Intentionality: A way to argue against abortion

By Austin G. Murphy

    For many in this country, the abortion debate has become futile and tiresome. Pro-lifers and pro-choicers continue to lock horns, but the status quo is little affected: abortions continue. Nothing about the debate seems new, and so the average American, suffering from a short attention span, moves on to other topics.

    How, then, do those of us committed to the sanctity of life awaken people to the horror that is abortion? How can we penetrate the fog of indifference, even boredom, which leads so many to tolerate something about which, instinctively, they would prefer not to think?

    We first need to clear away the rhetoric of absolute personal autonomy, of “a woman’s right to choose.” A basic sense of justice tells us all that innocent human life cannot be put to death. Few would be comfortable with suggesting that one person has a “right to choose” to terminate the life of another human being for no other reason than the fear that without such a “choice” personal autonomy is diminished.

    Abortion advocates prefer to portray the unborn child as a mass of tissue or something else less than human. Indeed, they prefer to divert the debate away from any reflection upon the humanity of the embryo or fetus. We must not permit them to get away with this. We must do whatever we can to focus public attention squarely upon the question: “Does abortion kill a human being?”

    Sadly, many defenders of abortion have reached the point that they would not care whether or not the unborn child is a human being. With such people, indeed, any rational argumentation would be useless, for they are—often on grounds of the personal autonomy mentioned above—determined to preserve the alleged “right to choose.” What I argue below, therefore, is not for them.

    But many who casually or unthinkingly accept abortion might well be given pause by a demonstration that what is destroyed in abortion is, in fact, a human being. It is in the hope of providing material to shatter the complacency of these less hardened advocates of abortion that I offer the following approach to the issue. If this argument helps to prevent even one abortion, it will have served its purpose.

    If we can bring people to acknowledge that the humanity of the embryo or fetus is a relevant issue in the abortion debate, then the logical question becomes: “How can we say that embryos or fetuses have human life?” To which I respond: “They have human life because they intend to have human life.”

    A distinction is here in order. When I say that embryos or fetuses intend to be human beings, I obviously am not speaking in terms of a conscious decision or plan of action on their part. In the pre-conscious state of the unborn child, decisions and plans are not a possibility. So it is not out of conscious reflection or choice that the embryo or fetus has the right to be called human.

    The sense in which it can be said that the child in the womb intends to be human is that its body acts with the definite and unmistakable, even if unconscious, goal of continued growth and development as a human being. Indeed, by the very fact that something intends to live (in this case, as a human being), it is alive (again, in this case, as a human being). Only by life can something seek life. Can that which is not alive seek life? Can a dead body seek life? No. That life is being sought (intended) proves that life is present. Intending to live is living.

    This can be seen yet more clearly when we examine the activity of the embryo. From the moment of conception, the embryo is biologically active. The division of the fertilized egg, the development of the neural tube, etc., shows that the embryo acts. And why it acts is obvious: in order to have life more fully, in order to develop as a human being. That it acts in order to have life proves that it lives. And as what else does it act and live than as a human being, even though in an early stage of development?

    This understanding of the intention of the embryo’s activity is essential in refuting those who say that it is no more than a part of the mother’s body. Various organs—various masses of tissue—exist within a woman’s body, it is argued, but they can hardly be called human beings. The decision to remove organs, to excise masses of tissue, is the woman’s. What is different about an embryo (or fetus)?

    The difference is that, while these other organs are certainly biologically active, they act in order to preserve the woman’s life. The embryo does not. It acts to preserve its own. Thus, it is fundamentally distinct from all other parts of a woman’s body. It acts to perpetuate itself, its own life, its own separate life. An unborn child is clearly not simply a part of a woman’s body. It intends to be, and so it is, a separate living being.

    And again, if it has life, it must be human life. What else could it be? How could it become human, were it not human already? If not human, then what is it? Certainly an embryo is not, nor will it ever be, a dog, cat, cow, or any other animal. Nor is its life the life of a body part, an organ, or an undifferentiated mass of tissue, as I have explained above. The life of any of these would function to give life to the larger organism of which it forms a part. The embryo functions to preserve and develop its own nascent human life. Only an ideological stance desperate to find justification for permitting abortion could argue the contrary.

    Admittedly, many people have difficulty in acknowledging the humanity of the embryo, for the embryo is very unlike what we are accustomed to regard as a human being. An embryo bears little physical resemblance to an adult, or even to a child. Consequently, the mind tends to distinguish the embryo from the human life we see outside the womb—and the distinction is often carried to the point of denying to the embryo the same right to life which is conceded to even the most helpless infant, once it has been born.

    To get past this stumbling-block, I think it helpful to ponder an aspect of life’s mystery which might be put thus: Life, all of life, is received. Nothing that we ourselves do earns us life, not as an embryo, not as a fetus, not as an infant, not as an adult. Whatever “right to life” is possessed by any human being at any stage is the result of the reception of life, in which the person was totally passive.

    Once this is understood, justifications for abortion collapse which seek to answer the question, “When does human life begin?” in such a manner as to suggest that at some point during development humanity—and thus the “right to life”—is attained. The assumption appears to be that simply by developing some physical characteristic the embryo or fetus or infant acquires the humanity which apparently it lacked before, the humanity which gives it the right to remain alive.

    But how can an embryo, any more than an ancient elephant or a wise owl, give to itself something so precious, something so mysterious, as humanity? The embryo, I have argued, intends to become fully what it is (i.e., human). How could it intend to become what it is not? In other words, how could it become human if it were not already human? Life is a gift we receive; that life received by the embryo at the beginning of its existence cannot be other than human life.

    Moreover, what physical characteristic could be said clearly to demonstrate that the embryo, or fetus, or, for that matter, the infant, has now reached the stage of humanity at which its life must be protected from arbitrary termination? The continuum that is life—in this case, human life—does not admit of partition into such neat stages (trimesters, levels of viability, moments of birth) which allow us to declare with much conviction, “At this point, the being is human; before this point, it was something other, something which lacks the right to life accorded to human beings.”

    We return again to intentionality, to that which is intended by this organism we call first an embryo, then a fetus, then an infant. We return to what we might call natural law: from the moment of conception, there is a material being which intends to be a living human being. It intends this no less when at a microscopic stage than when it departs the mother’s womb at a later stage. From the moment of conception, human life, the same personal human existence which the being will enjoy if it survives a century or more, is actively pursued. How can we say that this development is less human at the beginning than at the end, when the intent of the body—to live—is identical at both ends of the continuum? How can we say that the adventure which is life begins at any point but conception?

    Prior to conception, the intent to live is only potential. Nature has designed the human reproductive system, which is capable of forming new human life. But the reproductive system as such is not new life: the organs involved are parts of the bodies of men and women, they are intended to produce new life, but, until conception, the new life is not yet actual. Only with the existence of the embryo is there an entity in which the intention of new life is actualized. For the embryo actively pursues human life and can be spoken of as a new living being. Thus, again, we see the logic of speaking of conception as the beginning of a new human life, for starting with conception the drive to be alive, and as a human being, is clearly present.

    To insist upon the differences between an embryo or a fetus and a fully developed human being simply begs the question of what constitutes human life. Certainly, an embryo, and, for some months at any rate, a fetus, is not viable apart from the protecting and nurturing circumstances of the mother’s womb. But how many additional protecting and nurturing circumstances continue to be necessary for our “viability” after birth? Indeed, throughout our lives, not just as infants, we need sufficient food, a certain range of temperature, proper shelter, preservation from deadly disease, etc. The absence of one or more of these might threaten our lives, or even end them—but no one questions that it is a human life which is being threatened or ended.

    Just so, with the unborn child. He lives, not because he is viable, but because he has received the gift of life and possesses that gift until internal disintegration or external intervention takes it away. The right to life is not reduced in the case of minuscule bodies, which, as I have maintained throughout, intend to live no less than do new-born infants or fully-mature adults. Their activity in pursuit of life began at conception—and there also begins their right to life.

    For any of us, at any stage in our existence, the activity found in our bodies has the intention of keeping those bodies alive. By our own volition, we can hinder that activity, but for the most part the intentionality of our bodies operates even without our consent: we need not tell our hearts to beat or our lungs to function. And so we, just like the embryo or fetus, benefit from the unconscious intentionality of our bodies, which act in ways that keep us alive. Just like the embryo or fetus, though at a further stage, we benefit from that living and active body which we have received. In what way can we claim to have more of a right to enjoy this unearned gift than has an embryo or fetus?

    And so the difference between those favoring and opposing abortion comes down to a matter of how each group understands human life. Those of us defending the right to life of the unborn instinctively sense what I have been attempting to argue: that all of human life is received, all is a gift. No more than an embryo can we claim to have merited this gift: the gift simply is, it is received, and none of us can do more than enjoy what has been given us.

    By contrast, the “pro-choice” movement, discarding logic (not to mention compassion) in favor of convenience and “freedom,” in effect place the unborn child on trial, demanding: “What right do you have to be called, to be treated, as a living human being?” The embryo or fetus is treated as guilty until proven innocent—or, more precisely, as guilty without trial, since the unborn child’s striving to live is dismissed without a hearing. In what one prays is an unconscious selfishness, “pro-choicers” allow the gift of life to be enjoyed only by those like themselves who have reached a certain stage of physical (unfortunately, not moral) development.

    Here lies, of course, the futility in many cases of employing such arguments as I have tried to present. Many “pro-choicers” are simply not open to a reasoned discussion of the wrong they do in terminating life. But there are some less hardened supporters of abortion who accept the pro-choice argument without thinking the issue through. These we might awaken to the horror of abortion.

    No matter what success we think our efforts might have, we have no excuse for not at least making the attempt, in whatsoever creative ways we can. Every abortion we help prevent, while a tiny achievement statistically, means that one more little being is privileged to receive and develop the great gift of life.

Brother Austin G. Murphy, O.S.B., is a member of St. Procopius Abbey in Lisle, Ill. He was born in Huntington, L.I., and grew up in Suffern, N.Y. In December of 1995 he received his B.A. in economics from the University of Chicago. While in formation and preparing to take solemn vows at St. Procopius Abbey, he teaches high school mathematics at the abbey’s high school, Benet Academy. This is his first article in HPR.

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