How Does Our Evolutionary History Affect the Abortion Debate
As much as we like to deny it, humans are easily persuaded one way or another by emotions. Let’s put the philosophical arguments for and against abortion to the side for a minute. There are ways for abortions to be performed from day 0 (when the zygote is formed) to week 40 (when the baby is about to be born and assuming that the pregnancy lasted the estimated 40 weeks). Among the generic pro-life camp, there are self-identifying pro-lifers who say they oppose most abortions but make exceptions based on e.g. gestational age or abnormally difficult circumstances. Among the generic pro-choice camp, there are self-identifying pro-choicers who say they support most abortions except for e.g. those in the third trimester or those where pregnancy occurs because of irresponsibility. Let us briefly imagine not what a zygote is, but what he/she looks like (biological sex markers are present from the moment of conception). A zygote is tiny though just about visible to the naked eye. See the picture below.
“Zygote.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Zygote&oldid=1172989680.
Now consider what a 40 week baby looks like.
“Infant.” Wikipedia, 24 June 2023. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Infant&oldid=1161671013.
Depending on which image you use, it benefits different sides of the abortion debate. In Washington D.C. for example, abortion is legal up to birth. To argue against this, it is often not necessary to present a robust moral case. An image of a newborn is often enough to realize how evil it would be for an abortionist to kill him/her. Yet, our political leaders turn a blind eye. But we must be careful not to rely too much on images. They help to express our ethical views but we must be clear that we don’t consider the 40-week-old baby worthy of legal protection from abortion just because the baby looks vulnerable or looks human. Our fundamental point is that the baby is vulnerable and is human, regardless of what the baby looks like. If I randomly presented a person with an image of a zygote and I told them “This is a cell, try and guess which animal it’s from”, the person would probably fail and fair enough. The cell doesn’t look distinctively human. And here is where the pro-choice side allows emotions to unjustly affect their reasoning. “The zygote doesn’t look human," they say, and “an embryo is just a ball of cells that cannot do this and that and does not have a developed brain or heart.”
Many pro-choicers essentially let one image of a zygote settle the debate for them but miss a particularly crucial point - that human evolution has introduced bias. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans could not see inside a mother’s womb, altering our perception of what kinds of objects in the world are human beings. Our perception became sufficiently biased against zygotes such that when we finally started to capture photographs of zygotes, many people wondered why this mere cell had the right to live. Our senses can be unreliable so we have to critically evaluate the moral status of a zygote independently of what he/she looks like. Here’s another example of a similar bias. For most of human evolutionary history, killing humans was gruesome. You would stab, poison, suffocate, drown, or burn someone. Most people saw this as wrong (except in e.g. self-defense) and over time our bodies got used to reacting negatively to the sight of someone being killed. But nowadays, people can be killed painlessly. Hypothetically, I could inject my roommate with a poison that kills him quickly and painlessly in his sleep. Though it is still murder, it is harder to react viscerally towards it because we’re not used to seeing murder look like this. Likewise, we are not used to associating a zygotic cell with a human being who deserves protection from abortion. A book cannot be judged by its cover.
Julian Jimenez is a Senior in the College majoring in Philosophy with a concentration in bioethics and a minor in Theology.
