Should abortion be legal or should it be outlawed? The answer depends, at least in part, on the moral value of the fetus. In the following essay — Part 6 of Arc’s discussion of the moral and legal questions surrounding abortion — I argue that keeping abortion legal is more just than outlawing it, in part because the fetus has less moral value than a person.

In Berny Belvedere’s latest entry (Part 4), he accuses me of insufficiently engaging with the philosophical underpinnings of the argument that abortion = murder. He also sidesteps any discussion of the moral value of bodily autonomy, arguing that if abortion = murder, questions of bodily autonomy are inherently secondary. In Part 5, Ryan Huber acknowledges that abortion might be less immoral than murder, but asserts that the moral value of the fetus is still higher than the moral value of the pregnant woman’s autonomy.

As a result, their position is that a society that outlaws abortion is more just than one in which abortion is legal. I disagree.

If a woman is raped, gets pregnant, and decides to abort the pregnancy rather than have the rapist’s baby, would society be more just if the state imprisons her for 20 years? I’d say no. But punishing women who get abortions — no matter the circumstances of conception — is the natural conclusion of accepting that abortion = murder. Therefore, the claim that it would be unjust to treat women who choose to abort a pregnancy the same as adults who choose to murder requires differentiating abortion from murder.

This now 6-part series began with Don Marquis’ argument that the fetus has the same moral value as a child or an adult, even if children and adults are persons while the fetus is not. All three of them, Marquis asserts, have future value, and murder is immoral because it takes away that future value. Since abortion takes away a fetus’ future value it is as immoral as murder, for the same reason murder is immoral.

I argued that this is a hand-wave — that Marquis is, in Belvedere’s words, “smuggling in personhood” — and I stand by that. If a fetus has the same moral value as a person for the same reason as a person, then the fetus is, morally, a person.

But that’s less important than Marquis’ argument about future value. To assert, as I have, that society would be less just if the government treats women who abort a pregnancy as murderers requires arguing that abortion ≠ murder.

If a woman is raped and then, two months later, hunts down and kills her rapist, I would argue that the state should punish her. That’s because the rapist, however vile, still has a right to life, and individuals cannot take the law into their own hands. The morality of capital punishment is a separate issue, but for this discussion it is sufficient to say that justice is the purview of the state, and whatever punishment the state assigns to a convicted rapist is justified in a way that individual vengeance is not.

However, if a woman is raped and then, two months later, aborts a pregnancy, I would argue that the state should not punish her. That’s because abortion is not the same as murder.

Why Abortion Isn’t Murder

In Part 3, I disputed Marquis’ claim that the fetus has the same moral value as a person:

A fetus has moral value, but less moral value than a person. It does not have zero moral value, like some skin cells that could be scratched off without a thought, but it does not have the same moral value as an adult human either. The underlying logic here is a variation on Marquis’ claim that the fetus has the same moral value as an adult because both have a future. Under this formulation, the fetus has some moral value because it has a potential future, but not as much moral value as a person, because a person has a future and a present.

Belvedere accuses me of ducking Marquis’ argument, focusing on the phrase “potential future”:

Marquis isn’t saying that a fetus potentially has a future of value, but that a fetus presently has a future of value.

But my argument does not depend on “potential.” It depends on the difference between future value and present value.

By “potential future,” I just meant that the future is uncertain. Anyone could die in an instant, in which case one’s future value would be zero. The moral value of the future comes from its potential existence, not its guaranteed existence. (I accept responsibility for not making this clearer.)

That being said, I’m not challenging Marquis’ point that a fetus and an adult both have future value. I’m disputing the claim that the entirety of a human being’s moral value comes from one’s future. A person’s present also has value.

In that way, it is easy to differentiate between a fetus and a person. A fetus is physically part of someone else’s body while a person is not. This is an incontrovertible fact, one which people asserting that abortion = murder often prefer to ignore. An entity that is entirely inside of a person is different from an entity that is not. Their presents are different, and the latter has greater value.

Most people accept this intuitively, which is why they consider a child that dies in an accident a greater tragedy than a miscarriage.

[Preemptive counterargument: the key to my point is “entirely inside of a person.” A fetus is therefore categorically different from a person who is dependent on another, but not entirely inside of another.]

Let’s revisit the analogy of a rape victim murdering her rapist. Readers may have noticed that, even if we assume that abortion = murder, murdering a rapist is not actually analogous to the victim aborting a pregnancy that results from rape. The reason why is the rapist is responsible for the rape, while the fetus didn’t do anything.

The analogous situation would be a rape victim murdering an unrelated third person. And, while some may consider a rape victim murdering her rapist to be justifiable homicide, it’s uncontroversial to assert that murdering an unrelated third person is unjustified. The state would rightly prosecute it as murder.

But a rape victim murdering an unrelated third person and a rape victim getting an abortion are not morally equivalent. The reason is obvious: in the latter scenario, the woman is voluntarily undergoing a medical procedure on her own body. The fetus has less moral value than the unrelated third party — less present value — because it is entirely inside of a person and the unrelated third party is not.

Note that, even though the fetus has less moral value than a person, the only one justified in choosing to abort it is the pregnant woman. That’s because bodily autonomy has moral value. By contrast, forcing someone else to have an abortion would be immoral.

Abortion Should be Legal

Arguably, murder and abortion take away morally equivalent future value, but murder also takes away more present value than abortion. As such, they are not the same. Murder is more immoral.

That is why it would be unjust for the state to outlaw abortion as it outlaws murder. To outlaw abortion requires the injustice of taking away pregnant women’s bodily autonomy. If that was the price of preventing murder, it would be defensible. But it’s not.

However, there’s still Huber’s claim that abortion is not as immoral as murder, but still more immoral than violating pregnant women’s bodily autonomy. His method is sound, in that the question of whether a society is more just with legalized or outlawed abortion depends on comparing the wrongness of abortion to the wrongness of the state forcing pregnant women to carry to term and punishing them if they do not. Where he and I differ is the moral value we assign to each of those.

At some level, the assigned values are arbitrary, which is why the abortion debate is effectively endless. I’m giving the pregnant woman’s autonomy greater value and the fetus less value than Huber, and I probably won’t be able to convince him to agree with me. But I’m still going to push back on the way he assigns those values.

On the abortion side of the equation, he assigns the fetus the value of its entire life after birth, while on the forced-birth side he assigns the pregnant woman the value of nine months of autonomy. Huber then compares the nine months of lost autonomy due to forced pregnancy to longer time periods of lost autonomy due to incarceration and concludes that it’s justified.

One obvious difference is that people are in prison because they’ve been convicted of a crime and no one thinks getting pregnant is a criminal action. Furthermore, in the example of the rape victim, the pregnancy is entirely against the woman’s will.

The lost autonomy is also greater than nine months. There is the lifelong psychological damage of being forced by the government to carry a pregnancy to term. There are the health risks and lasting physical changes associated with giving birth. And then there’s a degree of lost autonomy from having a child. Those don’t justify murder, but I’d argue they justify the right to choose abortion, especially since I’m assigning less moral value to the fetus than Huber and Belvedere do.

This prompts another question, which this debate has thus far sidestepped: Are all lives of equal value? Huber says that, as a former fetus, he’s “glad already established persons were looking out for me.” But his mother voluntarily carried him to term. And he lived to be a healthy, successful adult. Would a baby born to a woman who believes she is incapable of taking care of a child — financially, emotionally, etc. — and wants an abortion, but is forced by the government to carry it to term, have the same value?

Imagine the worst possible circumstances for a child. A life filled with suffering and bereft of love. Is forcing that life into the world such a moral positive that it justifies the moral negative of taking away pregnant women’s autonomy?

Would a society that does that really be more just?

Wouldn’t it be better to keep abortion legal, but work together to reduce the number of abortions with proven methods, such as comprehensive sex education and improved access to contraception?

Here is the series in full.

Part 1: Abortion Is Wrong Even If The Fetus Is Not A Person by Berny Belvedere

Part 2: On Legality and Morality by Berny Belvedere

Part 3: The Legality and Morality of Abortion by Nicholas Grossman

Part 4: Misunderstanding Marquis by Berny Belvedere

Part 5: Abortion, Legality, and “Moral Value” by Ryan Huber

Part 6: What’s the Moral Value of a Fetus? by Nicholas Grossman

Part 7: Personhood and Value by Berny Belvedere