Is It Not a Child?
In a college course I teach on human cultural understanding of death, we discuss a number of topical questions in contemporary social policy. Capital punishment gets a few weeks, as does euthanasia, and also abortion. One of the sources I routinely give students on this last topic is James Q. Wilson’s excellent, now-classic essay, “On Abortion” (Commentary, January 1994). Written in the mid-1990s, and thus during the Roe regime, the article carefully describes the moral and philosophical complexity of the essential questions involved in considering this topic: What, precisely, is the nature and status of the entity one is considering destroying? Is it a person, and how do we know? If so, was it always a person, or did it become such at a specific time? And if a specific time, when and how?
Wilson also offers a perspicacious consideration of how, in a society like ours, we might minimally ensure that all involved parties in this matter are taking on the decision with the requisite moral seriousness. He says that human beings use many sources of information to make decisions about what things are and are not persons, and one of those sources —a particularly important one for a highly ocularly-oriented species like ours —involves visual evidence. Now that ultrasound imagery of fetuses is so cheaply and easily obtainable, he suggests, we might want to require all women considering abortion to look at such images of what is in their wombs, to help fill out their base of knowledge and moral decision-making.
Every year in which I’ve offered the piece to students, they show much appreciation for the thoughtful nature of Wilson’s analysis. There are also usually a few students with criticisms of his essay. Post-Dobbs, those criticisms have gotten louder and more numerous.
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Alexander T. Riley is a senior fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and a member of the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars.
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