The Cost of Philosophical Consistency for Pro-Choice Advocates

Stop pretending this isn't serious

Since I take my pro-choice position seriously, I concede that there’s no philosophically consistent way to support abortion legalization without holding that the criminal severity attached to the killing of babies outside the womb, infants, and severely intellectually disabled people should be decreased. This entails legally redefining all these categorical populations as second-class citizens.

While admitting these consequences is not socially or politically pragmatic, pro-choice people should, at the very least, internally acknowledge the legal and philosophical costs of their position.

The state’s forcing women to give birth with the implicit threat of violence is undeniably an infringement of the pregnant woman’s bodily autonomy.

The anti-abortion position is that abortion’s infringement of the woman is outweighed by the infringement of the fetus/baby’s bodily autonomy since the woman generally lives and the fetus/baby always dies. Anti-abortion people object to abortion legalization on the basis that killing an individual means maximally infringing upon their bodily autonomy. They claim that since no other form of bodily autonomy infringement could possibly outweigh killing, and since abortion necessarily kills the fetus/baby, no lesser form of bodily autonomy infringement could possibly justify abortion. They point out that the fetus/baby is undeniably alive in some sense and undeniably a member of the human species.

The pro-legalization position argues that forced pregnancy’s infringement of the woman’s bodily autonomy outweighs abortion’s infringement of the fetus/baby’s bodily autonomy. It recognizes that abortion is the killing of a human organism that is alive in some sense, but denies that this organism qualifies as a legally protected individual. In other words, it denies that the fetus/baby is a legally protected individual citizen in the same way the pregnant mother is. It argues that the fetus/baby has a lesser claim to bodily autonomy on this basis.

This position is logically forced by the anti-abortion objection from maximal bodily infringement to conclude that the fetus/baby is not a legally protected individual. If the fetus/baby is an individual, then killing it is necessarily a greater infringement than forcing the pregnant woman to give birth. Therefore, the fetus/baby can’t qualify as a legally protected individual under the pro-legalization view.

Pro-legalization people are forced to accept this task of redefining as well as the logical implications of their redefinition to be philosophically consistent. How can the legal definition of “individual” be redefined in a way that applies to pregnant mothers and not to fetuses/babies?

Before I state my proposal, I want my pro-choice readers to consider the question for a second. If you are pro-choice, you have the burden of coming up with a new definition. What are your criteria for a good one? Are there any other types of people you want to make second-class citizens while you’re at it? Or do you want to make as few categories of people second-class citizens as possible? You have to decide your strategy. You have to propose a new legal definition of “individual” that doesn’t include fetuses/babies in the womb otherwise your pro-choice position becomes completely philosophically arbitrary and legally incoherent.

In my view, there is only one even remotely workable redefinition that minimizes how many categorical populations will be rendered second-class. It establishes the ability to communicate symbolically as a necessary condition. This would legally define “individual” as “a human being with the capacity to symbolically communicate through spoken language, writing, or some other existing communication technology.” Behaviors like crying, screaming, and mumbling meaningless sounds are not symbolic. Symbolic technologies assign interpersonal meanings to things like sounds, shapes, and objects.

Under this definition, only those who can speak, write, type, etc. symbolically meaningful communications qualify under the law as legal individuals. Everyone else qualifies as a pseudo-individual. This would include all babies and infants, severely intellectually disabled people, comatose people, and any other categorical population that lacks the capacity to symbolically communicate by definition.

The idea is that the law would maintain that the infringement of the bodily autonomy of both individuals and pseudo-individuals is always illegal, except when an individual’s bodily autonomy conflicts with a pseudo-individual’s in which case it is legally permissible to violate the pseudo-individual’s bodily autonomy for the sake of protecting the individual’s. This justifies abortion.

You can dislike my definition, but you can’t support the legalization of abortion in a philosophically and legally consistent manner without proposing one of your own.

This is the cost of being pro-choice. Accept it or switch positions.