Feel like a human?

Hilde Lindemann, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Michigan State University, was kind enough to send me a copy of her note to a colleague about my comments on her article in the Hastings Center Report’s Bioethics Forum in which she calls the South Dakota law banning all abortions except to save the life of the mother “misogynistic.” I questioned Dr. Lindemann’s use of the term “specific performance,” since the woman is being prevented from an act of intervention and from recruiting others to act, rather than being forced to act.

Hilde Lindemann wrote:
“This is a good question as well. I checked with a lawyer who thought the legal argument was sound, though I'm sure there could be other ways of looking at it. The intentional act that is not being done here, as I see it, isn't the initiation of an abortion; rather, it's the sustaining of the pregnancy. That's why I tried so hard to motivate the idea that human pregnancies are purposive activities, not passive states.”

(Emphasis mine)

Well then, since there "could be other ways to look at it," why not choose the non-violent, non-destructive and non-interventionist way that will preserve the life of the child as long as that life is not a threat to his or her mother's life? And since the author has made the accusation of misogyny, I'd like to remind her that there is a 52% chance that the child in each human pregnancy is a female child.

However, the basic argument does not stand. The fact of human biology and developmental embryology in particular is that pregnancy is no more an "intentional act of sustaining" than ovulation or any other physiological phase of the menstrual or life cycle. The medical and surgical technology to prevent conception predate and may require less intervention that the act of abortion. They certainly do not require the level or complexity of intention that a medical or surgical abortion involves.

Once fertilization occurs in vivo, no intentional act is necessary on the woman's part for the pregnancy to continue. On the contrary, the woman must intentionally act if she does not choose to sustain the pregnancy. In the example Lindemann gives of her daughter's "work" to sustain her pregnancy and to control high blood pressure and gestational diabetes is equally - if not more so - beneficial to the mother as it is to the child.

In the case of elective abortion as prohibited by the South Dakota law, the intervention forbidden or penalized is the participation of regulated medical professionals, medicines, and instruments with the specific intention to abort the child. As far as the actual procedure required, there would be no difference whether the woman or a third party such as the State chooses that this child is not to be born.

In order to “motivate the idea that human pregnancies are purposive activities and not passive states,” Dr. Lindemann must redefine “mother” as well as “person.” She ignores common terminology used in biology, law and every day life. We are asked to agree that a woman is not a mother until she feels like it and that the embryonic, fetal, and even neonatal human is not a person until he or she is "called into being."

One of the readers at LifeEthics.org, "j2," correctly observed after reading Lindemann’s essay that, "A mother in her world must give birth twice: once to herself and once to her perfectible child." (spelling edited)

Indeed, if personhood is determined by arbitrary measures such as each individual’s feelings about an individual human life, there is no security of individual “choice.” If the power to end human life belongs to anyone in position to define the personhood of that human, accusations of misogyny or any other sort of discrimination become irrelevant.

Of course the idea that Lindemann tries so hard to "motivate" not only requires her great effort to bring us to “a revised understanding of what pregnancy is,” but an esoteric redefinition of "personhood" that is not consistent with the legal precedent she defends - Roe v. Wade – and its benchmark of personhood beginning at birth.

Dr. Lindemann’s "personhood" would vary according to individual feelings without tangible qualifications and criteria, becoming even more arbitrary and transient than variations dependent on politics, religion, and tradition, rather than species. The status of each human life in this scenario is completely severed from common empirical observations and the predictions that we make from those observations in order to participate in science, law and society. We’ve moved beyond abortion to infanticide to feelings that someone is a person and deserving of protection from . . . whatever.

Dr. Lindemann says this “view may be wrong, but there are no publicly available means of showing that it is wrong.” If Dr. Lindemann is correct, we owe restitution to Andrea Yates and even Ted Bundy, not to mention all the men and women who were able to win others to share their particular feelings about personhood long enough to commit pogroms, racial cleansing, killing fields, purges, genocide and jihads. Or not, depending on how we feel.