teaching abortion ethics paper, pt. 2

Below the fold is the next installment of my thoughts on teaching abortion, this time covering typical student arguments. Below are essentially the ideas I presented at the AAPT conference last summer. At that conference I wound up mostly talking about the scriptual abortion arguments, rather than the others, and that imbalance is reflected below. After the collected thoughts from the conference, I have some questions about ways in which I want to expand this discussion.

[update: I forgot to insert the section from my talk on rabbinic interpretations of the hebrew bible as pro choice.]



The most striking thing about the arguments given in the classic philosophical papers on abortion is how removed they are from anything students may have thought about the topic, especially religious students. In fact, this originality is exactly why philosophers value these papers. But the very thing that philosophers prize can alienate students if you drop it on them suddenly. Any class on abortion ethics must begin with student’s own ideas and inchoate arguments. It is facile to dismiss student’s arguments: they often aren’t very deep, often involve religious premises, but skipping over them guarantees that your course will not be relevant to student’s lives. They need to be given the most charitable reconstruction possible.

I will cover three classes of arguments here: scriptural arguments, arguments from so-called “post-abortion syndrome,” and an argument I label “the responsibility argument.” Let’s start with the scriptural arguments. The ugly truth is that Bible nowhere mentions abortion. Not the Jewish Bible, or any of the Christian Bibles. To present a scriptural argument against abortion requires a great deal of interpretation. This is actually one of those much sought after teachable moments. Many religious people are not used to the idea that interpretations of text both require defense and can be defended. My anecdotal impression is that Bible study at most protestant churches is very impressionistic, consisting largely of passages being read aloud and pupils discussing how the passage makes them feel, or how it relates to an event in their lives. Requiring students to defend their interpretation of text is a wonderful chance to bring critical thinking to a place where it is rarely practiced.

But before you even begin to critically interpret text, you should ask the students, “Why doesn’t the bible mention abortion explicitly?” Why was the most divisive moral issue of our day not even on the radar of the ancient Hebrews? You might think it was because abortion simply wasn’t practiced, that it is some sort of abomination of modern technology. But abortion was practiced. [Here follows a description of ancient abortion practices from Feldman (1968)].

It is best to let the question of the Bible’s silence on abortion hang for now, and let the students present their scriptural arguments. The question “Why is abortion an issue now when it hasn’t been for most of history?” will be tackled when we come to the history of abortion.

The most obvious passage to cite as proof of the immorality of abortion is Exodus 20:13, “You shall not murder.” But God’s words to Moses did not mention whom one should not kill. We know from the rest of Jewish history that it was ok to kill animals, but is a fetus more like an animal or a person? Most students with some religious training will be prepared for this, and move quickly to cite a number of passages that mention both God’s will and existence prior to birth. The classic is Jeremiah 1:5, where God informs Jeremiah that he is to be a prophet.

"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
And before you were born I consecrated you;
I have appointed you a prophet to the nations."

This passage is generally interpreted as meaning that God had a plan for Jeremiah at conception, and therefore valued Jeremiah. Since we are all commanded to be like the prophets, we must have all been valued at conception. There are a handful of other passages like this, all of them cited by John Paul II in the Evangelium Vitae (1995).

Even the darkness is not dark to You,
And the night is as bright as the day
Darkness and light are alike to You.
For You formed my inward parts;
You wove me in my mother's womb.
I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Wonderful are Your works,
And my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from You,
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth;
Your eyes have seen my unformed substance;
And in Your book were all written
The days that were ordained for me,
When as yet there was not one of them. (Psalm 139: 12–16)

By You I have been sustained from my birth;
You are He who took me from my mother's womb;
My praise is continually of You. (Psalm 71:6)

Yet You are He who brought me forth from the womb;
You made me trust when upon my mother's breasts.
Upon You I was cast from birth;
You have been my God from my mother's womb. (Psalm 22:10–11)


Listen to Me, O house of Jacob,
And all the remnant of the house of Israel,
You who have been borne by Me from birth
And have been carried from the womb; (Is. 46:3)

Your hands fashioned and made me altogether,
And would You destroy me?
Remember now, that You have made me as clay;
And would You turn me into dust again?
Did You not pour me out like milk
And curdle me like cheese;
Clothe me with skin and flesh,
And knit me together with bones and sinews? (Job 10:8–11)

The striking thing about these passages is that they are all descriptions of God’s omniscience and omnipotence. This raises two problems for anyone who would use them to argue a pro-life view. The first is that none of them are particularly concerned with conception as a moral boundary. Indeed, Jeremiah talks about God’s knowledge before conception: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.” To make a pro-life argument, we need to somehow show that Jeremiah became valuable at conception. But attempting to make an inference from what God plans to what God values will not help here, because God’s plans are timeless. The second problem is that, although these passages talk about the way God plans the fate of humans, we are not special in this regard. God also knows the fate of a mosquito before it hatches from an egg. But we can still swat mosquitoes. In general, there just isn’t a good way to move from what God wills to what God values here.

The most problematic aspect of the Bible for the scriptural pro-life arguments is that the rabbinic tradition actually interprets the Jewish Bible as granting only limited moral status to the fetus. The key passage is Exodus 21:22:

“If men strive, and wound a pregnant woman so that her fruit be expelled, but no harm befall [her], then shall he be fined as her husband shall assess, and the matter placed before the judges. But if harm befall [her], then shalt thou give life for life” (as translated in Felman 1968)

Basically, Exodus prescribes to kinds of penalties for assaults on pregnant women, a mild one for cases where only the fetus is killed, and the full penalty for cases where the woman is killed. This is prima facie evidence that the fetus has less moral status than an adult woman. Feldman (1968) says this interpretation is further supported by: (1) places in the Talmud where the fetus is described as a part of the mother, (2) the fact that ritual mourning is only given for babies who die more than 30 days after they are born, and (3) the Talmudic tradition that before the fortieth day, the embryo is “mere liquid” [Expand, get full references].


These arguments will generally not impress committed religious students. Nevertheless, I think they should be presented in class, because it is an opportunity to at least plant the idea that the interpretation of text is not straightforward or automatic. If the instructor can get the student to state and defend with argument an interpretation of a Bible passage, progress has been made for critical thinking. [Later versions will add quotes from student papers all over this section, with the identifying features removed obviously.]

The second set of arguments that one encounters are the arguments from so-called “post-abortion syndrome” (PAS). Often students will argue that one should not have an abortion because doing so will result in “post-abortion syndrome,” a set of psychological maladies that are supposed to be a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. [examples] The easiest response here is to simply note that this not a moral argument. Would abortion be acceptable for someone who knew, say because of their genetic profile, that they were unlikely to develop PAS? Even if someone knew that they were going to develop PAS, would that add to the moral wrongness of abortion?

If one simply dismisses the PAS argument as nonmoral, though, one misses a great opportunity to debunk some medical myths, and more importantly, to clarify aspects of the scientific method. [Discussion of the history of PAS here.]

The final argument I want to urge instructors to take seriously is the responsibility argument. The responsibility argument generally takes the form of a single statement: “women who have abortions are not taking responsibility for their actions.” This is a difficult argument to parse. It can be read as an argument based on the moral status of the fetus—by engaging in sex, one risks creating something with moral status, and one must take responsibility for this. This does not seem to be how many students intend it though. Many of my students insisted that the responsibility argument was independent of the moral status of the fetus. After I had been teaching abortion ethics for a while, I developed a curriculum which introduced vocabulary like “moral status” and “moral responsibility” to the students, in hopes that they would sharpen their arguments on the subject. My assumption was that the students would see that the moral status issue is prior to the responsibility issue, but they wound up using the vocabulary I gave them in unexpcted ways. [examples.]
Frankly, I think the real motivation behind the argument seems to be that premarital sex is simply immoral, and abortion is immoral because it is an attempt to cover up the sin of premarital sex. [expand with arguments from abstinence only ed., historical views on abortion, student papers.]

Questions

Is there a discussion of responsibility in virtue ethics that might be useful for dealing with the responsibility arguments?

Are there good sources for the history of attidutes towards abortion as they relate to the history of attitudes toward sex?

Is there a single good place on the web for the real science about PAS?

Can anyone confirm that lay bible study in the US uses very impressionistic methods of interpretation?