The Unnatural in Pursuit of the Unreal
A Defense of Abortion
by David Boonin
Cambridge University Press, 2002
(350 pages; $23.00, paperback)
reviewed by Anne Barbeau Gardiner
The blurb on the opening page informs us that Daniel Boonin has written, in A Defense of Abortion, “the most thorough and detailed case for the moral permissibility of abortion yet published.” The book evolved from a college course on abortion that the author has taught since 1995, and it is one in a series of “Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Public Policy,” recommended for students of applied ethics and bioethics.
Boonin is not content to let the debate on abortion end with “reasonable people” continuing to disagree. He is sure he can persuade the critics of abortion that, in typical cases, abortion is “morally permissible,” his word permissible here meaning “justified” and in no need of excuse. His task in this book is to prove “rationally” that the most powerful arguments against abortion are “ultimately unsuccessful.” He believes he has achieved his goal by using the very premises and terms accepted by the critics of abortion.
The Right Properties
But from the start, there is a lack of coherence in Boonin’s language and reasoning. In the first chapter, he presents us with the following unreal situation: We are to suppose that an “uncontroversial example” of an individual with the right to life has suddenly been found to have no human DNA, but to be an alien from another planet. Since this individual still has the same “properties” he had before we found him out, it is not permissible to kill him. The properties that give this imaginary alien the right to life are a key to the entire book. For Boonin keeps insisting, as we read on, that only the acquisition, possession, and retention of certain properties can give us the right to life.
The term property/properties keeps tolling like a bell, page after page; for example, on pages 62 and 118 it recurs ten times. For Boonin, the human fetus has no soul, no substantial identity, and it needs “some other fetal property beyond its species membership” to have a right to life. Even if one has the property of personhood as an adult, it does not mean he had it as a fetus, for personhood is not an essential, but only an accidental property, which one must acquire and can lose.
In the second chapter, Boonin returns to this imaginary alien, whose right to life trumps that of a human fetus. The crucial property possessed by this imaginary creature is “a brain exactly like ours.” Boonin declares that when “the fetus acquires a property, namely, the possession of a brain like ours, that might account for its having the same right to life as you and I.”
What is “a brain like ours”? A human fetus develops a three-part brain by the twenty-fifth day of gestation and has noticeable brain activity after the sixth week, but Boonin calls this early brain not “morally important.” Why? Because he sees “two distinct properties”—the mere “possession of a brain” and the “possession of a functioning brain.” Only the latter gives one the right to life. By “functioning,” Boonin means organized cortical brain activity that can be recorded in an EEG. Since fetal brain waves like this have been recorded only after the twenty-fifth week of a pregnancy, Boonin finds this to be evidence that the fetus is not “conscious” till then.
Regarding the fetus’s behavior in the anti-abortion video Silent Scream, he assures us it can be better explained as unconscious reaction to physical stimuli. Hence, an imaginary alien with no human DNA can be deemed a person with the right to life, but an indisputably human fetus with a human brain and human reactions cannot.
More Surreal Examples
Anne Barbeau Gardiner is Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She has published on Dryden, Milton, and Swift, as well as on Catholics of the 17th century.
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19.1—January/February 2006
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27.2—March/April 2014
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