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Atheists and abortion rights: How to form a rational policy?
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The late Carl Sagan had a useful approach to the
issue of abortion policy.
Ed West, of the Telegraph's Culture Wars blog, concludes his latest post on his opposition to the public funding of abortions with an extremely poorly phrased question:
So why don't atheists give a damn for the unborn?
It's one of those moments in which a thoughtful person hangs their head in despondency over the grotesque over-generalization and demonization of a group of people. West himself, in the comments of his post, affirms that he is "not much of a believer" himself, but this hardly helps matters. He could have phrased the question differently, and engendered a more reasonable discussion, one that acknowledged the anecdotal substance of his inquiry, such as, "Why do so few of the atheists I know oppose abortion?"
The subject of the question itself is too rich with angst to ignore outright, despite West's unfortunate wording. What is the atheist "position" on abortion rights? What ought it be?
A cursory Internet search yields little in the way of polling. The Pew Forum, which frustratingly lumps atheists and the nonreligious with those who may or may not believe in the supernatural in the "unaffiliated" category, shows that 70 percent of the American unaffiliated believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 24 percent say it should be illegal in all or most cases. This is somewhat in contrast with the American population as a whole, which has merely 53 percent on the "pro-choice" side, versus 40 on the ill-named "pro-life" side. But again, the "unaffiliated" are not necessarily atheists or even non-religious, so this doesn't tell us as much as we'd like. Still, we can probably go with the assumption that a large majority of nonbelievers are likely in favor of some degree of abortion rights.
Lisa Miller, who writes about religion for Newsweek, recently noted the anti-abortion wing of atheism, citing a different poll which yielded similar results:
Just as pro-life Christians argue that life is sacred because it's given by God, pro-life atheists insist that human life is intrinsically valuable without God's help. "I think there is nothing beyond this life—but life in and of itself is unique and special," explains Matt Wallace, a UPS package handler in North Carolina who started an online group for pro-life atheists in 1999. "In abortion, a human being ends up getting killed for no other reason than he or she wasn't planned or wanted. One should always err on the side of innocent human life."
Sounds fairly humanistic, no? As Miller notes in her post, Christopher Hitchens (not a "liberal" in the common use of the word) is an atheist with qualms about abortion, noting in God is not Great that "embryology confirms morality," meaning that it is now obvious to modern science that there is a "separate body and entity" in the form of a fetus, not a mere "growth," and this knowledge allows science, as Hitchens puts it, to "make common cause with humanism." But Hitchens also notes that this only deepens the debate, it does not end it, and the ethics of life and death, birth and gestation, remain murky.
Speaking for myself, I would say that my atheism has only made me more uncomfortable with the practice of abortion than not. But how do these ethical positions take the shape of policy applicable to all?
For me, the reckoning that comes closest to a sensible "solution" (probably a bad choice of word right there) or "compromise" actually comes from a book written over thirty years ago: the late Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence. Sagan dismisses the entire notion of a "right to life" not because it is an undesirable idea, but because no culture on Earth seriously enshrines it, at least not for all entities that possess life such as "lower" animals or plants. Even the professed sacredness of human life is dubious in the context of wars and capital punishment, but it is indeed something about humans that we seem to have determined is worthy of the first line of preservation.
But what about human life is so sacred? Sagan posits that were we to come across a non-human species that had language and art and civilization, we would consider its killing to be murder, so it is not even humanity we are talking about. It's "intelligence" or "consciousness," at least of the degree to which such things as self-awareness and culture are possible. For Sagan, this may give us a line to draw in the abortion debate. When a being possesses the ability for such things, they are newly imbued with the right to be born. More specifically, he writes:
The particular sanctity of human life can be identified with the development and functioning of the neocortex. We cannot require its full development, because that does not occur until many years after birth. But perhaps we might set the transition to humanity at the time when neocortical activity begins, as determined by electroencephalography of the fetus.
It's not an absolute line, of course, because we are talking about the nuances of biology, but it does free us from worry over, say, mere clumps of cells in a test tube with no discernible human properties. Instead, we reserve our concern for a being that might be thinking, that might have a "mind." Importantly, Sagan also believed that this kind of delineation has implications beyond humanity; dolphins, whales, and apes, for example, if shown to have similar properties, should be extended the same rights to their existence.
There is something ethically satisfying about an approach like Sagan's. The standards of humanism that abhor murder, that wish to lift up the helpless, that yearn to see every human have the opportunity to reach his or her potential, are met. At the same time, the problem is viewed through a scientific lens, using real data rather than tradition or supernatural claims to a soul, but also allows for something that is nearly unique to science, the opportunity to correct itself when something new is learned. I don't mean to say that this is the way to end debate, but it's certainly a smart place to begin discussion.
To Mr. West, I hope it is now clear that atheists do, in fact, care about the unborn, but we do not always see it as a binary issue (for or against abortion, the end). Atheists may reach different conclusions and run the gamut of positions regarding abortion, but we are wrestling with the ethics involved, not callously latching onto one black-and-white ideology or another. We want to do the right thing, but we will use reason to try and figure out what that is. On this difficult question of abortion policy, we will continue to utilize our neocortices as best we can.
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