This article was written and submitted by Jim Schultz, PhD.
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Pro-choice advocates often appeal to the need for gender justice in our society to justify abortion choice. For example, the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explains, “Also in the balance is a woman’s autonomous charge of her full life’s course… her ability to stand in relation to man, society, and the state as an independent, self-sustaining, equal citizen” [“Some Thoughts on Autonomy and Equality in Relation to Roe v. Wade,” in The Abortion Controversy: A Reader, ed. Louis P. Pojman and Francis J. Beckwith (Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 1994), 124]. She held that the Court ought to have included in Roe an argument concerning gender-based classification, for it, along with reproductive autonomy, “influences the opportunity women will have to participate as men’s full partners in the nation’s social, political, and economic life” (Ibid., 119).
The argument is not difficult to refute. Would pursuing an economic or political opportunity justify killing one’s two-year-old daughter? Of course not, pro-choice people would surely agree. But s/he would think this is a bad analogy because the unborn are not fully human persons. But that is the very question at issue in the abortion debate. The pro-choicer is begging the question rather than making an argument that the unborn are not human persons.
But if the argument is so easy to refute, why is it so influential today? Understanding the theory behind it may help answer this question and shed light on an effective pro-life response. The ethical theory here is act-utilitarianism, which says that a person’s action is justified if it brings about greater happiness, in this case by providing her with equal access to socio-economic and political opportunities. The end justifies the means.
This reasoning has fatal flaws. Predicting the future is notoriously difficult, as anyone who has ever tried to predict an election, a football game, or a toddler’s behavior can attest. You cannot know your or your offspring’s future. History is replete with examples of people who regretted past decisions or who were relieved that they did not do something they had considered doing.
Also, David DeGrazia, Thomas Mappes, and Jeffrey Brand-Ballard point out that act-utilitarianism seems unable to coexist with the notion of human rights [Biomedical Ethics, 7th ed. (McGraw-Hill Education, 2010), 12]. One of the common arguments for enhanced interrogation at Guantanamo Bay was that these methods could save many lives by finding out about planned terrorist attacks and preventing them. By the same reasoning, one could justify killing an old, unhappy couple to relieve them of their unhappiness. I doubt many pro-choicers would agree that the end justifies the means in those cases, so why would they think such reasoning justifies abortion?
Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen explain why it is that rights cannot coexist with a utilitarian ethic.
Within any such ethic, there will always be human beings who are dispensable, who must be sacrificed for the greater good. Utilitarianism fails in a radical way to respect the dignity and rights of individual human beings. For it treats the greater good, a mere aggregate of all the interests or pleasures or preferences of individuals, as the good of supreme worth and value, and it demands that nothing stand in the way of its pursuit. The utilitarian thus cannot believe, except as a convenient fiction, in human rights or in actions that may never be done to people, regardless of the consequences [Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, 2nd edition. Kindle version (Doubleday, 2011), Kindle loc. 1420].
But pro-choice people who use the utilitarian gender justice argument base their demand for such justice on the human rights of women. Thus, they have a contradiction right at the heart of their argument for abortion. You can either embrace utilitarianism or human rights, not both.
The utilitarian gender justice argument is a species of Marxist proletarian morality, the notion that whatever helps the oppressed in their class struggle against the oppressors is moral. Abortion is said to help women in their struggle against a male-dominated society and thus must be allowed, otherwise the legal system stands against equality (see “The Abortion Issue: A Socialist View,” http://www.deleonism.org/text/a-76.htm.).
There are right and wrong ways to secure women’s rights, and zeal must not continue to lead us to oppress one group of people for the sake of another, which is exactly what is happening when mothers and doctors oppress unborn human beings through abortion. Marxism’s history is stained with the blood of over one hundred million people whose deaths were supposedly justified by the ends. With 66 million unborn Americans and 1.7 billion unborn people worldwide having been exterminated in the last several decades, the history of Marxist bloodshed continues. This must end because all human beings, regardless of size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependency, have an unalienable and equal right to life.
