A Fetus is Not a Person: the Concept of Self-Ownership
The United States was founded upon the notion that all persons are born with “inalienable rights.” However, even to this day, “life, liberty, and happiness” are not guaranteed to citizens of this nation, especially its women. America has allowed patriarchal and sexist influences to contaminate its politics and culture. The abortion debate is essentially an argument over who has ownership over a woman’s body. In a fetus is not a person essay the concept of self-ownership is discussed.
John Locke, in his Second Treatise on Government, discusses the pivotal concept of the right to private property. He asserted that every person has a natural, non-negotiable right to his/her body and products of his/her labor. (Locke, Second Treatise on Government) Accordingly, a woman has full ownership over herself and is the only person permitted to dictate the fate of her body and its happenings, including the choice to abortion. Before birth, a fetus is not a person and therefore does not possess the rights of a living, breathing, self-sufficient individual. If the government were to restrict a woman’s right to abortion, it would be a moral injustice and a theft of her own vital rights over her private property.
“Ownership” often refers to the exclusive right or claim to possession over one’s own property, personal objects, intellectual property, real estate, etc. Regarding the abortion debate, the controversy of ownership relates to who has the right to a woman’s body. In fact, it was the landmark case of Roe v. Wade that decided to extend a woman’s right to privacy under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the freedom to undergo a medical abortion. However, even after abortion has been permitted under the federal law, it continues to be very controversial: “While Democrats [would] never abandon women’s right to choose...the Republican strategy [is] to obstruct and criminalize abortion, by overturning Roe v. Wade.”
It is a woman’s inalienable right as a person to be granted the privacy to decide on her own abortion. This is all because a woman is a person. But this brings us to the following aspect of this position: is a fetus a person? It is pertinent to discuss what comprises personhood, as laws of ownership apply only to those who are morally and legally considered persons. In her notable essay titled “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,” American philosopher Mary Anne Warren defends a permissive view on abortion through this definition of a person. She asserts that not all Homo sapiens beings are people per se, a statement with which many pro-lifers were/are quick to disbelieve. The moral community is defined as people with full moral rights, consisting of all and only persons. Warren outlines five traits that are most central to personhood. They are as follows:
- consciousness,
- reasoning,
- self-motivated activity,
- the capacity to communicate,
- the presence of self-concepts and self-awareness.
She makes clear that an entity need not fulfill all of these criteria. However, if an entity fulfills none of the five criteria, then the being cannot a person. By this logic, a fetus is not a person, not a member of the moral community. Therefore, a fetus does not have full moral rights, including that of self-ownership. Moreover, “...a woman’s right to protect her health, happiness, freedom, and even her life, will always override whatever right to life it may appropriate to ascribe to a fetus, even a fully developed one.” This ascribes a woman’s full ownership over her body as a member of the moral community.
With self-ownership comes the rights to privacy and power to decide. However, certain factions still attempt to challenge this truth with baseless and discriminatory anti-abortion statements. For example, Richard Mourdock, a former Senate candidate in Indiana, even proclaimed during a debate that “even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that is something that God intended to happen.” Abortion is not even a criminal offense. A young woman who terminated a pregnancy, which resulted from a physically (sexually) and emotionally abusive relationship, attested to this: “None of us is a murderer, not a single one of us who had an abortion did what we did with malice in our hearts...My abortion was the hardest thing I ever did, but I know why I did it. Women who go through this deserve compassion, not sadistic laws that make our experience even harder.” Government intervention with women’s autonomy to have abortions is an inevitable invasion of privacy.
As in the case in any controversial, politically-tinged subject, dissent is expected. In the case of the anti-abortion faction, many claims fall along the lines of the following: “There are human haploid gametes, male and female, and when they meet, they create a fully actual human being...From the moment of conception onward, there exists in a woman’s uterus a genetically distinct, fully individual human being. A pregnant woman shouldn’t be allowed to kill this human being or harm him in any way.” How are we to address such commentary? Well, just two years prior to Roe v. Wade, Judith Jarvis Thomson published her controversial “A Defense of Abortion” as moral justification for not holding women culpable if they do choose to terminate a pregnancy. The reason why this philosophically charged essay invalidates the pro-life arguments is that Thomson assumes, for the sake of argument, that a fetus is still granted the right to life. The fact that Thomson acknowledges that a fetus is a person from conception strengthens the legitimacy of her argument and highlights the concepts of self-ownership and autonomy in her reasoning per se. The termination of the pregnancy is still permissible, as she demonstrates through her People Seeds scenario. To hold a woman responsible for an instance of unwanted fertilization within her womb is equivalent to victim-blaming in cases of sexual abuse or molestation. Thomson herself writes, “Anyone can avoid a pregnancy due to rape by having a hysterectomy, or anyway by never leaving home without a (reliable!) army.” This portion of her essay hones in on why a woman’s bodily integrity and ownership is at the forefront of the abortion issue. If contraception fails,—and god forbid a woman engages in non-procreative intercourse—how can one discredit the fact that the body the resulting fetus houses is the woman’s? It is her self-evident liberty to decide what is to happen inside of her body. In fact, when a woman is denied the right to abortion, it is as if her body is coerced and conscripted into the service of the U.S. judicial power for all but her very own benefit. To male chauvinists, this will appear to be extreme but that is the irony per se. These “greater” powers that argue to deny women their right to self-determination and ownership of their bodies are built upon the very notion of patriarchy. Abortion is not murder, not comparable to killing a person who is already out of the womb. However, even if the fetus is granted the alleged right to life from the point of conception, a woman’s right to bodily integrity, self-determination, and privacy is of utmost importance.
The Lockean-inspired guarantees of life, liberty, and happiness listed in America’s founding documents are understandably natural freedoms that apply to every and any person. A woman who chooses to terminate her pregnancy is also a person. This is a decision to be made under her jurisdiction and hers alone, in accordance with John Locke’s ideas of private property and ownership. The fetus is not a person and thus does not qualify to fall under the sphere of natural rights, as prescribed not only in the United States’ Constitution but also Locke’s Treatises on Government. The government does not have the legal or moral ability to forcibly influence and affect a woman’s choice of what happens to, with, or inside of her own body. In American democracy that is built upon the philosophies that underscore self-evident rights, certainly half of the population, i.e. all of those who are physiologically female-bodied, should not be denied such liberties. This argument is a strong testament to gender equality, strongly against the outright violation of a woman’s autonomy. Would this debate even exist if the bodies in question belonged to men? Nevertheless, an unborn fetus is not an entity whose alleged rights outweigh the rights of a living, breathing female member of the moral community. Ownership of a female body should be out of the question. It belongs to no one else but the woman herself.
Works Cited
- Friedman, Thomas L. “Why I Am Pro-Life.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 27 Oct. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/opinion/sunday/friedman-why-i-am-pro-life.html. Accessed 9 Dec 2019.
- Locke, John. “Second Treatise.” John Locke: Two Treatises of Government, 1689, pp. 265–428., doi:10.1017/cbo9780511810268.011. Accessed 9 Dec 2019.
- New York Times Editor. “Abortion and the Democrats.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 9 Dec 2019, www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/opinion/sunday/abortion-and-the-democrats.html.
- Ruiz, Rebecca. “'I Am Sick of Being Silenced': 14 Women Share Their Abortion Stories.” Mashable, Mashable, 6 Mar. 2016, mashable.com/2016/03/06/abortion-stigma-women-stories/#.JRiV2rWmuqn. Accessed 9 Dec 2019.
- Science. “Here's A Primer On Pro-Life Responses To Common Counter-Arguments.” The Federalist, The Federalist, 1 Feb. 2017, thefederalist.com/2017/01/30/heres-primer-pro-life-responses-common-counter-arguments/. Accessed 9 Dec 2019.
- Thomson, Judith Jarvis. “A Defense of Abortion.” Biomedical Ethics and the Law, 1971, pp. 57–72., doi:10.1007/978-1-4615-6561-1_6. Accessed 9 Dec 2019. spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.htm
- Warren, Mary Anne. “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion.” Monist, vol. 57, no. 1, 1973, pp. 43–61., doi:10.5840/monist197357133. Accessed 9 Dec 2019.
- “Why Pro-Life?” Why Pro-Life?, www.whyprolife.com/. Accessed 9 Dec 2019.
