If Drinking During Pregnancy is Wrong, Why Is Abortion Okay?

A Brief Rejoinder to the Impairment Against Abortion.

1 Introduction

In the United States, upwards of 40,000 babies are born every year with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS). Destined for disfiguration, these babies will grow to fill in damage brains and stunted bodies, leaving them to live their lives as individuals with permanent, and life altering disabilities. Unlike many diseases which permeate themselves into the bodies and hospital beds of our world, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is quite easily preventable, and is often only caused by, what most consider to be, careless and indecent acts. So this then leads us to asking the key question: if it is frowned upon to drink during your pregnancy, why then, is it okay to terminate your pregnancy?

I can sympathise with those who ponder this question, I was astonishingly stunted when first asked myself. At first, I thought this was a significant threat to the pro-choice position. It certainly is a very intuitive argument, and does not rely on transcendent, and hard-to-grasp concepts such as ‘personhood’ or ‘moral status’. After all, nearly everyone would agree that causing Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, or any physical deformity for the matter, would be harmful, and thereby wrong, most would then agree that killing is more harmful than simply deforming, so it follows that the action is more wrong. Let’s call this the Impairment Argument. I believe it can be structured as follows:

Premise One: If causing harm to an organism is wrong, then causing harm of a greater degree to the same organism is just as much, or more wrong.

Premise Two: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome causes harm to the embryo and is wrong.

Premise Three: Killing causes more harm to the embryo

Conclusion: Therefore killing (abortion) an embryo is morally wrong.

The second premise is uncontroversially true — most people believe that causing FAS is harmful and wrong. I will briefly provide some comments on the first and third premise. In regards to the first premise, I believe the inference that is made ignores the relevance of context and other variables which may make the inference untrustworthy. In order to isolate the variable of harm in order to see it’s relevance to another variable, such as the wrongness of an action, all other variables have to be controlled for. However, when comparing the acts of an abortion with the act of causing FAS, these variables are not controlled for. So, even if we believe that abortion is wrong, we cannot reach this conclusion by running parallels to FAS. In regards to the second premise, the nature of harm, and specifically, the harm of death needs to be investigated. I will provide an account of harm that allows us to agree that FAS is wrong whilst abortion is not. The Impairment Argument is defeated.

2 The First Premise

The first premise of the impairment argument states that if causing harm to an organism is wrong, then surely, causing harm of a greater degree to the same organism is just as much, if not more wrong. However, there are issues with this method of inference. This premise is focusing on two variables: harm and wrongness. This premise argues that if we increase the degree of one variable, harm, then surely, the degree of the other variable, wrongness will increase with it.

The issue with this premise is that it does not account for all other variables. Taking back to lessons in the scientific method, you will remember that in an experiment, there are three important variables: the dependent variable (the one we are measuring), the independent variable (the one that we change to see its effects) and the control variables that we must keep the same. If we do not keep the control variables the same, an experiment is flawed, and we cannot trust the results. In substituting the roles of each variable, we can see that we are measuring moral wrongness (dependent variable) and changing the degree of harm (independent variable). This requires everything else to be equal in order for us to make the inference that abortions are wrong. Therefore, the first premise requires what’s known in philosophy as a ceteris paribus (all things equal) clause. However, once we add this adjustment to the first premise, the impairment argument falls apart, as there are many differences between abortion and fetal alcohol syndrome.

To see the importance of context and the ceteris paribus clause, consider the following two cases from philosopher Dustin Crummet:

Case A: I flood a room you’re in with gas. The gas permanently hinders your ability to roll your tongue, which you enjoyed doing. I have no particular reason for doing this.

Most would agree that in this case, my actions were wrong. Now consider:

Case B: I flood a room you’re in with gas. The gas permanently removes your ability to roll your tongue, which you enjoyed doing. I do this because otherwise the gas would flood into a room with me and several other people who are allergic to it, killing us.

In this case, many would agree that what I did was actually okay. But when we look to the first premise of the impairment argument without the ceteris paribus clause, the fact we consider Case A to involve a wrongful action would imply that my action in Case B is wrong, but this is clearly not the case. My actions in Case A were wrong because I limited your ability to roll your tongue (which you enjoyed doing), the same thing happened in Case B in which I also limit your ability to roll your tongue (which you enjoy doing). If we agree with the first premise of the Impairment Argument, we have to agree that because my actions in Case A were wrong, so were my actions in Case B. However, we would be unlikely to accept this inference, as we consider my actions in Case B to be okay. The reason for this, is because there are many important differences between Case A and Case B, for example, Case A is done with malicious intent, while Case B is done out of defence. This makes it clear that making an inference from one action to another is only trustworthy where the important variables are the same across both actions. This is why a ceteris paribus clause must inserted into the first premise.

The question then becomes: is the ceteris paribus clause satisfied? In other words, are the important variables the same across the action of causing FAS, and the action of abortion? It seems not. Abortions can be invoked for reasons relating to bodily autonomy, family and societal acceptance, physical health, mental health, financial stability etc. Since the important variables are not the same across both actions, we should be skeptical about the infernece from the wrongness of causing FAS to the wrongness of abortion.

3 The Third Premise

The third premise says that killing a fetus causes more harm than permanently disabling it. This forces us to look into the nature of harm, and to see whether this is true. Personally, I believe that a pro-choicer can adopt a theory of the nature of harm that is able to reconcile the wrongness of causing FAS whilst being okay with abortion. This leads me into introducing the philosophy of Joel Feinberg. Feinberg believed that at the very centre of harm and harmful actions, is the setback or frustration of a persons desires. For an action to be harmful, it is required that the action is, or will lead to the frustration of desires. As said by Feinberg:

One’s interests, then, taken as a miscellaneous collection, consist of all those things in which one has a stake… What promotes them is to his advantage or in his interest; what thwarts them is to his detriment or against his interest… It is only when an interest is thwarted through an invasion by self or others, that its possessor is harmed (Feinberg, 1987).

Obviously, an embryo does not have any desires. However, if we let the embryo develop into a living human person, it will have desires. When we cause FAS to an embryo, we are setting up a future in which the desires of that future person are going to be frustrated. In comparison, an abortion prevents that person and their desires from coming about in the first place. As philosophers Jeff McMahan explains:

prenatal injury is, in this respect like an act done before an individual begins to exist that will later cause that individual to be harmed, such as planting a bomb that detonates 150 years later, maiming and disabling whoever is nearby at the time of the explosion. (McMahan, 2006)

In McMahan’s scenario, planting a bomb does not frustrate anyones desire’s at the moment it is planted. However, it is leading to a situation in the future in which the frustration of desires will occur, and that is why it is wrong. Likewise, causing FAS will lead to a situation in the future in which the desires of a person will be frustrated. The same is not true of an abortion, as abortions prevent any desires from coming about in the first place.

Therefore, if we subscribe to Feinberg's view of interests and harm, we can reconcile the paradox of abortion and FAS. If we believe that harm is really a thwarting of desires, then the third premise is false; the death of an embryo is not more harmful than FAS.

4 Conclusion

There is a lot more that could be said surrounding the impairment argument against abortion. I hope to have provided some brief issues with the first and third premises of the argument. I have posited that the argument fails to suffice it’s necessary ceteris paribus clause and hence, cannot infer that abortion is morally wrong from the moral wrongness of FAS. Moreover, I have argued that under certain theories of harm, it is false that killing a fetus causes more harm than FAS. Therefore, we should reject the argument from fetal impairment against abortion.

Bibliography and Further Reading

Crummett, D. (2019). Violinists, demandingness, and the impairment argument against abortion. Bioethics. doi:10.1111/bioe.12699

Crummett, D. (2020). MIP does not save the impairment argument against abortion: a reply to Blackshaw and Hendricks. Journal of Medical Ethics, medethics–2020–106566. doi:10.1136/medethics-2020–106566

Degrazia, D. (2007). The Harm of Death, Time-Relative-Interests, and Abortion. The Philosophical Forum, 38(1), 57–80. doi:10.1111/j.1467–9191.2007.00253.x

Feinberg, J. (1987). Harms as Setbacks to Interest. The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law Volume 1: Harm to Others, 31–64. doi:10.1093/0195046641.003.0002

Gillham, A. R. (2020). Against the strengthened impairment argument: never-born fetuses have no FLO to deprive. Journal of Medical Ethics, medethics–2020–106579. doi:10.1136/medethics-2020–106579

McMahan J. (2002). The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life. Oxford University Press.

McMahan, J. (2006). Paradoxes of Abortion and Prenatal Injury. Ethics, 116(4), 625–655. doi:10.1086/504621

Räsänen, J. (2019) Against the impairment argument: A reply to Hendricks. Bioethics. doi: 10.1111/bioe.12720