An anticipated disaster is no less horrifying when it eventually occurs. Many of us experienced such horror as we read the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion to overturn Roe v Wade. The right to an abortion is now under the greatest threat since its inception.
This threat is of immediate importance, and it also bears on professional philosophy. The abortion debate is a regular topic in many introductory ethics classes. Many of us have used Thomson, Marquis, Warren, Hursthouse, and others to help students recognize the morally relevant features of an ethical problem and defend a position on it. The topic offers a (too) timely ethical issue that requires rigorous analysis of moral concepts such as the conditions of moral personhood, rights to bodily autonomy, and the limits of charity. As such, it gives students a good way to practice critical thinking skills about a real-life issue.
No doubt, it is important to carefully consider the moral features of the abortion debate listed above, and philosophy is uniquely positioned to do so. However, in light of our current political landscape, it is irresponsible to continue this conventional approach to teaching the ethics of abortion if it fails to seriously engage with the political context of the abortion debate. I define the conventional approach as a framework for teaching the ethics of abortion as primarily a debate over the moral status of the fetus and subsequent weighing of rights to life against rights to bodily autonomy; in short, the ethical story set up in many readers on contemporary moral problems. (I don’t claim that this is the only way abortion is or has been written about or taught, but it is safe to say that it is fairly common.) I argue that the conventional approach offers a morally incomplete and pedagogically irresponsible framework for assessing the ethics of abortion. Rather, I hold that philosophy educators ought to contextualize abortion lessons in the relevant sociopolitical and historical context of the debate and ought to center lived experiences of pregnancy and abortion in these lessons. Doing so can offer a more accurate and complete portrait of the morally relevant features of the ethics of abortion that gives voice to those who stand to be most impacted by it.
I am not suggesting that we disregard aspects of the abortion debate on which the conventional approach focuses. Traditional abortion papers on moral personhood and rights (such as Warren’s or Thomson’s) represent an important part of the debate, and are worth keeping in classrooms. However, my worry with the conventional approach is its apolitical framing, which overlooks certain morally relevant features of the issue. Identifying these problems can help identify correctives to teaching abortion that supplement and expand, rather than replace, the conventional approach. Indeed, it is perhaps only when properly contextualized that these traditional arguments can be fairly assessed.
The first problem with the conventional approach to abortion lessons is that it sets up a thoroughly political issue as apolitical. Sifting out the politically loaded aspects of the debate is ostensibly done for the sake of isolating the morally relevant features of the issue. This in turn is meant to offer a fairer assessment of the arguments. However, framing the debate as primarily a matter of rights and moral personhood ignores the context of that debate and the practice of abortion itself: a patriarchal society that tirelessly works to control the bodies of pregnant people and of cisgender women more generally, which has used abortion as a central tool in these efforts. Because political restrictions on abortion and gender injustice are deeply intertwined, casting the abortion debate as primarily a quasi-metaphysical question of personhood and rights yields a distorted moral assessment. Doing so completely disregards this history of oppression, a history that is morally relevant.
Why should philosophy educators consider the political and social conditions of an ethical issue? Won’t this just obfuscate the “pure” moral issue with biased political pathos that we (rightly) teach our students to avoid? The problem with this objection is a false assumption that the sociopolitical can never appropriately bear on the moral. Consider one relevant piece of history that is perplexingly overlooked in abortion lessons. In an effort to expand its diminishing voter base in the 1970s, the GOP strategically retooled its platform to focus on “family-centered” and pro-life values in order to recruit religious and conservative voters. The blatant partisan cooptation of this platform helped the abortion debate expand to the central political issue it is today. This history shows that the abortion debate is inherently political in the U.S. So, ignoring the sociopolitical context creates a distorted—thus biased—assessment of abortion because the issue is so tied up with injustice. And this injustice—including the many harms to pregnant people entailed—is morally important. It is thus a bad faith strategy to attempt to depoliticize the issue in an attempt at “pure” moral analysis.
Both for the sake of accurately representing the issue and presenting a more morally comprehensive landscape on which to assess the ethics of abortion, these lessons ought to frame abortion in terms of its relevant sociopolitical and historical context. At the very least, this can include some discussion of the women’s liberation movement and the history of the GOP’s co-option of the religious pro-life platform. But an even more faithful strategy would also situate abortion within the context of gender oppression. Before students even consider abortion, they can engage with the fact that our society already disrespects cisgender women’s and other pregnant people’s rights to bodily autonomy. We can ask students: what does it mean to weigh up rights in such a climate? How do considerations of existing gender injustice impact the ethical questions surrounding abortion specifically? And, as educators, how can we ask our students whether abortion is moral without first seriously engaging with this history of oppression?
A second, related, worry about the conventional approach stems from the otherwise appropriate attempt to approach ethical debates with impartiality. We teach our students to suspend their personal biases and opinions so that arguments can be rationally evaluated. I am not claiming that there is something wrong with objectivity in argumentation! But under the conventional approach, this aim can translate into treating the lived experiences of pregnancy and abortion as dispensable for moral assessment. Worse, considerations of experience and embodiment (which are connected, inherently, to gendered experiences) may be seen as a bias. This is why, for instance, some arguments about abortion rely on gender neutral analogies. Such analogies are meant to remove partiality and allow anyone to enter into the debate, even those whose bodies are constitutionally incapable of pregnancy, just on the strength of their reasons. But abortion is not an impartial issue (consider, for instance, the unique ethics surrounding gestation), and to treat it as such is ethically disingenuous.
I am not suggesting that only those capable of pregnancy can legitimately debate the ethics of abortion. Rather, I highlight the concern that a fundamentally embodied experienced has been disembodied for the sake of “the view from nowhere.” Especially given our current political climate, it is pernicious to treat considerations of a lived, embodied phenomenon that is decidedly partial to half the population—a marginalized population at that—as morally irrelevant. Under this approach, objective, sound reasoning becomes more important than the lives of these people. Tellingly, when embodied experiences of pregnancy and abortion are considered under the conventional approach, they are usually the traumatic experiences of rape, incest, and threats of mortality from pregnancy. The message received by students may be: conditions of embodiment matter only when they offer a (particularly horrendous) exception to the rule. In sum, an effort toward impartiality can end up dismissing lived experiences of abortion and pregnancy as morally irrelevant.
A corrective to this second problem requires centering the stories of those who have experience with abortion. Incorporating first-person accounts, narratives, or literature that speaks to these experiences offers several benefits. Crucially, it would help counter the silencing of pregnant people in these debates—an effort that is long overdue because these voices have often been dismissed as irrelevant. It could remind students of the moral relevance of embodiment and reintroduce these considerations into the debate. And it may also offer insight into otherwise epistemically opaque moral considerations (what does someone ask themselves when deciding whether to get an abortion? How do they decide? What is the experience of getting an abortion like, and how might someone cope with the aftermath?). Again, centering these lived experiences matters because these considerations are morally relevant.
Taken together, I have argued that philosophy educators should, ultimately, take a feminist approach to the ethics of abortion by engaging with the sociopolitical context of the debate and by centering the lived experiences of those who have had or may have an abortion. This is a feminist approach because it attends to injustices, the non-ideal realities of oppression, and the actual experiences of those who live through them. I am not saying this feminist approach will necessarily yield The Definitive Answer about the ethics of abortion. But it can at least provide a more accurate framework that highlights essential moral considerations.
If one were to argue that a feminist approach to teaching abortion “poisons the well” against a pro-life stance, they are missing the point. Indeed, a non-feminist approach that pretends the issue can be ethically sterilized from the role it has played in controlling pregnant people’s bodies is a greater perversion of the matter. That is a biased approach, as it ablates a central moral feature of abortion for the sake of “impartiality.” I remind the reader that I am not suggesting that we toss the conventional approach to abortion, nor that we stop debating the issue in ethics classes. Rather, I am suggesting that we must properly situate abortion lessons within the relevant sociopolitical context and amplify the relevant voices, in part because that context and those voices are morally important.
Most students who take an introductory ethics class will get no other exposure to academic philosophy. Now more than ever, as educators we must make sure that if this includes the topic of abortion, it is represented accurately and responsibly. And, I suggest, this requires a political reframing of the moral issue.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or the Associate Editor Alida Liberman.
Alycia LaGuardia-LoBianco
Alycia LaGuardia-LoBiancois an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Grand Valley State University, where she teaches and researches in feminist philosophy, moral psychology, and philosophy of psychiatry. She is especially curious about how experiences of oppression, trauma, and mental illness (and their intersections) can shape personal identity and responsibility.
