Abortion

Since I've been skirting around my views on abortion, I might as well go ahead and say what they are.

Here's the thing. I've never been able to get passionate about abortion issues, because they have always seemed to me neither terribly controversial nor terribly interesting. It boils down to this. Until an unborn entity becomes a person, the state has no legitimate stake in telling the woman carrying it what to do or what not to do with it. Once it is a person, it bears rights and is entitled to protection. The notion that personhood begins at conception is a case of mistaking the potential for the actual; something that will be a person is not a person: that's just an analytic truth. Whatever the potential mode of existence of an entity in the early stages of gestation, it is not a person. So any barriers to abortion in first trimester pregnancy (let alone barriers to obtaining emergency contraception) are illegitimate infringements on a woman's privacy.

On the other hand, a fetus in the final stages of pregnancy obviously is a person: its intrinsic qualitative profile the minute after it is born is effectively identical to its intrinsic qualitative profile the minute before. If it's homicide to end the life of the former (intentionally), it is homicide to end the life of the latter (intentionally). There is a brand of--I don't know if I want to call it feminism, but I'm not sure what the term is--that simply can't acknowledge this. I do sympathize with the standard pro-choice line on abortion, to the extent that the objective of a great deal of opposition to abortion has to do with asserting control over women and over their offspring, but I find it (at least in some cases) easier to understand the anti-abortion argument. If you define a person as something that comes into existence at the moment of conception, often courtesy of some process of ensoulment, then of course you would want to outlaw any abortion, and EC too. The anti-abortion answer to the question, what is a person, may be utterly wrong, but at least it's an answer. I simply cannot grasp what definition of personhood could make it alright to abort a fetus at any point in time until the moment of birth, and when I inquire about this, I usually get a lecture about slippery slopes and efforts to ban abortion simpliciter. All that could be true, but it still wouldn't provide a basis for killing rights-bearing persons. Put it this way: what about the moment of birth is it that makes it so special for determining personhood? Everything that seemingly essential property of personhood, consciousness, viability, etc., arises prior to birth. Perhaps someone could set me straight on this point.

Of course, my analysis doesn't solve the true problem cases---cases where personhood, as defined as conscious being, is indeterminate. I tried to sketch the issues surrounding indeterminacy in personhood here.