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Abortion and the Morality of Nurturance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Paul Gomberg
Paul Gomberg*
Affiliation:
Chicago State University, Chicago, IL60628-1598, USA
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Extract

The moral problem of abortion seemed simple to describe, if not resolve. There was consensus that at least some methods of birth control—avoiding or preventing the development of a conceptus—were not wrong. There was consensus that it was wrong to kill another person like ourselves. The problem seemed to be this: when in the development toward adult life does it become wrong to prevent or terminate that development? The conservatives said, ‘from conception.’ Liberals said that it became wrong after viability, or after birth, or after early infancy. Some moderate liberals have argued that there is an intermediate stage where stopping the development of a fetus is wrong—but not the same as killing a person—because of the fetus’s similarity to or potential to become a person. While all agree on the moral principle that it is wrong to kill another person, there has been little progress toward agreement on how this principle applies to the fetus.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , December 1991 , pp. 513 - 524
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1991

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References

1 The conservative position on abortion is stated by Noonan, John T. Jr., ’An Almost Absolute Value in History,’ in Noonan, ed., The Morality of Abortion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1970) 1-59Google Scholar. The last several pages are frequently reprinted. A more developed argument for the conservative view is given by Baruch Brody, Abortion and the Sanctity of Human Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1975). A widely discussed presentation of an extremely liberal position (defending the innocuousness of infanticide) is Tooley, Michael ’Abortion and Infanticide,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (1972) 37-65.Google Scholar Tooley amplifies his argument in Abortion and Infanticide (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1983). Mary Anne Warren defends a similar position, but tries to back off on the issue of infanticide, in ’On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,’ The Monist 57 (1973) 43-61. Brandt Bolton, Martha ’Responsible Women and Abortion Decisions,’ in O’Neill, Onora and Ruddick, William eds., Having Children (New York: Oxford University Press 1979)Google Scholar puts the issue of abortion in the context of the array of moral responsibilities that may be part of a woman’s life. The papers by Noonan, Warren, and Bolton are reprinted in Munson, Ronald ed., Intervention and Reflection, 3rd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing 1988)Google Scholar.

I use the terms ’conservative’ and ’liberal’ for what are sometimes called the ‘pro-life’ and ’pro-choice’ positions because I believe the latter terms are politically more loaded and less accurate. As I will argue, the former terms capture the essence of much of the political difference between the two camps.

2 Gilligan, Carol In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1982)Google Scholar suggests that women’s orientations toward moral problems are often different from those of men. She does not suggest what is proposed here: that both men and women have within their repertoires of moral competence both the morality of relations between adults and the morality of nurturance. Also the morality of nurturance is not the same as what she calls ethic of care, which is a fully developed orientation toward moral problems. Still, this work is relevant to the discussion at hand. For the morality of relations between adults is the morality that governs the relations between agents in the world of business and commerce in capitalist societies, a domain of social life traditionally dominated by men. The morality of nurturance, in contrast, is an important component of the morality that governs family relations, where women have traditionally concentrated their concerns.

3 The suggestion of this paper is that this norm is part of the morality of our culture. I doubt that the morality of nurturance is derivable from principles governing moral relations between adults, the principle prohibiting killing of another person being paradigmatic of morality between adults. Hence I doubt the significance of both the attempts to derive a prohibition on abortion from potential to become an adult like ourselves, and the vindications of abortion which rely on criticisms of such arguments. For the latter see Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide, 178-83. Since the purpose of the present paper is only to understand the abortion debate, I adopt, methodologically, a moral intuitionism which articulates the moral imperatives commonly accepted in our culture.

4 I would speculate that our abhorrence of infanticide is related to the development of the technology of birth control. Societies that have had to limit population but have not had contraceptive technologies (all human societies throughout most of human prehistory) almost certainly had to practice infanticide. However emotionally difficult such a practice may have been, it was probably not severely condemned morally. The present controversy over abortion is probably partly due to the availability of pre-conceptive means of population control.

5 Rawls, John A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1971), 453-512Google Scholar (’The Sense of Justice’), esp. 485-90

6 For a published description of the personification of the fetus in late pregnancy see Katz Rothman, Barbara Recreating Motherhood (New York: Norton 1989), 97-105Google Scholar.

7 The idea that accepting a pregnancy is a crucial stage was suggested to me by a discussion with Charlotte Jackson. Laura Coleman pointed out to me that one can carry to term and never accept the pregnancy or develop a nurturing attitude. See Sandy Robey, ‘Weighing the Mother Load,’ The Chicago Tribune, May 14, 1989, Sect. 6, 1 for an account of a decision to accept a pregnancy. In that case, however, it seemed that nurturing attitudes were already at work in that decision. This suggests that the physical development of the fetus, combined with our awareness of what it will become, can cause us to accept a pregnancy.

8 But see Brody (63) for an attempt to explain why we might treat this particular instance of murder differently. I assume here that the conservatives are wrong, that abortion is not murder and that Warren and Tooley are correct. Otherwise there is no need for an alternative conception of the objection to abortion.

9 Of course, someone who does this is not necessarily a monster, but someone who, for whatever reason, did not develop a nurturing attitude toward this baby.

10 Infanticide is a common form of birth control when there are few other ways to limit births. See, for example, Harris, Marvin Cultural Anthropology (New York: Harper and Row 1983), 56-7Google Scholar. Killing of children may be murder and a violation of the morality of nurturance.

11 This conception of women’s roles by itself is enough to generate a condemnation of abortion, but not as akin to infanticide. That is, this conception of women’s roles does not by itself explain the focus on the fetus by the opponents of abortion.

If I am right about the importance of the conceptions of women’s roles to the abortion dispute, then the issue of abortion was raised in a more forthright way in the nineteenth century when, according to Linda Gordon, the criminalization of abortion was justified on the grounds that ‘abortion was a sign of women’s selfish ness in evading their prescribed destiny as mothers.’ See Linda Gordon, review of Barbara Katz Rothman, Recreating Motherhood, New York Times Book Review, April 16,1989.

12 Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press 1984). Page references to Luker’s study are in the text.

13 Bolton in Munson, 99

14 Ibid.

15 Many complexities of Luker’s study are omitted or inadequately covered here. She gives a sensitive account of how the conservatives’ views on abortion are tied to their conceptions of sexuality, spirituality, birth control, relations between husbands and wives, and human relationships generally. Most important, she shows how the dispute about abortion is an attempt by women whose lives exemplify different conceptions of women’s roles to defend the dignity and value of their lives.

16 On the difficulty of infanticide see Spencer, Robert F. The North Alaskan Eskimo: A Study in Ecology and Society, Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 171 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office 1959), 94Google Scholar, also 87-8, 92-3. On secrecy about infanticide, a secrecy that seems to indicate shame, see Lee, Richard The Kung San (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979), 451-2Google Scholar.

17 Two friends have reported to me that they have raised children that they considered aborting. They were explaining why they could not take abortion lightly. See also Robey (cited inn. 7).

18 I am indebted to many who contributed their ideas to this paper but who may not agree with my formulations and conclusions. I learned much from discussions with Charlotte Jackson, Laura Coleman, Donda West, and Maureen Ruder. Bonnie Bluestein and Michael Davis criticized an early draft; Mary Gomberg offered sharp criticisms of several later drafts. An anonymous editor and two anonymous referees for CJP made extensive criticisms of a late draft. I have tried to answer or incorporate all that I have learned from these many criticisms.