The owners of Hobby Lobby claim to oppose not only the termination of pregnancy in the technical sense, but also anything that impedes implantation of a fertilized egg. (In the technical sense, prior to implantation no pregnancy has yet been established.)
Hobby Lobby's position on this issue appears to be rooted in a certain view about the fertilized egg: At the moment of fertilization, it becomes a person with a person's rights--including the right to life.
Now there's more to their argument than that--and that something more should make those with a vaguely libertarian bent rather uneasy. After all, what does a right to life consist in? If I will die unless you let me into your home, does my right to life entail that if you lock me out you have committed homicide? Hobby Lobby would presumably have to say something along these lines if they want to insist that there is something seriously wrong with preventing implantation--which is a fair bit like denying me access to your home when I need such access in order to survive.
But let's grant all of this. Let's assume that the fertilized egg has a person's right to life, and that a person's right to life isn't limited to a right not to be killed but also puts demands on others: If I have a right to life and I need to use your body in order to survive, then you have a duty to make sure that I can gain access to it--and if you take steps to block me from gaining access, that's seriously wrong.
Let's assume all of that is true. If we adopt such a perspective, what ought we to think about a practice which results predictably in the deaths of more than half of all fertilized eggs that are involved in the practice? If you know, when you engage in a practice, that there is a good chance that a person will die--let's say a 50-60% chance--would it be permissible for you to engage in the practice?
Let's suppose that you have a worthy goal: You want to become a parent. Imagine a dystopian world where the only legal way to become a parent is to put in a request with a breeding factory--one which is fully automated, using artificial wombs and robotic childbirth and infant nursing machines. If you put in a request, the breeding factory goes to work--gestating a baby until viability and then evaluating the newborn for a period of time (a few weeks, say).Then the facility either delivers the newborn to you--or anesthetizes the infant and dumps it into a midden where it dies quickly from suffocation. Sometimes this happens because the evaluation protocols have judged the baby insufficiently healthy. Sometimes it happens inexplicably--it's just something the breeding factory does.
In fact, let us suppose it does it 50-60% of the time. More often than not, when you put in a request for a baby, the machine produces a baby and then dumps the living three-week-old into a midden heap to die.
Would it be morally problematic for you to make use of such a breeding facility? Most of us, I think, would say yes. After all, babies have a significant moral standing and a robust right to life--and making use of this facility entails that, on average, for every two beings with such moral significance who come into the world, one of them is automatically tossed away and left to die.
If a fertilized egg, pre-implantation, has that kind of moral standing, then there's a significant problem. Because fertilized eggs only successfully implant 40-50% of the time. The rest of the time, they are washed out of the uterus and die. If we really want to give to fertilized eggs the kind of moral standing that we give to three-week-old babies, then don't we need to regard every case of a couple trying to conceive as having the same problematic moral status that we attach to the parents putting in a request with the breeding factory?
Now let's modify our dystopian scenario just a bit. Let us suppose that all human beings are sterilized at birth, but they are implanted with a device that detects if and when they are engaged in sexual activity. Instead of putting in a request for a baby, in this future world you just have to start being sexually active--and a request is sent automatically. The detection device is imperfect, so the request only goes once in awhile, and is more likely to go out during full moons. To be sure the message is sent, you need to have sex fairly consistently, especially around the time of the full moon.
Now compare two couples who are sexually active in this dystopian world. Bill and Mary want a baby and are urgently trying to get the message through to the factory--and hence engaged in a practice which has a 50-60% chance of throwing a baby onto the midden heap. Carl and Nancy, however, have found a way to disable the transmitter so that it doesn't put in any requests for babies. But suppose that the disabling technique is not quite perfect. There is a 0.5% chance, say, that a request will go out anyway after a year of being sexually active. And when that happens, something about the disabling technique increases the chances that the baby produced will be thrown on the midden heap. Let's say the chance is 90%. Still, since the chance of a request going out is only 0.5%, the chance that Carl and Nancy' activity will send a child to the midden heap is 0.45%.
So, Bill and Mary are engaged in an activity that has a 50-60% of resulting in a living baby being thrown onto a midden heap to die. Carl and Nancy are engaged in an activity that has a 0.45% of producing this result. Who is morally better? Which choice is more problematic, morally?
Numbers aren't everything, of course, so the morality of their respective choices may not be simply a matter of consulting the numbers here. And in this dystopian world, taking he risks that Bill and Mary take is the only way for new children to come into the world. But something should be pretty clear: It's not obvious that Bill and Mary are doing nothing wrong while Carl and Nancy are engaged in moral wrong-doing. There's at least some reason to think that Carl and Nancy's behavior is less troubling, morally.
But if a fertilized egg, prior to implantation, has the same moral status as a three-week-old newborn baby, the couple trying to have a baby is like Bill and Mary, while the couple using an IUD is like Carl and Nancy. That is, if we adopt a key assumption made by advocates for Hobby Lobby's position on contraception, the couple trying to have a baby is engaged in activity that is at best morally suspect--and arguably more wrong, morally, than the couple that uses the IUD. Their key premise about the moral status of the fertilized egg can hardly justify the position which they in fact seem to take--namely, one in which a couple trying to conceive is doing something lovely, while the couple using the IUD is engaged in a serious moral wrong.
Note that most of these problems go away if we think that baby-like moral standing emerges at some point after implantation--that is, at some point after a pregnancy has started in the technical sense.
All of this leads me to conclude that there is something seriously muddled about the Hobby Lobby position. Am I missing something?
Moral analogies can be tricky. The huge difference between the hypothetical breeding machine and fertilized eggs in the womb is that the latter dies of natural causes. It is simply the way nature in its callous way works. Any medication that heightens the mortality rate for fertilized eggs cannot be considered a natural cause in the same way. Let us instead imagine a primitive society with an extremely high mortality rate for infants, let us say 600 deaths in every 1000 live births (it has probably never been this high, but for the sake of argument). Let us also imagine that they had discovered a contraceptive herb that was 99,5% effective in preventing pregnancies, but it had the side effect that any child who did get born after they used this herb had only 10% chance of survival. Would having children be more problematic than using this herb in such a context? Let us also imagine that the herb could be used as an emergency contraceptive (IUD can be used in this way up to five days after sexual intercourse, and its function in preventing implantation then becomes part of its primary function). Using the herb in this way would be not as effective in preventing pregnancy, but it would almost assure that the baby would not survive infancy. Would this be less problematic than having children naturally? (Continued)
ReplyDeleteI also do not think that the analogy of denying access to your home is quite apt, since the person you would deny in this case would be your own child. Even denying a child access to your own body, let’s say in refusing to breastfeed a child in a context where it would otherwise die, is a form of neglect comparable to homicide. This, of course, depends on seeing the fertilized egg as having a moral status similar to a child, but this can be a consistent moral convictions that is, however contestable, not so obviously false as to be illegitimate. I do not hold this conviction, by the way, but neither do I think the fact that most zygotes are destroyed prior to implantations is in and of itself a reason not to regard them as beings endowed with natural/God-given rights. Nature is after all cruel and heartless. Maybe each zygote is a human life that God will redeem and bring to completion. I do not know and I would not use my ignorance on this matter to restrict the medical choices of others, but I kind of respect those who have strong personal convictions about this. I too think that something marvelous, even sacred happens as early as conception, and, regardless of what we can call it at such an early stage and regardless of what rights we should presume that it has, we should treat even the earliest stages of the human embryo with some reverence.
ReplyDeleteWell, in conclusion, this whole conundrum is just one more reason why I'm not a big fan of insurance-based health care.
Best regards,
Øystein Evensen
Øystein,
DeleteThanks for these comments. They're thougthful and helpful. You're right that getting one's analogies just right in moral arguments is tricky. I think your analogy of the primitive society has some advantages over my analogy, but also has some disadvantages.
First, for better or worse (and probably without warrant) we tend in the developed world to think of primitive peoples as different from ourselves in such a way that we don't hold them to the same moral standards as ourselves--which creates problems for tapping into our intuitions in cases that feature primitive peoples.
Second, I was trying to construct an analogy in which the deaths of the children results from an automatic process that cuts them off from what they need for survival (as opposed to being caused by an intrinsic health problem, illness, injury, predation, etc.), but which does not involve suffering.
I think your analogy can be tweaked so as to address both problems--and the result will likely be a more effective analogy than what I started with.
You're right that refusing to provide another access to what is yours, when their survival depends on it likely has a different moral status when the one being refused is your own child--but this gets tricky, too. We implicitly import many assumptions when we say, "It's your child,"--and not all of these assumptions may be apt in the case of a fertilized egg prior to implantation (even assuming it has something like the moral standing of a person). But I was a bit too quick there, in part because I knew I was going to grant this perspective for the sake of argument in order to focus on my analogy. At the very least, a careful treatment of this issue would attend to the difference between cases in which you are partly responsible for the person's plight and cases in which you aren't.
I share your sense of the marvelous character of the development of new life--and don't find abortion morally innocuous. There is a real moral dilemma here--but I think that the dilemma should be seriously wrestled with by the individuals involved in the course of reaching a decision in line with their conscience, as opposed to a decision being imposed by third parties.
Thanks again for the thoughtful comments. If I ever develop something like the analogy in the post above into a formal paper, I'll take your remarks into account and credit you.
--Eric
“Thanks for these comments. They're thougthful and helpful. You're right that getting one's analogies just right in moral arguments is tricky. I think your analogy of the primitive society has some advantages over my analogy, but also has some disadvantages.”
ReplyDeleteThank you :) Such feedback really means a lot to me. I agree that a better analogy could be made that would address both your point and mine. All analogies are limited, and mine is by no means an exception.
“We implicitly import many assumptions when we say, "It's your child,"--and not all of these assumptions may be apt in the case of a fertilized egg prior to implantation (even assuming it has something like the moral standing of a person).”
I’m not sure if I understand that. If a fertilized egg can be defined as a child in some form or another, there can be no doubt that it is the child of the woman carrying it, at least not if it’s been naturally conceived.
“I share your sense of the marvelous character of the development of new life--and don't find abortion morally innocuous. There is a real moral dilemma here--but I think that the dilemma should be seriously wrestled with by the individuals involved in the course of reaching a decision in line with their conscience, as opposed to a decision being imposed by third parties.”
I couldn’t agree more. In this, and many other issues, those who seem to shout the loudest and be most assured in their convictions are often those who are least affected by them. My point was rather to defend the individual’s right to hold moral convictions that may be at odds with how society regularly views things. Even though I ‘m strongly opposed to the discrimination of gays and lesbians and though I think it absurd that women should not be allowed to teach and minister in the church, I do not think that churches should be forced to marry gay and lesbian couples, or hire female minsters, priests and bishops. If (or when) society at large does go awfully wrong in their convictions, we should be thankful for those who dare to dissent and challenge our moral thinking. For the various reasons you have mentioned, I do not think that the Hobby Lobby-case is a good example of this. As you say, providing their employees with a health insurance covering (what they would see as) morally problematic contraceptives should not make them morally liable for how their employees choose to use this insurance. But in principle, if not in this particular case, I respect the Green family’s right to take a moral stance when they feel they are morally or religiously obligated to do so. I’m not implying that you don’t, by the way.
The issue of how we should treat unborn human organisms may be the only one in which I have some sympathy with conservatives, but I think they go about it the wrong way. If they really cared about the unborn babies they should provide significant financial aid and other benefits to employees who decide to keep them and work to create a society in in which no family need fear for their future. Conservatives seem to support politics that make it more likely (in some cases almost necessary) for women to choose abortion rather than less.
-Øystein