But the Fetus Isn’t Sentient!
Responding to pro-choice arguments related to sensory experience
Some pro-choicers form their abortion stances around the point that the human inside the woman experiences pain, which occurs at about twenty weeks of gestation. This is what we may call a sensory experience—it’s constituted by information from the sense organs. I will demonstrate how particular arguments grounded in this idea are inimical to a pro-choice conclusion.
Pro-choicers frequently argue that the unborn human is not worthy of moral consideration until she is having a sensory experience. But this is unreasonable. Consider a baby that is born into a coma and is not actively experiencing anything. Would it follow that the lack of sensation means it is permissible to kill the baby? Of course not—no one would seriously argue that a recently born baby is not a moral agent because she lacks sensation. At this point, pro-choicers often pivot their attention to the location of the baby and how that makes the comparison disanalogous. But this is to say nothing about the sufficiency of active sensory experience in our moral considerations, which is the current object of our attention.
Pro-choicers will sometimes argue that it’s not an active sensory experience that grounds moral worth, but rather the capability for such. Within the coma hypothetical above, they might say that the recently conceived human does not have the capability to deploy a sensory experience, but a baby in a coma does have said capability. Therefore, it is acceptable to kill the recently conceived human but not the one in a coma.
Let’s formulate a fundamental understanding of capability to address this argument adequately. Capability is always in reference to a way in which a being may actually exist; we may use it differently, but every proper usage will maintain this necessary aspect. Consider burning your tongue on a scalding hot drink—when your tongue comes into contact with the liquid, the pain experienced is present in what we might call an actual way. Of course, you can remove your tongue, and eventually, that feeling will cease. But that pain can return—you have the capability to burn your tongue again on the liquid. Both our capability—our potential—to experience pain and the actuality of experiencing it are fundamental to our being.
This is not to say that it must always be actualized. It may be the case that for the rest of your life, you will never be exposed to an extremely hot drink again. It wouldn’t then follow that you are no longer fundamentally in possession of the capability to experience the burn produced by those circumstances—that is still a very real aspect of what you are.
Similarly, the human recently conceived and the human in a coma can both be said to possess the capability to experience sensation. While it is true that the recently conceived human is not in the proper circumstances for such an experience to be actualized, it cannot be said that her being is fundamentally incapable of such an experience; under the suitable particulars, that feature tends to come about. This is then problematic for the pro-choice position, as all humans, including the unborn, are always in possession of this fundamental capability.
Continuing with the hypothetical coma scenario, a pro-choicer may prefer a more specific characterization of capability. She may even be inclined to the metaphysical merit of a capability being some sort of fundamental potential of a being, but is more interested in how the term is commonly used. She may reason that the human outside the womb—though not actively sensing—is closer to deploying a sensory experience, which makes the being capable in a way that the recently conceived human is not. Of course, we may be entirely in the dark as to when the baby in the coma will have sensation, but it could occur instantaneously, which is not the case for a recently conceived human. Thus, because of the lack of this sort of capability, there is no wrongness in aborting the recently conceived human.
The idea that the experience feels more attainable may make depriving a being of such more wrong. However, for that to be the case, there must be a wrongness in depriving a human of specifically actualizing a sensory experience. Otherwise, the explanatory power would have to come simply from the fact that an actuality is being denied. But it is not per se wrong to prohibit the actualization of something; there are plenty of powers within our nature that ought to be suppressed.
Since there must be wrongness in intentionally prohibiting a human from actualizing a sensory experience, there is wrongness in aborting the recently conceived human. While said experience may be understood as a distant outcome, an abortion still denies its realization. Thus, this pro-choice framework must reckon with this unavoidable issue.
My thoughts here are a perfectly satisfactory introduction to the problems with common pro-choice positions related to sensation. There is much more to discuss—don’t forget to subscribe.
Capabilities or capacities can be understood as dependent upon the kind of thing a being is.
To say that early fetuses have the capacity for sentience is to make a claim about what a fetus is and will be in the future—namely, sentient.
But fetuses aren’t the kind of thing that can be sentient.
To be sure, those for whom it would be uncontroversially wrong to kill have this capacity—infants, adults, the elderly—and so it would be wrong to kill them. This is because the kind of thing that can be sentient is a mind. And our minds don’t begin to exist until the brain has enough functional unity to sustain conscious experience, i.e. sentience (roughly 20 weeks into gestation).
To see why this must be the case, consider what would happen if I placed your brain in a different body, and then I destroyed your original body. Where did *you* go? It seems like you go with your brain, not your body. So you must be your brain, not your bodily organism.
In sum: it is wrong to kill beings like us because of some property we have. This property is sentience, understood as the capacity to feel pain and pleasure. But we possess this capacity qua minds, not organisms. This is illustrated best through brain swap cases. But if we don’t possess this capacity as organisms, then fetuses (until they have a developed brain) do not possess the capacity for conscious experience.