From National Review, October 8, 2007, pp. 68-70.
© 2007 by National Review Inc., 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10016. Reprinted by permission.

Defending Life:
A Moral and Legal Case
Against Abortion Choice,
by Francis J. Beckwith
(Cambridge,
312 pp., $22.99)

For Humanity

RYAN T. ANDERSON

‘Supreme Court Settles Abortion Issue”: So declared the New York Times the day after the Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. But as the past 34 years have shown, there is no question less settled in American public life than abortion. The pro-life movement has succeeded in keeping the debate alive — and in his new book, Defending Life, leading pro-life scholar Francis J. Beckwith offers a precise statement of the philosophical and jurisprudential case the movement has developed.

Beckwith begins by defusing the “don’t impose your morality” slogan. Everyone, he argues, recognizes the absurdity of being “personally opposed” to murder but refusing to “impose” that view on others. State neutrality is impossible; either the law recognizes the unborn as persons and protects them, or it does not and permits the killing of them. That the fetus is a person with rights is no more religious a claim than the assertion that the fetus is not. Our task is to determine which claim is true.

But Americans’ ability to decide this question was usurped by the Supreme Court’s Roe decision, which — together with its companion case Doe v. Bolton — provided a constitutional right to abortion for practically any reason throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy. Roe allowed states to protect the fetus in the third trimester, but mandated exceptions for the life and health of the mother; Bolton defined health broadly to include “all factors — physical, emotional, psychological,” and so on. Justice Harry Blackmun said that the Court “need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins.” But it did: Life doesn’t begin in a way that merits protection until after birth.

The Court based its abortion decision on a “right of privacy” manufactured in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), coupled with a fraudulent reading of history according to which abortion prohibitions were intended to protect women, not babies. (Beckwith correctly observes that the “overwhelming consensus of scholarship” considers this historical argument “untrustworthy and essentially worthless.”) In Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), the Court struck down Nebraska’s partial-birth-abortion ban by extending the health criterion to include a right to “the safest procedure” of abortion. But here the Court proved too much: If less intrusive procedures are safer, wouldn’t abortion by infanticide be best for the mother’s health? Furthermore, asks Beckwith, what is it about the “vaginal passageway that changes the child’s nature in such a significant fashion that it may be killed without justification before exit but only with justification post-exit?”

The Constitution is silent on these questions. How should citizens approach them? Beckwith thinks we need to answer three questions: Is the fetus a human being? Is it a person — a moral agent? And does it have any claim to inhabit a woman’s womb? Beckwith answers yes to all three questions.

He begins by marshaling medical embryology to show that “from a strictly scientific point of view . . . an individual human life begins at conception.” Whereas sperm and egg each contain half of the genetic code (23 chromosomes) and are parts of larger organisms (the parents), the one-celled zygote “is a new, although tiny, individual with a human genetic code with its own genomic sequence (with 46 chromosomes), which is neither her mother’s nor her father’s. From this point until death no new genetic information is needed to make the unborn entity an individual human being.” Beckwith responds to common objections, noting that high rates of natural embryo loss no more disprove the humanity of embryos than high rates of infant mortality do that of infants; that early-embryo twinning does no more to undermine the unity of the embryo prior to twinning than cutting a flatworm in half (forming two flatworms) does to its unity prior to separation; and that while a human embryo doesn’t look like an adult, it “does look exactly like a human ought to look at this stage of her development.”

If embryos and fetuses are human beings (which the science compels reasonable people to acknowledge), do they have a right to life? Some, like David Boonin of the University of Colorado, think not. Describing a sonogram taken 24 weeks before his son’s birth, Boonin writes: “There is no doubt in my mind that this picture, too, shows the same little boy at a very early stage in his physical development. And there is no question that the position I defend . . . entails that it would have been morally permissible to end his life at this point.” Advocates of this view typically point to self-awareness or other immediately exercisable mental capacities as features that make a human being valuable.

Beckwith rejects these arguments because they rest on a faulty understanding of the human person, undermine human equality, and produce morally repugnant conclusions. For starters, when adults are asleep, unconscious, or temporarily comatose, they lack the immediate capacity to perform any rational acts. So do newborn babies until several months after birth. Do they therefore lack the right to life? Also, if human value depends upon certain capacities that human beings possess in varying degrees, there is no reason that fundamental rights shouldn’t also vary, thus destroying equality. As Beckwith notes, “some adult human beings are more or less rational and more or less self-aware” than others. Should those at the high end be treated better than those at the low end?

Beckwith persuasively argues that the “substance view” explains why they should not: “A human being is intrinsically valuable because of the sort of thing it is and the human being remains that sort of thing as long as it exists.” What about fetal development, sleep, coma, or dementia? “The human being is a particular type of substance — a rational moral agent — that remains identical to itself as long as it exists, even if it is not . . . currently able to immediately exercise these activities.” We are valuable in virtue of the sort of thing (the substance) we are — human beings, with basic root capacities for personal acts. Since a substance cannot come in degrees, we are all equally human beings and thus equally valuable.

But even if fetuses are persons, does that mean they have a right to occupy women’s wombs? Judith Jarvis Thomson famously answered no, when she compared pregnancy with being involuntarily hooked up to a diseased violinist in need of your kidneys: Does the violinist have a right to remain connected to you even if it leaves you bedridden for nine months? Thomson concluded that a right to life does not entail a right to use another person’s body to sustain life: You could ethically unplug the violinist just as a woman may legitimately remove a fetus from her womb. Beckwith responds that such arguments smuggle in a radically individualistic conception of autonomy. In reality, he writes, “human beings are persons-in-community and have certain natural obligations as members of their community that arise from their roles as mother, father, citizen, child, and so on.”

Thomson also fails to recognize that pregnant women are (usually) responsible for being pregnant. She argues that women can consent to sex without consenting to pregnancy, but this simply ignores the nature of a sexual act: Even if diligent contraception use fails, points out bioethicist Patrick Lee, “the baby does not cause his or her presence in the mother’s womb; rather, the mother and the father do.” On what grounds can parents — who willingly engage in an act that naturally results in creating a highly dependent child whose natural home is a womb — claim to have no responsibility for that child? (The case of rape is more difficult since the woman is obviously not responsible for the child’s existence. Beckwith notes that in such cases the child, too, is a wholly innocent victim of the rape, and asks if the death of the child-conceived-by-rape is proportionate to the suffering her mother would experience in carrying her to term.)

Beckwith closes by applying many of the principles relevant to abortion to new biotechnologies. But this is the least satisfying part of the book, as it fails to mention alternative sources of pluripotent (embryonic-type) stem cells and uncritically accepts the claim (rejected by leading authorities) that stem cells show great potential for treating Alzheimer’s. Nor does it explain the great biological hurdles embryonic stem cells need to clear before they’ll ever be useful in medicine. The rest of the book isn’t flawless either: not quite rigorous enough for academics, yet too detailed for casual readers.

But these drawbacks are relatively minor, in the context of the book’s overall success in argumentation. The New York Times’s claims notwithstanding, the Supreme Court has not settled the abortion issue; and when the abortion question eventually returns to the electorate, careful thinking will be crucial. That’s when Beckwith’s Defending Life will be helpful indeed.

Mr. Anderson is an assistant editor at First Things. A 2007 Phillips Foundation Fellow, he is the assistant director of the Program in Bioethics at the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, N.J.