Abortion is Wrong Even if a Fetus Isn't a Person
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The Torture Emporium
Jeff works as a nurse at the local hospital where he cares for braindead people whose bodies are being kept on life support. With the hospital manager’s permission, Jeff sometimes takes a few of the braindead bodies home with him. Jeff likes to torture the braindead bodies for fun by flaying off pieces of skin and putting hot coals in the intestines. Jeff invites some goth kids from the local high school to join in the fun! Seeing a business opportunity, Jeff opens a Torture Emporium where sadists can come to torture braindead bodies to their heart’s content.
Is there anything morally wrong with Jeff’s actions? Braindead bodies can’t feel any pain. A braindead body is not a person. Still, I think most people would say there’s something morally wrong with what Jeff is doing and his Torture Emporium shouldn’t be allowed.
***WARNING - GRAPHIC IMAGE BELOW***
During a Dilation and Evacuation abortion (D&E), the abortionist crushes the fetus/baby’s skull with forceps so that it can be pulled out of the mother. The fetus/baby is ripped limb from limb so that it can be taken out of the mother in pieces. The level of ghoulishness of a D&E abortion seems similar to the level of ghoulishness of Jeff’s Torture Emporium. If we think that there would be good arguments to make Jeff’s Torture Emporium illegal we should also think there are good arguments to make abortion illegal.
Desecrating a Corpse
Even though a brain-dead body is not a life, it has the aura of life, and so to torture a braindead body would be a depraved act and it would indicate a depraved attitude toward human dignity. This is part of the reasoning behind our laws against desecrating corpses. An embryo also has the aura of life. While an embryo of course does not have the same value as a person, I don’t think an embryo is as valueless as a piece of dirt. If embryos must be destroyed, they should be disposed of respectfully.
Two Stages of Abortion
The Catholic Church’s traditional view was that the fetus/baby’s was endowed with a soul at quickening - the point at which the fetus/baby begins to move its body. A woman who had an abortion after that point was treated as a murderer, while a woman who had an abortion before quickening was given a much lesser punishment. These two tiers of punishment are compatible with the view that a fetus/baby becomes a person at quickening, but that abortion is bad even when the fetus/baby is not a person. One explanation of why abortion would be bad even when the fetus/baby is not a person might be that abortion is a ghoulish act, it indicates a depraved mind, and it is likely to make a mind even more depraved. Jeff’s actions with the Torture Emporium are less bad than murder, but they are blameworthy to some degree.
Exceptions
A defender of abortion might argue that abortion is not analogous to the Torture Emporium because women often choose abortion as the least bad of several bad options, while Jeff tortures brain-dead bodies just for fun. It’s true that an act that would be ghoulish if performed for fun, might be necessary under some special circumstances. For example, Jeff’s bloody activities with the brain-dead bodies might be morally justified if they would somehow prevent a woman from becoming pregnant with her rapist’s offspring.
“Shout your abortion” is ghoulish. The best policy would recognize that abortion is always a bad thing, but that it might be necessary in some rare special circumstances.
You might want to put some kind of warning before the picture of the crushed baby head. Wasn't ready for that!
1) Certain actions reveal things about the actor that cause us to have lower trust in them.
2) Certain actions alter the psychology of the actor to make them less trustworthy.
These things can be independent of the actual effect of the action. For instance, let us say that somebody gets a realistic doll of a woman, then engages in sado-masochistic sexual acts with them and ritualistic torture murder. The doll is even less alive than your theoretical brain dead body, but the effect is fairly similar. You would never trust such a person, regardless of whether their action caused "harm" (it likely harms their psyche).
To be totally honest, if I didn't think abortion had such strong connotations for #1 and #2 I wouldn't be as offended by it. I would probably put it in the same category as birth control. But it clearly effects #1 and #2 in a way birth control does not.
P.S. Your brain dead scenario plays out in "Kill Bill". The protagonists violently murders the assailants.