by Tim Sommers
It’s not often that you get a new argument on such a well-canvassed issue, but starting in 2018 Perry Hendricks began energetically defending variations on what he calls the impairment argument against abortion. It attempts to establish the wrongness of abortion without taking a stand on whether the fetus is a person, in much the same way that Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous violinist example tried to establish the permissibility of abortion even if the fetus is a person. Hendricks’ argument has generated an extensive secondary literature in bioethics and, basically, nothing anywhere else. Here I want to present his argument and my own counterexample, which I will call the Pro-Choice Astronaut.
Hendricks’ original argument can be presented in five steps. If it is immoral to impair the fetus by giving it fetal alcohol syndrome, then, all other things being equal, it is immoral to kill the fetus. It is immoral to impair the fetus by giving it fetal alcohol syndrome; therefore, it is immoral to kill the fetus. To abort a fetus is (in most cases) to kill it. So, all other things being equal, to abort a fetus is (in most cases) immoral. The strength of the argument is that it operates by analogy from a case in which the wrongness is widely accepted even by those who think abortion is permissible.
On the other hand, imagine an astronaut, call her Sally, who is pregnant and who has agreed to a space mission of substantial duration. She knows that the radiation exposure and other stresses of extended spaceflight will severely impair the fetus she carries. She also intends, on return, to terminate the pregnancy. She is not deceived about what the mission will do to the fetus and she knows what she will do upon return. After careful reflection on the facts, her own psychological states, and, perhaps, after consulting with others, she undertakes the mission.
There is no question of irresponsibility here, apart from the question of whether or not the abortion is, in and of itself, irresponsible. Sally is not drinking, taking drugs, or behaving recklessly or thoughtlessly. She is doing her job, which happens to be a job for which she has trained, with which she has been entrusted, and which (we will stipulate in the first variant) carries great social value. The fetal impairment is foreseen and accepted as part of the cost of doing the mission, but the fetus she would otherwise carry to term is not being prepared for a life of impairment. It is being impaired and, then, separately, will be aborted.
Consider three variants of the case, in decreasing order of socially recognized importance.
Variant 1 (Lifesaving): The mission includes the production of a drug that can only be performed in microgravity and that will save many lives. Further. Sally is the only person qualified to perform the task. Failing to undertake the mission would cost lives at scale. Sally undertakes the mission. The fetus is impaired in the course of doing so. She aborts on return. Many lives are saved.
Variant 2 (Moderate): The mission produces real, but modest, social value. It advances scientific understanding in a meaningful way, let’s say, but it does not save lives. It benefits some people in the future via scientific or technological gains. Sally is the most qualified person to perform it, though others could be trained.
Variant 3 (Self-Regarding): The mission is of value primarily to Sally herself. It is the achievement of a life goal, the culmination of all her training, sweat, and ambition. She pursued this long before the pregnancy. It will advance her career, satisfy her aspirations, but produce no social benefit for others.
My claim is that, in all three variants, Sally does no wrong by undertaking the mission. The lifesaving case is the easiest; the moderately valuable case should also be uncontroversial once one notices that the moral structure has not changed from the first case. While the self-regarding case is most likely to generate pushback, I believe that we should conclude that it, too, is permissible. And I would argue that if the case is permissible in any of these variants, the impairment argument is in trouble. If it is permissible in all three, the argument is decisively defeated.
I think the appearance of wrongdoing in these cases is misleading for three reasons. First, the action Sally is being asked to undertake is not the abortion. It is the mission. The abortion is permissible if abortion is generally permissible, which the impairment argument is supposed to establish, not assume. So, the question Variant 3 puts is whether a pregnant woman who intends, by hypothesis, to undergo an otherwise permissible abortion is required to subordinate her career, ambition, or self-realization to the welfare of a fetus she will not carry to term. To answer, yes, is to assign the fetus interests that override the agent’s, which is to assign it something very close to full moral status. This is basically the personhood claim that the impairment argument was supposed to circumvent.
Second, the conventional standard for the wrongness of self-regarding behavior during pregnancy is, arguably, quite permissive. A pregnant woman is permitted to skydive, travel to high altitudes, train for ultramarathons, work demanding jobs, and decline burdensome accommodations of fetal interests even when these activities carry some risk of fetal harm and are pursued for purely personal reasons. The pro-choice astronaut case differs from these in degree, not in kind.
Once we accept that some self-regarding risk-taking during pregnancy is permissible, the question is where the line falls, and a stipulated intent to abort places Sally’s case below, not above, the threshold of wrongness that ordinary risk-taking pregnant women already cross without moral censure.
Third, the alternative verdict is unstable. If Variant 3 is wrong because the impairment is undertaken for merely personal goals, then the wrongness of the impairment is parasitic on a judgment about the inadequacy of Sally’s reasons. That is, it’s a judgment about her, not about the impairment as such, and it imports exactly the kind of evaluation of women’s reasons for abortion that the impairment argument was advertised to avoid. And if Variant 3, the most permissible form of the impairment argument, fails, then the impairment argument fails across the full range of cases. You won’t be surprised that I think the Pro-Choice astronaut is right.
I should say, by the way, that Hendricks is a controversial figure in philosophy, not least of all, because he wrote a widely-condemned paper called “Abortion is Good for Black Women.” (I am not linking to it. The argument is bad as well as offensive. It reads like a third-rate debate case. And it’s not hard to find, if you really want to see it.) I mention this because, well, on the one hand, full-disclosure, and, on the other hand, there is something going on in the Hendircks’ article that resists the tools of analytic philosophy. Why did Hendrick’s choose fetal alcohol syndrome for his thought experiment? Why “black women” in his other article? Nothing in the first argument requires the pregnant person to be a particular race, nothing in the secod requires this one very particular source of impairment. The topic of fetal alchol syndrome surged in the 1980s which is, well, to be fair, quite a while back. But back then fetal alcohol syndrome inspired a moral panic well beyond what was warranted by the data. Furthermore, the moral condemnation of FAS, which is only caused by very heavy drinking, and not moderate drinking, became a moral prohibition on any kind of drinking while pregnant. What is all that suppoused to mean? I think I will leave that to you.