Opinionator | The Stone: Should Pope Francis Rethink Abortion?

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Pope Francis has raised expectations of a turn away from the dogmatic intransigence that has long cast a pall over the religious life of many Roman Catholics. His question "Who am I to judge?" suggested a new attitude toward homosexuality, and he is apparently willing to consider allowing the use of contraceptives to prevent sexually transmitted diseases. But his position on what has come to be the hierarchy's signature issue — abortion — seems unyielding. "Reason alone is sufficient to recognize the inviolable value of each single human life," he declared in his recent apostolic exhortation, "Evangelii Gaudium," adding: "Precisely because this involves the internal consistency of our message about the value of the human person, the church cannot be expected to change her position on this question."

Revising the ban on abortion would not contradict the pope's overall commitment to the 'value of the human person.'

I want to explore the possibility, however, that the pope might be open to significant revision of the absolute ban on abortion by asking what happens if we take seriously his claim that "reason alone is sufficient" to adjudicate this issue. What actually follows regarding abortion once we accept the "inviolable value of each single human life"? This appeal to rational reflection has been a central feature of the tradition of Catholic moral teaching. I put forward the following reflections in the spirit of this tradition.

There is considerable rational basis for moral concern about abortions. In many (probably most) cases, it would be immoral to abort a pregnancy. (Note, however, that this by no means implies that most abortions actually performed are immoral.) Late-term fetuses, for example, are no different biologically or psychologically from babies born prematurely at the same stage of development. It's hard to see how killing a premature baby is immoral but killing an identical late-term fetus isn't. At a minimum, aborting a healthy late-term fetus would, except when the mother's life is at risk, be immoral — which is no doubt why it is seldom, if ever, done.

Further, from conception on, an embryo or fetus is at least potentially human in the sense that, allowed to develop along its natural path, there is a human life ahead for it. As the philosopher Don Marquis has pointed out, one reason it's wrong to kill a human being is that, when you take a life, you take away a human future. The same is true when you kill a potential human being: All the human goods that it might have enjoyed are eliminated. At the very least, even early abortions for trivial reasons (e.g., not having to postpone a trip or pass up an athletic competition) would be immoral, even if not the "murder" of pro-life rhetoric.

At the same time, the "inviolable value of each human life" does not imply that no abortion can be moral. Here the case of rape is especially relevant. It is hard to claim that a rape victim has a moral duty to bring to term a pregnancy forced on her by rape, even if we assume that there is a fully human person present from the moment of conception. We might admire someone who has the heroic generosity to do this, but talk of murder is out of place. As the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson has noted, if someone kidnapped you and connected your kidneys to those of someone who would die unless the connection were maintained for the next nine months, you would hardly be obliged to go along with this. How can we require a woman pregnant by a rapist to do essentially the same thing?

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Other exceptions to the condemnation of abortion arise once we realize that an early-stage embryo may be biologically human but still lack the main features — consciousness, self-awareness, an interest in the future — that underlie most moral considerations. An organism may be human by purely biological criteria, but still merely potentially human in the full moral sense. As we saw, Marquis's argument shows that killing a potential human is in itself bad, but there's no reason to think that we are obliged to preserve the life of a potential human at the price of enormous suffering by actual humans.

Another point, seldom discussed, is that not even pro-life advocates consistently act on their belief that any embryo has full moral standing. As the philosopher Peter Smith has noted, they do not, for example, support major research efforts to prevent the miscarriages or spontaneous abortions (many so early that they aren't ordinarily detected) that occur in about 30 percent of pregnancies. If 30 percent of infants died for unknown reasons, we would all see this as a medical crisis and spend billions on research to prevent these deaths. The fact that pro-life advocates do not support an all-out effort to prevent spontaneous abortions indicates that they themselves recognize a morally relevant difference between embryos and human beings with full moral standing.

There is, then, a strong case for thinking that abortions always bring about some bad results — at a minimum the loss of potential human life — and that for most pregnancies abortion would be morally wrong. But this conclusion is limited in two ways: A woman's right to control her reproductive life can, as in the case of rape, offset even a person's right to life; and at least at the earlier stages of pregnancy, the embryo has only the moral standing of potential, not actual, human life, which may be overridden by harm to humans with full moral standing.

These limitations, I suggest, correspond to the "very difficult situations" (such as "rape" and "extreme poverty") in which the pope, in "Evangelii Gaudium," admitted the church has "done little to adequately accompany women." Allowing for exceptions to the moral condemnation of abortion in some of these painful situations would not contradict the pope's overall commitment to the "value of the human person." Rather, it would admit what reason shows: There are morally difficult issues about abortion that should be decided by conscience, not legislation. The result would be a church acting according to the pope's own stated standard: preaching not "certain doctrinal or moral points based on specific ideological options" but rather the gospel of love.

Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, "Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960″ and writes regularly for The Stone.