Chickens and eggs

Abortion, viability, and rounding errors

What came first, the chicken or the egg? Actually, that’s a stupid question: it’s the egg, of course. The egg is an early stage in the life cycle that, if all goes well, ends in a chicken. This fact is embodied in the admonition not to count your chickens until they hatch.

But note how how this saying inadvertently promotes an egg to a chicken. You’re counting “chickens” that aren’t even chickens yet, and might never become chickens, which is why you shouldn’t be counting them. Effectively, it “rounds up” the egg to what it might one day become, and therein lies the problem.

This part really isn’t complicated: a thing is not (yet) what we expect it to become. It is potential, not actual. A seed is not a tree, even if it may one day be. A person is not corpse, even though that’s really only a matter of time. If and when the time comes, fine, its status changes and we treat it differently. But not until then. Why jump the gun?

We don’t bury the living just because they’ll die someday. Yet this sort of confusion about the actual and potential status of things forms the basis of arguments against a woman’s right to choose. You can see this in the self-contradictory term, “unborn child”, which makes as much sense as “living corpse”.

Come back here, you living corpse, I’m here to bury you! Stop insisting on your rights as a person; I’m rounding you up to a cadaver!!!

The ethics of abortion are often framed in terms of personhood. If it’s a person, it has rights, so killing it is murder. But this quickly turns into a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey with blind attempts at sticking a pin through the magic moment at which personhood is achieved. Spoiler alert: there is no such moment because there’s no such thing as magic. Real life is more complicated.

An ovum and a spermatozoon are individual cells, and I don’t think anyone mistakes either for a person. If things go well, however, they might join together to eventually become a newborn in about 40 weeks. Just as uncontroversially, it doesn’t seem as though anyone denies that this newborn should be treated as a person. So, somewhere between these two points in time, in this gray area, the potential person transitions into an actual one. That’s where the controversy is to be found.

Those who oppose female bodily autonomy justify it by prematurely promoting a potential person to an actual one. Many of them argue that life (by which they mean personhood; they don’t understand ethics) begins at conception (by which they mean fertilization, not implantation; they’re ignorant about medicine, too). This is muddled and entirely arbitrary, but it yields their desired conclusion, so they stick with it.

A more recent trend is to claim it starts with having a heartbeat, but since that’s about 5 weeks in, it’s usually before the woman even knows she’s pregnant, so it serves the same purpose. (Even then, it’s not an actual heartbeat, as there’s no heart yet, just a measurable electrical signal.) Either way, they want us to treat something which cannot survive on its own as a person.

This is relevant because, so long as the embryo or fetus is wholly dependent upon the pregnant woman, there is no way for us to grant it rights except by taking hers away. And while the personhood of a fetus is questionable, there’s no question about the woman being a person. It’s her body, her rights, her choice. If she chooses to give up some of those rights to transfer them to the fetus, that’s fine so long as it’s her choice and not ours.

A note on terminology. When a woman decides she will carry the pregnancy to term, it’s entirely fair to round her up to a mother and round the fetus (or, really, even embryo or zygote) up to a child or baby. There’s nothing offensive about that and doctors do it routinely. But if she hasn’t, then such rounding up is both dishonest and emotionally manipulative. It’s where you get bullshit phrases like “mothers murdering their babies” in reference to abortion.

It’s not murder because the fetus has not earned any rights on its own and the woman has not chosen to give it rights at her own expense. If she did, then killing it would indeed be murder. So if someone sticks a knife in a pregnant woman’s uterus and kills the fetus, that’s murder, but an abortion isn’t. By the same token, there is no contradiction between allowing abortion and opposing pregnant women doing things that would lead to a newborn that is unhealthy.

This all goes back to viability. I said before that there’s no magical point, and that’s because it’s gradual. Fetal viability is not a phase change, like ice melting into water. It’s more like tar slowly turning soft until it flows. There’s solid tar, liquid tar, and a whole range in between, where it’s sticky.

Under our current technology, no embryo is viable. At 9 weeks in, the embryo is considered a fetus, but there’s still no chance of surviving outside the womb. It’s not until about 22 weeks that there’s any chance at all, and it remains very low: about 5%. Even then, this is a measure of survival, not health. Pre-term babies suffer from serious issues, and these don’t all go away even if they live: long-term disabilities are common, and many of these are dire.

At around 24 weeks, viability increases dramatically and reaches about 50%. A couple of weeks later, viability is up past 90%, and the last few percentage points slowly come in as the 38th week approaches. This is also around the time that even a premature birth will still likely result in a healthy newborn. Childbirth is usually around 40 weeks in, though viability never does reach 100%.

So while there’s no magic point, there are three stripes which blur into each other. There is a clear black zone (up to 22 weeks), a gray zone (22 to 27), and then a white zone (27 to 38+). With modern medical technology available, we tend to round up from the halfway point, considering a 24-week fetus to be viable enough to deserve intervention, but even so, death is still the most likely outcome.

When a fetus cannot survive on its own, aborting the pregnancy entails killing it. Once it can, there’s no such connection. Doctors could just induce labor or perform a C-section and hand the baby off to someone who actually wants it.

In practice, this is a largely a non-issue because elective abortion of pregnancies past 26 weeks is nearly nonexistent. Women don’t request them and doctors won’t perform them. There are still a handful of abortions even this late, but they’re therapeutic, not elective. In other words, they’re for medical need, for desperate circumstances such as the fetus not being viable or the woman’s life being at risk.

Back to that newborn that we all agree is a person. Let’s be frank: it has not earned personhood through its own merits; even dogs are smarter. Their status is based on their potential, but it’s safe to round up because we don’t have to round anyone else down in the process.

Ultimately, the morality of abortion comes down to distinguishing the potential from the actual so that we don’t count our fetuses as babies unless we can do so without counting women as mere incubators. We put the actual rights of actual people above the potential rights of potential people. The alternative would be immoral.