IB Philosophy HL IA

A BILL TO BE ENTITLED: AN ACT RELATING TO THE DEATH OF REPRODUCTIVE

LIBERTY

IB Candidate Number: 000251–0077

IB Philosophy HL 3A

Renz

9 March 2022

Word Count: 1924

 Marcelino 1

Stimulus

Texas 87th State Legislature, House Bill 3326, Abolition of Abortion through Equal Protection for

All Unborn Children Act:

…SECTION 2. Acting on Section 1, Article I, Texas

Constitution, which provides that "Texas is a free and independent

State, subject only to the Constitution of the United States," and

acknowledging the sanctity of innocent human life created in the

image of God, which should be equally protected from fertilization

to natural death, the purpose of this Act is:

(1) to ensure the right to life and equal protection of

the laws to all unborn children from the moment of fertilization;

(2) to establish that a living human unborn child,

from the moment of fertilization and at every stage of development,

is entitled to the same rights, powers, and privileges as are

secured or granted by the laws of this state to any other human

person;

(3) to rescind all licenses to kill unborn children by

repealing discriminatory provisions… (State of Texas, Legislature, House 1)

The resurgence of bills in state legislatures, such as the Texas Abolition of Abortion through

Equal Protection for All Unborn Children Act, which work to oppose the legality of people’s
 Marcelino 2

rights to abortion, and in the hinderance and limiting of the accessibility of abortions, utilize

arguments defining embryos as individual, autonomous beings that deserve protection and the

right to life. Thus, the struggle of bodily autonomy, between that of embryos and the one

carrying such an embryo, has been a main point of contention in society. Personhood is the

quality of being a person—the qualification of being considered part of a moral community, and

thus should be afforded our moral consideration. However, the concept of personhood and being

a human are not always interchangeable as non-human entities can be considered persons

regarding how we afford them moral considerations—there are also human persons that we may

consider that do not deserve our moral consideration. This qualification of personhood then

influences the policies of government as it relates to how government should be allowed to

exercise its powers over the liberties of the individual person, as is the case with the contention

of whether the government should consider the life of the fetus as that of an autonomous person,

or whether the personhood of the child bearer should be considered and thus be unimpeded in

their bodily autonomy. This essay will explore the criteria of personhood as it relates to the

personhood of the fetus, or rather its lack thereof, and of the child bearer; it will also discuss the

ethicality of government exercising its power to restrict rights to abortion and thus the individual

liberty of bodily autonomy.

In first discussing the personhood of the fetus and of the child bearer, the theories of the
 Marcelino 3

criteria of personhood must be considered. With the genetic criterion for personhood, as

proposed by John Noonan, any being that “however is conceived of human beings is human”

(Warren para. 5). This criterion makes intuitive sense, as we use “human” and “person”

interchangeably, colloquially. We would usually say, “There are twenty people in my class,” not

“There are twenty humans in my class.” However, this criterion opens personhood to organisms

that are seemingly insignificant in our moral considerations, such as human cells that flake off

our bodies—would then the destruction of damaged erythrocytes by the body be considered

murder or suicide? It also excludes many beings that we seemingly should keep in mind in our

moral considerations, such as intelligent animals like apes and monkeys. Thus, the genetic

criterion for personhood seemingly is unsatisfactory in its definition of a person.

Other criteria that we may consider are the cognitive criteria and the more utilitarian theory

of personhood regarding sentience. The cognitive criteria, as set forth by Mary Anne Warren, sets

out five criteria for determining one’s personhood:

1. consciousness (of objects and events external and/or internal to the being), and in

particular the capacity to feel pain’

2. reasoning (the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems);

3. self-motivated activity (activity which is relatively independent of either genetic or

direct external control);

4. the capacity to communicate, by whatever means, messages of an indefinite variety of

 Marcelino 4

types, that is, not just with an indefinite number of possible contents, but on indefinitely

many possible topics;

5. the presence of self-concepts, and self-awareness, either individual or racial, or both.

(Warren para. 30)

Regarding this definition of personhood, the fetus seems to fall short of qualification. It has been

shown that “sentience is not possible before 20 weeks [of] gestation…although billions of

neurons have already migrated to the cerebral cortex, there are almost no synaptic connections

between them or with the thalamus, which mediates sensory perception” (Perry). Due to the

inability of a fetus to display any of the five criteria of the cognitive criteria, the fetus does not

qualify to be a person. However, while I agree with much of the criteria that are considered for

personhood, a problem with this theory is that many younger children, whom many of us

suppose as being part of our moral community of persons, would not meet the criteria of

consciousness, communication, or reasoning. Thus, they would not be considered persons under

this theory—which thus fails in this respect to properly defining personhood.

The utilitarian theory of personhood, as proposed by Peter Singer, is dependent upon one’s

sentience and one’s concept of time. Peter Singer uses the term person to refer to one “who is

capable of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future” (Singer). He

proposes that the idea is such that to not “exclude from moral consideration non-humans or non-
 Marcelino 5

persons who can clearly suffer” (“Moral Status”). Thus, the theory is dependent upon one’s

ability to be conscious, too, of one’s surroundings and the experience of time, and one’s ability to

perceive suffering and pleasure. Under this theory, too, fetuses do not qualify as persons. This

theory’s inclusion of those beings that are developed enough to feel and to perceive their

surroundings thus seems a plausible theory of personhood as much of our perceptions of others

and in our inclusion of others in our communities is our ability to conceive that the other has a

mind—that it can feel—whether it is seen through its ability to communicate or show that it can

respond to its surroundings.

Thus, the general conclusion regarding the personhood of the fetus is that fetuses are not

persons. In the fetus’s inability to reason and perceive its surroundings—in its lack of sentience

and consciousness—can we conclude its not being able to qualify to be a person. Because of its

inability to feel pain, our moral considerations for limiting suffering for the fetus can thus be

regarded as arbitrary. However, it is not to say that the existences of fetuses are worthless, it is

merely to suppose the idea that the rights of persons that are living and birthed is greater in

weight than that of fetuses who are not persons.

Therefore, we must now consider, based upon the conclusion of the fetuses not being

persons, the ethicality of government’s restriction of abortion as it concerns the liberty of bodily

autonomy. Regarding the personal liberty of the individual person, the question of what parts of
 Marcelino 6

the individual does government have license to control. The telos, or purpose, of the government

is such that it should protect the rights of its citizens; the social contract between state and the

individual calls for the subjugation of the will of the individual to society as “[e]ach man…gives

over the power to protect himself and punish transgressors of the Law of Nature to the

government that he has created through the compact” (Friend). Thus, it can be seen to it that the

liberty of bodily autonomy is a very valuable right to the individual, and it can therefore be said

of that right to be paramount to the protection of the individual. The government must therefore

protect the right of the individual to retain their autonomy and their freedom to do as they please.

Being that the fetus is not a person, and thus not subject to the same moral considerations of

you would a living person (i.e., the child bearer), the government does not have the duty nor the

jurisdiction to protect it. It is emphasized in On Liberty, “[t]he only part of the conduct of any

one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely

concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and

mind, the individual is sovereign” (Mill 13). Since the fetus holds no right of personhood, and

thus cannot be considered an individual component of society, the abortion of a fetus by the child

bearer does not impede upon any other in society, other than the child bearer themselves. It is

thus conceivable, by the Harm Principal proposed by Mill, that the right to abortion should not

be impeded by the executive, legislative, or judicial actions of government. Since abortion is

 Marcelino 7

only concerning the individual child bearer, and not any other person of society, the Harm

Principal does not apply here, and thus the government does not have the jurisdiction nor is it

afforded the license to exercise their power over the individual and limit their actions.

However, it may be argued that there is still a moral problem to the very execution of an

abortion. It can be argued that abortions are immoral in and of themselves in that it disregards the

potential of life and the existence of the fetus—it denies it the opportunity to grow to be reasoned

and conscious and aware of its surroundings. It does society an overall disservice, as well as to

those that are “unborn”. It is proposed in the Natural Law Theory by St. Thomas Aquinas that the

primary precepts of the Natural Law—moral law that is universal and is only naturally moral as

it can reasonably and logically determined a priori—that we should “1. Protect and preserve

human life. 2. Reproduce and educate one’s offspring” (Dimmock and Fisher 68). However,

because of the nature of this theory being of Christian origin, it can be argued that such a

religious theory has no place in a secular government—government must blanketly serve and

protect all individuals of society, and not just a certain portion of the populace. To elucidate upon

this point, being that Abolition of Abortion through Equal Protection for All Unborn Children

Act references religion as its foundational basis for its modus operandi in “acknowledging the

sanctity of innocent human life created in the image of God, which should be equally protected

from fertilization to natural death” (State of Texas, Legislature, House 1), say the government
 Marcelino 8

was ruled through Muslim values. Islam outrightly rejects the eating of pork—something that

Christians have no problem in partaking. If the laws of the country were to prohibit the banning

of pork based upon merely the teachings of Islam, the Christians would find this to be unjust and

not right in the limitation of their rights and autonomous choices to enjoy things regarding their

own body and diet; however, from the Muslim perspective, this would be doing right by their

own deity. This can be made analogous to Christians justifying their prohibition of the rights of

abortion to people who do not hold the same values as them with scripture. Enforcing religiously

driven philosophy in government is on that leads to the unethical abuse of government power

and is contradictory to the telos of government in protecting the rights of all its citizens, as it

forces the limiting of liberty based upon ideals not universally shared nor driven by the duty to

protect all of society. The main argument of this essay is concerning the bounds by which

government should act and in the ethicality of its restriction of rights concerning bodily

autonomy—which should stray from religious ideals.

Thus, concerning the personhood of the fetus and in the ethicality of the government’s

restriction of the right of abortion, my conclusion is such: the fetus is not considered a person

and the government has no right in controlling and limiting one’s right to abortion. The lack of

consciousness in the fetus and in its lack of ability to feel pain and pleasure, denies it the right of

personhood. The right of the child bearer as a person thus is the only concern of government and
 Marcelino 9

should protect the right of people to have an abortion, as it is the purpose and telos of

government.
 Marcelino 10

Works Cited

Dimmock, Mark, and Andrew Fisher. Ethics for A-Level. Open Book Publishers, 2017.

Friend, Celeste. “Social Contract Theory.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

iep.utm.edu/soc-cont/#SH2b.

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Batoche Books Limited, 2001.

Perry, David L. “Some Issues in Contemporary Neurological Science and Technology.”

Markkula

Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University, 2001. www.scu.edu/ethics/focus-

areas/bioethics/resources/ethics-and-personhood/

Singer, Peter. “Frequently Asked Questions.” Peter Singer. petersinger.info/faq

State of Texas, Legislature, House. Abolition of Abortion through Equal Protection for All

Unborn

Children Act. LegiScan, capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/87R/billtext/html/HB03326I.htm.

“The Moral Status of Animals.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University, 2003.

plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-animal/#Pers

Warren, Mary Anne. “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion.” The Monist, vol. 57, no. 4,

1973. rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil215/Warren.pdf