The importance of awe

One way pro-choice supporters “justify” abortion is to distinguish between human beings and persons, arguing that only persons deserve respect for their lives and then defining unborn children/fetuses out of personhood and its protections. Dr Giubilini and Dr Minerva take this approach, but claim that neither unborn nor newborn children are persons.

They propose, following in the footsteps of Princeton philosopher Peter Singer and some other prominent utilitarian bioethicists, that being a person requires being “capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her” and having “aims”, and neither unborn nor newborn children have these capacities (as is also true of some other people).

Moreover, they characterize “post-birth abortion” as “unlike the case of death of an existing person, [because] failing to bring a new person into existence does not prevent anyone from accomplishing any of her future aims”. And, they say, this is not euthanasia, because it’s not the killing of an existing person or done for the benefit of the child. In short, for Dr Giubilini and Dr Minerva the unborn or newborn child does not exist, because a person does not exist, and the fact that the child is a living human being is irrelevant. Yet again, those are precisely the same arguments pro-choice advocates use to justify pre-birth abortion.

Outrage…
So what can the outrage that has greeted their article tell us?

First, the assessment of the ethics involved is radically different on the part of the general public, as compared with the authors’.

The authors’ proposal is radically utilitarian and seems to lack any influence of an emotional response to the thought of killing a young child or what the impact of doing so would be on important societal values, especially respect for every individual human life and human life, in general.

Some research suggests that people with a malfunction of the frontal lobes of their brains tend to make what the researchers called “overly utilitarian decisions”, which, as a result, are not good ethical decisions. We also know that people with damage to the emotional centres of their brains have impaired judgment about ethics. Might the contents of the article have been affected by such factors? Could Dr. Minerva’s explanation to the media that she was just theorizing in what was written indicate that?

Then there is the matter of perception: When we choose not to see or imagine what abortion involves, we can deny the reality of what we are doing, killing a child. When we do the same overtly in infanticide, we cannot.

When we can dis-identify from the human being who is harmed – we are no longer unborn children and never will be again – we can reassure ourselves that what we are doing to that human being would never be done to us.  That is not true for the child who has been born.

The primary focus of our consideration of the morality and ethics of infanticide, as compared with abortion, can also affect our perceptions and conclusions in these regards. Unlike in infanticide, where the focus is solely on the child and the moral and ethical acceptability of taking the child’s life, in abortion the focus is most often just on the woman and her claims. This suppresses or eliminates our sensitivity to the ethics of doing the same to the child, from the child’s perspective, in abortion as in infanticide.

Moreover, probably, a cause of the enormous difference between the outrage at infanticide and the absence of that at abortion is that many people have so normalized abortion that they’ve lost their ethical sensitivity to what it involves, but that isn’t true with respect to infanticide.

I suggest that a more existential perception also differentiates those who accept abortion and possibly infanticide, from those who do not: this is whether the transmission of life, the coming-into-being of a unique new human being, involves a mystery that must be respected. If we perceive that mystery, we look at both the unborn child and the born one with amazement, wonder and awe just because they exist, and act accordingly. If we do not perceive it, we can make recommendations such as those outlined in Dr Giubilini and Dr Minerva’s article.

Read more of this response here.