"Do Fetuses Feel Pain?"

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“Do Fetuses Feel Pain?”

July 6, 2011 by Rico Vitz

Tom Bartlett discusses the issue in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

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Posted in Bioethics | 7 Comments

7 Responses

on July 6, 2011 at 11:03 am | Reply Jeff

How much actually hinges on this? I don’t think too many pro-life people would be content with the administration of some sort of anesthetic prior to abortion. They would say murder is murder whether or not pain is felt. That is presumably why the new law bans abortion after 20 weeks instead of mandating anesthetized abortions.

The pro-choice argument about bodily privacy, perhaps articulated best by Judith Jarvis Thompson, does not seem to be affected much either. If we think that our bodies should not be appropriated when another’s life is at stake (in cases not only of abortion but mandatory organ, bone marrow or even blood donations), it seems unlikely that pain will suddenly make such appropriation acceptable.

I don’t know how familiar everyone is with Thompson; this is a summary of what I’m referring to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion.
on July 6, 2011 at 12:33 pm | Reply Aaron

Jeff,

Do you find moral significance in the difference between the organic dependence of the pre-natal fetus on the mother and the post-natal dependence of the infant, toddler, and, say, the 4 – 13 year old child on the parents. It seems me that in both instances the organisms are dependent, though on technically different ways, on their parents for sustenance.

Assuming nobody wished to care for the child, I wonder if post-natal abortion would also be permissible?
on July 6, 2011 at 2:31 pm | Reply Jeff

Aaron,

I’ll apologize in advance for the length of this. It is my attempt at explaining why organic dependence is morally distinct from social dependence. Paradoxically, maybe, I reject the premise that there is no morally significant difference, while I accept that your argument is (maybe) a problem for Thompson.

To being with, I would say that our society certainly does believe there to be a moral difference between a child who is connected to the body of their parent and one who is not organically connected but is economically and socially dependent. For whatever reason we hold bodily independence to be more inviolable than social independence. A mother who refused to give blood or bone marrow to save the life of her dying child would be seen as a terrible person, but wouldn’t be charged with any crime, while the mother whose neglect led to the death of her young child would be a murderer.

One reason why post-natal abortion (i.e. infanticide) would be morally distinct from abortion is that post-birth the mother can walk away from the baby and never have anything to do with it again. Immediately after birth she has the option to turn the child over to the state is she doesn’t want it. Neither her bodily privacy nor her finances are burdened by this choice, removing the prime justification for it. A pregnant woman, however, has no non-abortive option other than to “donate” her body.

In moral thinking we usually have to consider the burden that discharging an obligation places on an individual. The burdens of giving an unwanted child to the state (instead of killing that child) are significantly less than the burdens of carrying a pregnancy to term (instead of aborting). This would seem to make abortion at least somewhat morally different from infanticide.

More specifically about the issues of pre- vs. post-natal dependence: either you are right and child care is not in any morally relevant ways different from pregnancy or there is a way in which organic, physical attachment is objectively generally more intrusive and burdensome than social duties. I would lean toward the latter – the government taking taxes out of my paycheck is not as intrusive as if they made me report to clinic to have blood drawn every two weeks. Of course social duties can be made so burdensome that they outweigh bodily intrusion (I would rather be made to give blood every two weeks than lose 90% of my salary to taxes).

Factors being as equal as they could be, I would think that we react in psychologically different ways to social intrusions vs. bodily intrusions. I’m not aware of any studies specifically on this, but people usually seem to regard money as impersonal (an object), and they do not regard their own bodies in a similar fashion. People who would give a beggar $5 would be less likely to help (and certainly wouldn’t unthinkingly help) if she were requesting the labor equivalent of $5. Giving the money is an unthinking and impersonal reaction, very different from using one’s own body.

Of course it could be argued that this is irrational, since that $5 (assuming it was part of one’s wages) came from bodily labor and so should be conceived of as identical to lending out one’s body. I’m not trying to defend the rationality of the distinction we draw, just point out that we do treat money, not our bodies, as an impersonal object. Thus we see economic intrusions as generally less intrusive than bodily intrusions, and social dependence as different from biological dependence.

Even if you argue that this is irrational, though, the distinction is morally relevant because we value it. A government that enslaved adults for 10% of each year would cause far more suffering and harm than a government that took 10% of all income as taxes. Forcing someone to “donate” their body will cause them more distress than a reasonable income tax level would because they conceive of their bodies differently than their money. Because bodily infringements usually cause such distress and harm more than economic infringements, morally they should be weighed differently.

All of this is still just to dance around your main point – in cases where the social/economic burden of child care is so high that it equals or surpasses the burden of pregnancy and there are no other options for avoiding that burden, is infanticide as much an option as abortion? That is a good question. Maybe Thompson’s argument would lead to this. (Although in practice it probably wouldn’t justify infanticide in the US, only in places where adoption is not an option.)

I’m not defending Thompson’s view. Actually I see her arguments as strong, but culturally relative. Their force derives from one accepting the sort of deontic, liberal rights that most in the West find intuitive, but they may be less persuasive to people from other cultures.

Sorry this is so long! And here I thought I was going to actually get something done today.

PS I use my terms sloppily. Organic/biological/physical/bodily intrusions (or violations, infringements, obligations) to all refer to the same category of things.
on July 6, 2011 at 8:37 pm | Reply Aaron

Jeff,

Thank you for the lengthy response. However, I do not think you have answered my question.

First, you say that because the parent may abdicate responsibility for the post-natal child via means other than terminating life, e.g., adoption, which is not a viable option for a pregnant woman, there is a moral relevant distinction. While I think there is something to this response, the question I posed was:

“Assuming nobody wished to care for the child, I wonder if post-natal abortion would also be permissible?”

Adoption is a social institution available in our culture, certainly, but, presumably, one is not morally obliged to adopt (care for) the undesired child. If the parent is not morally obliged, then certainly you and I are not obliged, nor are our state representatives. Thus, it may happen that nobody, not even state agents, wish to expend the labor necessary to care for the child. Hence, I ask you:

“Assuming nobody wished to care for the child, I wonder if post-natal abortion would also be permissible?”

Abortion here need not entail an active euthanasia. Rather, we can passively euthanise the undesired child by, say, exposing her to the elements or refrain from feeding her.

Would you find this a morally acceptable state of affairs? (Given your moral qualms over the dearth of accessible anti-malarials in Africa and the so-called unnecessary largesse on the part of Americans, I would say on pain of being diachronically contradictory, you would have to say ‘No’.)
- on July 7, 2011 at 7:55 pm | Reply Jeff
  
  Aaron,
  
  Let me make sure I am clear about your argument before I get into any more detail. I take your argument to be:
  
  1) If it is acceptable to refuse any positive obligation, then it is acceptable to refuse all positive obligations.
  2) Carrying a pregnancy to term is a positive obligation*
  3) The pro-choice position allows that it is acceptable to refuse this obligation.
  4) Therefore the pro-choice position entails that it is acceptable to refuse all other positive obligations. (Including those of feeding and sheltering children.)
  
  Is that an accurate summary of the argument you articulated?
  
  * I understand that 2 is controversial, but you do not frame abortion as a violation of a negative right (i.e. murder); instead I take your argument to be that abortion is an abdication of a positive responsibility that logically implies the acceptability of abdicating other positive responsibilities (giving malaria medicine to children in Africa or feeding or sheltering children). That seems to be the grounds for concluding my views in one of these areas imply the existence of a contradiction with my views in another area.
  - on July 11, 2011 at 6:36 pm Jeff
    
    I’m not sure if you check back on this thread or not. I was going to point out that if your argument is anything like the above, it rests on a very problematic premise (#1). I might as well spell this out.
    
    The assumption of 1 is that if it is permissible for people (women) to “abdicate responsibility” via abortion, it should be permissible for people to abdicate any other (positive) responsibility simply on the grounds that they do not “wish” the obligation.
    
    That incorrectly takes my point about considering the moral importance of burdens and assumes it implies a voluntarist point. I do think that the burden an obligation places on someone can become so high that it allows one to reject obligations that would otherwise required. (To be clear, I do not think that the presence of a burden always constitutes grounds for rejecting a obligation.) I do not accept that mere “wishing” always constitutes such burdens, as you imply that I must. In a society with functioning adoptive institutions, the actual burdens become minimal: nobody is forced to work in adoption, nobody is forced to adopt against their will, and the amount of taxes that is collected is so minimal that it can’t realistically be considered a financial burden by anyone.
    
    Arguably socialized burdens tend to weigh the least, because they are held collectively by many people. I think the implication of this is that in a society with adoption and related mechanisms, the “burden” of childcare does not fall heavily on the unwilling. It does not follow that someone who wants none of her income go to supporting such social programs has grounds for “abdicating responsibility” and leaving the children in the system or who would go into the system to die from exposure.
    
    I can’t emphasize this more: the move from acknowledging the relevance of burdens in moral thinking to moral voluntarism is an illegitimate one.
    
    For the record, I think voluntarism is wrong for the simple reason that it strongly seems that we do have obligations that we do not choose, and we cannot shirk those obligations simply by “wishing” not to have them. My parents, siblings, and even strangers I just run into can place positive obligations on me I did not choose. If I see a child drowning in a shallow pool, I have an obligation, through no choice of my own, to save her. If I do not wish to save her, I am still obliged, at least most people would say. (Perhaps this intuition is wrong, but you’ll need to argue why, without begging the question.)
    
    I grant that whether carrying pregnancies to term is such an obligation can be debated. What I reject is your claim that a pro-choice stance logically implies that any positive obligations can be rejected on voluntarist grounds.
    
    But let’s assume that “abdicating responsibility” in one area does have this implication. Let’s assume that if we grant the permissibility of abdicating responsibility in the case of abortion, it does mean that we also must permit abdicating responsibility in the case of infanticide by exposure, and we must also permit the abdication of responsibility when it comes to tropical diseases or global poverty.
    
    Even granting you all of this, your position still doesn’t look promising. Why? Because you (likely) reject some positive responsibilities yourself. If abdication in one area implies the permissibility of abdication in another area, then someone who doesn’t want their money going to foreign aid, must, by the logic of your argument, be pro-choice, and she must also find infanticide by exposure permissible.
    
    If we take this approach, there will only be two camps of thought that are free of contradiction. One, call it the pure libertarian camp, will think that we always can abdicate responsibility, and so if we do not wish to care for a child, even if we easily could do so, it becomes permissible to abandon the child on the icy slopes. This was the conclusion of your reduction ad absurdum argument that you thought I was logically obliged to accept. The other camp, call it the obligationist camp, will think that we can never refuse a positive obligation, no matter how budernsome it be.
    
    Anybody who is not comfortable with either of these two camps of thought will, by accepting premise 1, be led to conclusions they do not like. For that reason your argument likely applies against you as much as against me. Since voluntarism doesn’t follow from acknowledging the relevance of obligations, it would seem best to reject premise 1.
    
    One final point – while I do hold that positive obligations exist, I think that we have obligations relating to malaria and global poverty on purely negative grounds. There are many ways in which people and governments in developed countries harm people in developing countries. Global warming, support for dictators, and the arms trade are perhaps the three most egregious and widespread, but other examples could be given as well. (Many libertarians, for example, make moral arguments against the trade barriers that developed countries erect against imports from poor countries.) Given that such practices 1) harm people in developing countries and 2) benefit people in developed countries, a case for compensation for harms could be made on purely negative grounds. Arguably Malaria research could be one manifestation of such compensation. So even if your argument were right about everything else, it still wouldn’t follow that I contradict my moral “qualms” about the lack of research on Malaria.
    
    PS: You could object that abortion is a special case because parents have special obligations. If a parent abdicates a responsibility to her child, it should be acceptable for anybody else to also abdicate that responsibility to that child. I think this is incorrect: our obligations to others do not necessarily depend on parents (or anybody else) fulfilling their obligations. The abusiveness of a parent does not mean that strangers can be abusive toward a child as well. It is precisely when others fail in their obligations that we may be called on to fulfill ours – a parent who doesn’t feed their child has the child taken from them and fed by someone else. If I see a child bleeding to death in the street, and the parent ignoring her, I have some positive obligation not despite but because the parent is not upholding her obligation. Changing premise #1 to read “If it is acceptable for a parent to refuse any positive obligation to her child, then it is acceptable for anybody to refuse all positive obligations to that child” doesn’t make it more plausible.
    
    I apologize again for the length of this. Please do let me know if I misunderstood your argument. I’ve written this in a hurry (as much as something this long can be) since I am about to leave, and I probably have made some mistakes.
on July 11, 2011 at 7:09 pm | Reply Aaron

Jeff,

Apologies for my inattentiveness; I have been too preoccupied recently to respond to you in a way your comments deserve.

For the record, I am pro-choice and I largely reject positive moral obligations. I do hold to some positive obligations and negative moral obligations which I justify on largely Hobbesian decision and game theoretic grounds.

My question concerned your (what I take to be) confused moral distinction between the responsibility of the mother to provide bodily for the pre-natal organism and the responsibility of the parents to provide for the post-natal organism. I understand the intuitive distinction one might want to draw, but, in nuce, (1) I place no weight on intuitions and (2) fail to see the moral difference between compelling a man to work for three months in a work camp and claiming ownership over the product of his labor for three months. In both cases, others are asserting ownership claims over the man; of what use is it to say that a man has a right to his bodily existence and but not to the means by which a man must by necessity sustain his bodily existence?

To be continued?