The Scope
On any important political and social issue, there are many ways to proceed in analyzing the subject. On the abortion issue alone, several questions should be asked and answered: Is abortion a right? Is abortion justified? How does abortion impact our culture? Should women get abortions? These are just a few of the questions that could be legitimately asked about this issue.
Many times, individuals will take an issue like abortion and conflate every aspect of it, answering each concern with the same argument. Doing this hurts the abortion debate because all these questions have nuance and point to different aspects of the abortion conversation. To act as if they are all the same or to not take each question seriously (even if it may seem trivial) is a disservice to this issue.
In this article, I will be specifically addressing whether it is good for a mother to get an abortion. Other concerns may be touched on but will not be the focus.
Finally, I will exercise restraint on certain concepts. The goal is to make this a comprehensive but brief argument. If I explained and defended each concept in depth, I would fail to maintain brevity.
The Argument
On the question of whether abortion is good for mothers, I can emphatically say no. To arrive at this position, here is the deductive argument:
P1: A mother is a good mother insofar as she promotes the flourishing of her children.
P2: Abortion disrupts the child’s natural directiveness to flourish.
C: Abortion is not good for mothers.
Before going through each part of the argument, I suspect some groundwork is necessary, which will be addressed next.
Laying the Foundation
Firstly, when I speak of good, I speak of it ontologically, meaning how it exists in nature. Something in nature is good insofar as it is perfect. Something is perfect insofar as it aligns with its natural ends.
I suspect many readers will now find themselves in depths they either have yet to experience or hoped never to be in. For those with the intellectual courage to continue, let us expand upon the ideas of goodness being ontological and perfection being in accord with natural ends.
An honest inquiry into the world around us quickly presents the idea that some things can be considered good and others not good. When you speak of something being good, you refer to it being good in the way it does what it is supposed to. For example, your coffee maker is good when it makes you a hot cup of joe. If your coffee maker breaks one morning, causing you a day of agony as you suffer with your caffeine addiction, that coffee maker is lacking in goodness; it is less than perfect in this way. If it were perfectly good, it would do what it was designed to do. In other words, that coffee maker exists to brew coffee, and when it does not achieve that purpose (or final cause), it can be said with certainty that it lacks goodness in this way.
Consider the human heart. The human heart, simply speaking, exists to pump blood through the body. When a heart does this perfectly, we commonly say that it is a good heart. To reject the natural goodness of this heart would be absurd. If a human heart does not do this, or does not do it well, then it would be lacking in goodness because it fails to do what it is organized or designed to do.
There is a key difference between the end of the coffee maker and that of the human heart, found in their inorganic versus organic beings. Ultimately, through the combination of different components and our own intelligence, the end of the coffee maker is artificial. Which is to say, man has created it to work for a certain purpose. However, in the case of a human heart, it cannot be said that man created it to be a certain way. What is true is that the human heart itself is self-directed towards the function of pumping blood through the human body. Ultimately, we have no control over what makes a heart perfect or what it is naturally inclined to do, nor do we control which heart is good and which heart is lacking in goodness. The heart, by virtue of its nature (what a thing does, directed by what it is), exists to perform this crucial function for man.
The brute may quickly, likely with little thought, critique what has been said by arguing, “I could potentially use my heart as a toy, to be thrown around. In that way, the heart would be considered good in the sense it achieves the end I am using it for.” This critique fails in this way:
Just because X is good in respect to natural end Y does not mean that X could not be considered good in respect to some other artificial or natural end, Z.
The brute misunderstands what has been said. I have not said that the heart could not be considered good in other ways; I have simply said that it is certainly considered good in the way it is naturally inclined to operate (to pump blood through our bodies). It may be the case that a heart can be considered good in other ways, but it can never be the case that the heart can be considered perfect, maximal in goodness, if it does not pump blood through the body because that heart is self-directed towards that natural end. Again, a heart that does not pump blood through the body, as we would expect it to by virtue of its nature, would be lacking in goodness in this way.
Breaking Down the Argument
P1: A mother is a good mother insofar as she promotes the flourishing of her children.
Premise one of the argument touches on the idea of what a good mother is. There is much I can say in respect to how our human nature self-directs us to flourish and that, ultimately, this is what all rational creatures desire. However, to keep this argument as brief as possible, I will assume that what is best for the child is to flourish. On this point alone, much more will be said by me in the future.
Motherhood exists only in relation to one who is mothered. A mother will have perfected her motherhood, who she is as a mother, when she perfectly promotes the flourishing of her child. It is important to note that I am not making the argument that a perfect motherly relationship with your children is synonymous with being a perfect woman. Rather, I am speaking directly to what would be required to be considered a perfect mother, and thus, considering what is necessary in measuring the degree of goodness a mother exhibits. While of course perfecting your motherhood will benefit your person in general, it is not the case that just by being the perfect mother for your child means that you are perfect in every way as a person.
P2: Abortion disrupts the child’s natural directiveness to flourish.
On premise two, the child is naturally growing and developing on the path to fulfillment. Abortion directly kills the child, halting growth and development, and thus disrupts flourishing.
By virtue of the child being a unique individual human organism, it acts in this way. Everything that is, exists for an end, and for organic composites, is organized by nature to direct it to that end. Simply, every part in that child’s small body serves a purpose that works to improve the life of the child.
Some may be skeptical about this reality, considering that some people are created with defects or deformities. Aspects of the being of some individuals seemingly work towards self-destruction. While this is possible and does occur, it does not disprove what has been said. Rather, it acknowledges that nature can be ordered in the way explained previously, with every part of a child working for the betterment of the child, or disordered, in a case where a part works against the whole.
Some may say that the existence of disorder itself proves that beings are not naturally organized in a way directed to their own flourishing. This critique fails in two major ways:
First, the discussion of something being disordered implies that something is ordered. Consider this:
If X is disordered for reason Y, then in the absence of Y, X must be ordered properly.
Hence, those who hold this critique seemingly believe in the ordered versus disordered diagnosis of nature.
Second, beings are still naturally moved in a way that is in accord with their natural end to flourish even if they have a level of disorder. For example, a child in the womb with a genetic disposition that harms the organism does not change the fact that the organism still works for its own good, naturally. Disorder does not change the laws that govern nature or how things work, but rather changes circumstances.
Thus, the child is directed towards its flourishing, even if aspects of their being do not work ideally. The mother, by killing the child, abruptly stops the movement toward this state of flourishing.
C: Abortion is not good for a mother.
The conclusion then follows that abortion is not good for a mother. For a perfect mother would not act in this way.
For the brute who doubts this, consider a mother who beats her one-year-old daughter versus one who gives her one-year-old daughter love and affection. Certainly, one situation highlights a good mother, and one clearly shows a mother lacking in goodness. Notice how no consideration was given to the mother’s mental state, nor was there room for subjectivism to corrupt our analysis; it was clear as day which mother exhibited goodness, and which acted contrary to it.
This level of intelligibility is accessible in analyzing the good in abortion. For abortion to be considered good for a mother in any way, the act itself would need to work to perfect a mother. But as shown, the act itself works against what a perfect mother would be.
Conclusions
At this point, it has been said that a mother who aborts her child is not acting in a good way, but the brute still may find little importance in this argument based on not caring for what is good. The brute sees themselves as morally superior, able to define what is good and rank the hierarchy as they see fit, and thus may decide that even a mother lacking in goodness still can and perhaps should act in this way. The brute, likely out of ignorance, does not understand that all people do what they perceive as good. To know what is not good to do and still do it demonstrates a degree of irrationality. This person is actively harming themselves by acting in this way. On this, I shall write much more in the future.
Some at this point may feel disappointed that I did not evoke rights language and engage with the idea that abortion is “not a right.” However, as I mentioned at the beginning of this article, I never set out to demonstrate that abortion is not a right. I would say that what I have said helps build the case that abortion is not a right, something I believe, but I kept to the scope I laid out from the beginning. As for abortion not being a right, I plan to build on this idea and provide argumentation in the near future.
Some will be disappointed to find that I did not engage in an intense pragmatic investigation of the ways abortion is not good for mothers. This was also outside the scope of this article. However, this is an important aspect to consider and will be tackled in the future.
Acknowledgments
I am greatly indebted to the classical philosophers, especially Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. Without their work, I could not have prepared the argument in the way I did.