim, such as laws against heroin use, prostitution, gambling, etc.
There is also a lot of confusion about Roe v. Wade and what the Supreme Court does. The Supreme Court does not make laws, it only enforces the Constitution. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as well as other liberal constitutional theorists, stated that Roe v. Wade was a bad decision because it had no basis in the Constitution.
There are a number of reasons why Roe v. Wade made no sense. First off, the decision ignored the right to life of the fetus, and the right to life is clearly stated in the Constitution. Second, the Constitution says nothing about the right to abortion. Roe v. Wade instead invented a right to privacy to justify abortion. But the Constitution never even uses the word “privacy.” The Court simply made up a right to privacy, which was Ginsburg’s and others’ objection.
Third, Row v. Wade also asserted that a state can forbid abortion after viability on grounds that the baby is no longer dependent on someone to live. But of course, a baby is dependent on someone to live for the first few years after it is born. In fact, a fetus has all of the parts of a human by week eight. For this reason, pro-abortion legal theorist Michael Tooley stated that if you are pro-abortion, you need to support infanticide, killing a baby after it is born. Tooley did in fact support infanticide as a necessary condition of supporting abortion.
The most famous pro-abortion legal theorist, Judith Javis Thompon, correctly noted that abortion involves one person, the mother, being connected to another person, the fetus, and the fetus needs the mother to live. But the mother does not want to be connected to the fetus. She correctly stated that the abortion debate comes down to the question: Can one person kill another person because that second person’s existence is going to be a burden to the first person for the next nine or fewer months?
The problem is that the law does not allow one person to kill another person to eliminate a burden. If my mother moves in with me due to poor health and taking care of her will be a burden for the next nine months, that does not give me the right to kill her. Neither men nor women have this right.
Without any situation where one person can kill another person to eliminate a burden, we will need to make up a hypothetical case as a thought experiment to test the premise. This is what the liberal constitutional theorist Judith Javis-Thompson said needs to be done to decide the debate. We need a situation where one person is connected to another person for nine or fewer months, who does not want to be connected to the other person, and the other person needs to be connected to the first person to live.
We can in fact create such as case using conjoined twins. Imagine that I have a conjoined twin joined to my hip that needs to be connected to me to live, but I don’t need to be connected to him to live, just as in the situation of a pregnancy. Now imagine that I am told that an operation will allow us to be detached, and will allow him to live, if I just wait the nine months needed for federal approval. This is analogous to pregnancy. But I do not want to wait nine months, so I cut the connection now, causing him to die, which is the same act as an abortion. This would be considered murder because nobody has a right to end another life because that other person’s existence is a burden to them.
The abortion debate is the latest step in a long historical process of granting rights to previously excluded humans. At one time only the nobility had full rights, but over the course of time, the realm of humanity has been expanded to include non-nobility, women, slaves, homosexuals, etc. Abortion has only become an issue in the past 50 or 60 years because prior to ultrasounds and MRIs a fetus was out of sight and out of mind. But once people could see that a fetus was human, people started wanting to give it the same protection as other humans. A real debate about abortion cannot ignore these humans.
