Saturday, October 08, 2005

pregnancy as a practice

an under-discussed feature of abortion is the fact that it is the interruption of a process. this is an obvious fact, and is reflected even in our other uses of the words 'abortion' and 'abort' (e.g. "mission aborted"). to abort something is not simply to do something, but is to stop something else from happening. when a pregnancy ends in abortion, what is stopped is the process of development of whatever is in the womb. in this sense, people commonly speak of 'aborting a fetus.'

but we can also think of abortion not only as ending the process of development for a fetus, but as ending the process of the pregnancy. that is, the pregnancy itself is a process -including, among other things, things that the mother is doing and things that are happening to the mother- and this process is ended by an abortion. some people, it seems, even prefer to speak of abortion with reference to the pregnancy rather than with reference to the developing human in the womb, as when pro-choice advocates commonly speak of a right to 'terminate a pregnancy.'

when pregnancy is discussed with reference to abortion, there is sometimes a tendency to think of pregnancy as a merely biological phenomenon -for example, focusing on what is happening physically at various stages of a pregnancy. while pregnancy is no doubt a biological phenomenon, a human pregnancy is also a distinctly human phenomenon. that is, a pregnancy is more that just a set of biological changes or developments, but it is something that can be conceptualized in certain ways, something that can be valued and express values, something that can be done in a particular way with particular intentions. thus, we can speak of a pregnancy as 'going well' in a merely biological sense -e.g. no physiological problems for mother or child. but we can also speak of a pregnancy going well or going poorly in a different, distinctly human, sense -e.g. with reference to the attitudes of the mother and father to their child, how they are preparing themselves to be parents, etc.

what i have in mind here is that we can think of a pregnancy something like what alasdair macintyre has called a practice, by which he means a rule-governed activity with goods internal to it. macintyre has pointed out that dying, far from being a merely biological phenomenon, can also be a practice -that there are ways to die well and ways to die poorly, that there are various goods at stake in the activity of dying and understandable ways of securing or failing to secure those goods, etc. what macintyre has in mind for the end stages of human life, i suggest, can also be applied to the beginning stages of human life.

my hope, moreover, is that we might be able to make progress in our thinking about abortion if we begin by thinking about pregnancy as a practice. in doing so, we will ask about the kinds of goods that are internal to a pregnancy, and about what sort of attitudes and beliefs and activities underlie a good pregnancy, as well as what attitudes and beliefs and activities can be destructive of a good pregnancy. we will also want to know how a good pregnancy relates to living well in general. my suspicion is that in thinking this way about pregnancy, we might be able to unearth and explore some of our commitments and intuitions related to humans at the very early stages of development and what our proper response might be to such developing human beings.

i see no reason why this strategy of inquiry ought to seen as biased toward either side of the abortion debate. in fact, one of the strengths of such a strategy may be that it keeps in view things that each side are eager to stress: for pro-lifers, it keeps in view the fact that we are dealing with a developing human being, and for pro-choicers, it keeps in view the fact that we are dealing with a woman who sustaining that developing human being. moreover, beginning with pregnancy as a practice allows us to keep in mind that this practice is a social one, inevitably structured various aspects of a given society and culture, and inevtiably connected to a host of other practices -most notably sexual practices and child-rearing practices.

this post, unfortunatly, is only something of a promissory note. i will try to post something soon that is more concrete, something that looks at various aspects of pregnancy and actually does what i am here proposing we should do. of course, i also would be very interested in what other folks might have to say about this.

Sunday, October 02, 2005

a note on viability

much is sometimes made about the issue of 'viability' in talking about abortion. for example, both the roe and casey decisions by the supreme court make reference to the notion of 'viability.' and many people seem to feel that if a developing human being cannot survive outside the womb, then abortion is permissible.

when saying that something in the womb is not viable, many people seem to have in something like this: there is something in the womb that is alive, and if we were to take it out of the womb and hold it in our hands, or put it on a table, it would die very quickly.

in general, viability seems to involve the idea that a living thing is able to sustain its own life, given the proper context. a healty, adult human being would seem to be a paradigm of viability. but such an animal can survive only given the proper environment -a human being is not 'viable' on the surface of the moon wearing only a t-shirt and shorts. likewise, a one-week old baby is not able to sustain its own life if left on a table to fend for itself. on the other hand, some adult human beings are unable to sustain their own lives without the aid of various medicines or complex equipment, such as ventilators.

because human beings go through various stages of development, the specific things required for them to survive change over time. typically, a human baby at 6 weeks is dependent on others to a greater degree than a human at 6 years, and in that sense we might even say that a human baby at 6 weeks is 'less viable' -that is, less able to keep itself alive on its own. at the same time, a healthy human baby at 6 weeks is perfectly able to keep itself going, given the proper environment, and in that sense is fully viable.

what, then, about a developing human being at 8 weeks in utero? what is the proper environment for a developing human at this stage? surely, the proper environment is a healthy womb. and, given a healthy womb, a healthy human at 8 weeks gestation is perfectly capable of sustaining its own life. this is not to deny, of course, that at 8 weeks in the womb a developing human is incredibly dependent -in particular it is dependent on its mother (although, dependent in a secondary sense on many other people -doctors and nurses, as well as the people on whom the mother is dependent for her survival). the point, however, is that at 8 weeks gestation, a devoloping human may be dependent in a unique way on something outside itself, but it is not unique in being dependent on something outside itself.

my aim here is not to suggest that there is somethign non-sensical or unintelligible about the notion of 'viability' typically invoking in discussions of abortion. rather, i want to ask: why should that notion matter very much in helping us to determine our response to developing human beings prior to birth? of course, there may be good reasons for thinking that such a notion of viability is important for guiding our response to such humans, but i can't as yet see how this could be.