Kristina Grob is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina Sumter.
Nathan Nobis is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Morehouse College. He is also Editor-in-Chief of 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology.
Tell us about the book!
Thinking Critically About Abortion: Why Most Abortions Aren’t Wrong & Why All Abortions Should Be Legal (Open Philosophy Press, 2019; www.AbortionArguments.com) is a brief (53-page) argumentative introduction to the many arguments about abortion, written for a general audience with no philosophical background. And it’s open-access, so is freely available, globally.
The book argues for moral and legal conclusions about abortion, as the subtitle states, but that is really only a small part of the book. Most of it reviews and critiques common arguments and ways of understanding the issues that you read about in newspapers, see online and hear in everyday discussion.
So we discuss how to better define what an abortion is (and what makes a definition better or worse here), why many arguments given on the topic on all sides are “question-begging” (and why that’s bad), and why, in general, many common arguments are ones that are given seemingly without little understanding of how people who disagree with them would react.
This all to better “meet people where they are at” on the issues and to set them up to engage the types of issues and arguments that philosophers tend to find central. It’s ideal for teaching since it addresses most of the background concerns that many students have, but philosophical writings tend to overlook or take for granted.
We also address many distinctly philosophical arguments, including:
- arguments against abortion from fetuses’ alleged “rational nature” or “essence”;
- arguments about personhood: we present some novel ways to reason towards a psychological understanding of personhood by reflecting on what might end our personhood and what might explain various clear cases of personhood and the lack of personhood, instead of merely asserting a definition of personhood;
- personal-identity-based objections to Don Marquis’s “future like our’s” arguments against abortion;
- arguments that the right to life does not seem to involve a right to anyone else’s body, famously developed by Judith Thomson and the 1978 McFall v. Shimp case, as well as critical replies.
As you’ve already indicated, this issue is quite relevant today. I recently read a New York Times op-ed from the former president of Planned Parenthood, who quit after having debates over whether that organization’s mission should be focused on abortion advocacy or women’s health. She felt that more people would support the organization if it made clear how important health is to its mission. How does your book deal with the connections abortion has to similar topics, like feminism, religion, law, economic justice, and more?
We don’t discuss any specific organizations or services related to abortion, but we address both ethical and legal aspects of the issue. We argue that, given the absence of evidence showing that abortion should be made illegal, and given the fact that the primary causes of abortion tend to be economic rather than malicious, and practical concerns about how the law intruding into private medical matters would be bad for all, abortion should be kept legal where it is, and that even later-term abortions should be kept legal, given the information available on the reasons women seek them.
In arguing that all abortions should be legal, we should clarify that we do not mean that all possible abortions should be legal, just all abortions given current practices. And our consciousness-focused arguments about abortion urge that any abortions be performed early in pregnancy, as best as that is possible, before capacities for consciousness and feeling develop in the fetus.
Kristina is a feminist philosopher who studies feminist bioethics and written about the range of feminist positions on sexual ethics. The book doesn’t explicitly develop a “feminist position,” but it is shaped by a feminist consciousness and is written in such a way that it anticipates objections from both antifeminist and feminist detractors: some feminists, of course, do argue that abortion is wrong, for reasons they consider “feminist.”
We believe our overall position is reasonable whether you explicitly identify as a feminist or not, and we didn’t want people getting mired in (what they perceive as) identity politics. And we didn’t want this book to be read only by people who already agree with its overall position. This is a work of public philosophy, so we want to be able to engage people who hold very different positions and show that that the arguments we present are, at least, worth taking seriously.
Concerning religion, we observe that we all should want laws to be religiously-neutral. And we present a simple Euthyphro-like dilemma to any moral claims based on anything religious: either the claims can be independently supported by good reasons or not, so there can, and should be, reasonable inter-faith dialogue on the issues on those reasons: religions shouldn’t be “argument stoppers” on this issue or any other.
We do, however, appeal to a vision of beneficence and social justice that’s inspired by the Biblical “Good Samaritan,” in arguing that economic and social changes should be made to reduce many common motivations for abortion in our society and so reduce the “demand” for abortion: we hope everyone should be able to agree on that.
How did this book come about?
Nathan had offered to write chapters on abortion for Noah Levin’s (now published) open-access textbook Introduction to Ethics: An Open Educational Resource and had been working on those in early 2019. He noticed that Kristina – whom he had met at a conference – had posted some questions and observations about teaching the topic of abortion in some on some teaching philosophy Facebook pages, so he asked her if she wanted to collaborate. She agreed and so we got to work on Google Docs, which is just great for collaborative writing (which is nearly always more fun and results in better work) and sharing work for real-time feedback.
After we finished the textbook’s essays, we thought they should be also available for a broader audience, since people who reviewed the essays were enthusiastic about them and eager to use them in teaching. So we turned it into a short, free e-book and a $5.38 paperback. We’ve also added a text-to-speech feature to the webpage to make the text an audiobook of sorts.
What motivated you to write this? What are your goals?
Philosophy instructors have been teaching the topic of abortion for decades now, at least. And, of course, there is a well-developed literature on the issues.
Unfortunately, however, it appears that philosophers’ understandings of the issue have made little to no difference to how the general public views the issues. This has become especially vivid since the legal status of abortion in the US has become “unstable,” to understate the crisis. A friend said that if you looked at, say, letters to the editor on the topic from the 1970s, they look about the same as what you see today: so there’s been little to no progress in collective understanding.
Perhaps thinking that philosophy really can, and should, make a difference to how people think about the issues is foolish and naive. But we wrote something, and did something, to at least try to help address these problems. In the spring, Nathan wrote a “letter to the editor” with the same title to his local online newspaper as a start, and this book in part developed out of reactions to that. Justin Weinberg at Daily Nous described the message of that letter as “lawmakers, take a philosophy course” and this book is designed to bring that course to them and anyone else!
So, our main goal was to create a resource that could be used to help people really learn about the issues in a deeper way, with greater understanding and insight. If people at least see that many common arguments, on all sides, are bad arguments, that’s progress that moves people towards potentially better arguments.
I just read your letter to the editor. It is great how slowly you go through the issue, defining your terms and providing counter-examples to challenge the hyperbolic rhetoric you hear from many in the media. What else did you do to encourage a similar attitude in your readers? Talk a little about how the resources you provide will help to inform debate.
We try to be very “fair and balanced”: we address problems with both pro-choice and pro-life arguments and positions. We try to be very respectful and understanding to the reader, whatever their position is.
We also present our arguments in a rather tentative way, explicitly denying that we are trying to “prove” anything, and acknowledge that our arguments could be in need of improvement: hopefully this makes readers less defensive.
We are also, we think, often more explicit in explaining why we are reasoning in various ways, which hopefully helps readers better understand and use philosophical methods with other arguments.
What has the response been?
Response from philosophers has been uniformly positive: instructors are excited to have a freely available resource that engages the type of background issues that most philosophical readings just don’t address, in addition to the typical issues and readings.
Other philosophers have appreciated that the book reviews some of the empirical information about abortion, such as developmental facts about fetuses and why people seek abortions. Philosophical writings often do not review these facts, which isn’t ideal.
Responses from other philosophically-minded people have been positive. We have gotten messages from people on all sides of the issues expressing appreciation that we show that some arguments in defense of their own preferred points of view are bad arguments. This is a great response since many people seem to want to agree with anything and everything said in favor of their own point of view, whether its a good argument or not.
Responses from other audiences very much depends on whether, at least for this issue, they try to have philosophical virtues such as being willing to try to understand perspectives different from their own, are willing to admit the possibility that they could learn more and are just generally interested and willing to ask, “Why?” Unsurprisingly, some people who might be “underdeveloped” regarding these virtues haven’t responded as well as we’d like, from our point of view (yet)!
So, for example, someone who opposes abortion responded that they just didn’t think there was any need to be so “deep” as to ask why human beings have value and rights. This person said they considered the belief that all human beings have rights and are persons to be just a core assumption, in no need of analysis or defense. They were presented with reasoning for why that might not be true, but apparently weren’t interested. We can only hope that fundamental “why?” questions will seem more pressing to more people by reading this book.
Some pro-choice women have been angry that a man co-wrote a book on abortion that argues in defense of abortion. They were also angry that we argue that some abortions could be morally wrong (as opposed to insisting that every possible abortion just must be morally permissible), and were even angry that people would “debate” the issues in the first place. None of these reactions seem wise. Since they probably only read the cover, we can only hope they decided to read more.
Finally, we’ve gotten some Amazon and Goodreads reviews that suggest that readers are coming away with just the reactions we hopes they would have: that this is a good book to at least get beyond the common bad arguments and fallacious ways of engaging the issues.
Why open-access?
These issues are pressing, and we really need more people to learn to think more critically and effectively about them: in short, we need more people to be philosophers! We wouldn’t want cost to be an obstacle to that learning, especially at a global level.
Noah Levin offers some further great insights on why we should develop free educational materials. He suggests that chances of authors making much money on an ethics book are so slim that the potential educational and social-justice benefits of making excellent materials freely available justifies making excellent materials freely available. The internet is a blessing and a curse, and free high-quality educational materials for all (or everyone with an internet connection) is part of the blessing.
Tell us about the cover.
A theme that emerged in the writing of the book was that of the Biblical Good Samaritan. Judith Thompson and others have famously argued that not allowing women to have abortions is like to forcing them to be like Good Samaritans to fetuses. Since nobody else is forced to be a Good Samaritan for anyone else, for anything in any way comparable to what pregnancy and childbirth demands, this doesn’t seem fair to pregnant women.
We present this worthwhile consideration and use the idea of the Good Samaritan to support the common claim that those who object to abortions should work towards making social and economic changes so fewer women see abortion as their only or best option. “Pro-life” people often to deny this, for reasons that we find understandable, but mistaken. These same people, however, often find inspiration in the Bible, and themes from the Good Samaritan and other beneficence-related messages from the Bible pertaining to loving your enemies and doing good (even for people who you disagree with and think are doing wrong) do appear to support making social, political and economic changes that would result in, at least, far fewer abortions.
This was a note of agreement that we ended the book on.
What’s next?
We’ve had a follow-up article inspired by reactions to the book, “Abortion and Soundbites,” and have some other writings in the works.
What’s most important is getting the word out about this resource, especially to people who could really use it to make positive change, both about this particular issue and to try to encourage reasoning, fact-finding and honest, charitable and fair discussions of all controversial issues. These are lofty goals, but it’s what philosophy, is all about. Public philosophy isn’t easy, and projects like these can use all the support that other philosophers are willing to contribute to them!
Book Preface
We are both philosophy professors who regularly teach ethics classes that cover the topic of abortion. In classes like these, students learn how to better define the issues, develop skills to systematically explain why some arguments are better and others are worse, and practice seriously and respectfully engaging with ideas different from their own. We wrote this book to help make the many goods of philosophical thinking more readily available to everyone, given our society’s current need for better discussions of abortion.
To many people, abortion is an issue for which discussions and debates are frustrating and fruitless: it seems like no progress will ever be made towards any understanding, much less resolution or even compromise. Judgments like these, however, are premature because some basic techniques from critical thinking, such as carefully defining words and testing definitions, stating the full structure of arguments so each step of the reasoning can be examined, and comparing the strengths and weaknesses of different explanations can help us make progress towards these goals.
When emotions run high, we sometimes need to step back and use a passion for calm, cool, critical thinking. This helps us better understand the positions and arguments of people who see things differently from us, as well as our own positions and arguments. And we can use critical thinking skills help to try to figure out which positions are best, in terms of being supported by good arguments: after all, we might have much to learn from other people, sometimes that our own views should change, for the better.
Here we use basic critical thinking skills to argue that abortion is typically not morally wrong. We begin with less morally-controversial claims: adults, children and babies are wrong to kill and wrong to kill, fundamentally, because they, we, are conscious, aware and have feelings. We argue that since early fetuses entirely lack these characteristics, they are not inherently wrong to kill and so most abortions are not morally wrong, since most abortions are done early in pregnancy, before consciousness and feeling develop in the fetus.
Furthermore, since the right to life is not the right to someone else’s body, fetuses might not have the right to the pregnant woman’s body—which she has the right to—and so she has the right to not allow the fetus use of her body. This further justifies abortion, at least until technology allows for the removal of fetuses to other wombs. Since morally permissible actions should be legal, abortions should be legal: it is an injustice to criminalize actions that are not wrong.
In the course of arguing for these claims, we:
- discuss how to best define abortion;
- dismiss many common “question-begging” arguments that merely assume their conclusions, instead of giving genuine reasons for them;
- refute some often-heard “everyday arguments” about abortion, on all sides;
- explain why the most influential philosophical arguments against abortion are unsuccessful;
- provide some positive arguments that at least early abortions are not wrong;
- briefly discuss the ethics and legality of later abortions, and more.
This essay is not a “how to win an argument” piece or a tract or any kind of apologetics. It is not designed to help anyone “win” debates: everybody “wins” on this issue when we calmly and respectfully engage arguments with care, charity, honesty and humility. This book is merely a reasoned, systematic introduction to the issues that we hope models these skills and virtues. Its discussion should not be taken as absolute “proof” of anything: much more needs to be understood and carefully discussed—always.
You can ask Kristina and Nathan questions about their work in the comments section below. Comments must conform to our community guidelines and comment policy.
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