At some point in pregnancy it is widely acknowledged that fetuses start to feel pain. Estimates of this point vary from around seven to thirty weeks of gestation.
We cannot directly conclude from the fact that some fetus can feel pain that killing that fetus is impermissible. For it seems permissible, given good reason, to humanely kill a conscious non-human animal. But perhaps there is an indirect argument. I want to try out one.
It has been argued that if the fetus is the same individual as the adult person that the fetus would grow into, then it is wrong to kill the fetus for the same reason that it is wrong to kill the adult: the victim is the same, and no more deserving of death, while the harm of death is greater (the fetus is deprived of a greater chunk of life).
But if a fetus can feel pain, then this offers significant support for the hypothesis that the fetus is the same individual as the resultant adult. Imagine the fetus has a constant minor chronic pain, is carried to term, and grows into an adult, without ever any relief to the pain. The adult will then feel the pain. If the fetus is not the same individual as the adult, there are two possibilities at the time of adulthood:
There are two beings feeling pain: the adult and the grown-up fetus.
At some point the grown-up fetus had perished and was replaced by a new individual feeling pain.
Option (1) seems crazy: if I have a headache while sitting alone on the sofa, there is only one entity in pain on the sofa, namely me, rather than me and some grown-up fetus. Option (2) is also rather implausible. On our hypothesis we have the continuous presence of a brain state correlated with pain, and yet allegedly at some point the individual with the pain perishes and a new individual inherits the brain with the pain. That doesn’t seem right.
If we reject both (1) and (2), we have to conclude that the fetus in pain is the same individual as the adult that it grows up into. And thus we conclude that at least once fetuses are capable of pain, abortion is wrong.
This argument doesn’t say anything about what happens prior to the possibility of fetal pain. I think that is still the same individual, but that requires another argument.
I think that's a good argument. Of course there are a number of ways a person might object to it. One way might be to say that being in pain is not sufficient for personhood. This would depend on how they define personhood, but I've talked to people who think personhood has more to do with social connection than with subjective experience. I've also heard it argued that personhood doesn't happen until one develops a sense of personal identity and can make distinctions between self and other, and that happens some time after birth. While I think that view is kind of crazy, there are people who hold to it.
ReplyDeleteI've also run into people who deny that we maintain personal identity through time and change. I'm always surprised when I run into these people, but they seem to be serious when they say a person who undergoes significant change in their personality or in their memories over time, they are literally not the same person as they used to be. That, too, strikes me as being crazy, but just from talking to these people, I don't get the impression they are merely blowing smoke.
Although I think your argument is sound, I don't think the ability to experience pain has much to do with what makes abortion wrong. It would be wrong even if the unborn couldn't experience pain. After all, if I could kill an adult painlessly, it would be no less murder just because they couldn't feel it.