Does the unborn child have a soul? Let us imagine a conversation between Aristotle (the 4th c. BC Greek philosopher) and some contemporary politician calling for abortion at any time up to the moment of birth. We’ll call her ‘H’. H. and A. are watching the recent news on television about abortion legislation in the United States. During a commercial, H. turns to A. and begins the dialogue.
H: I believe that women have the right to abortion.
A: I do not dispute that you believe that. If you say so, you most likely do. But do you know what you are saying?
H: What do you mean? Of course, I do.
A: Let us first consider what you mean. Are you asserting something about the legal or moral right of a woman?
H: I am asserting that women have the legal right. This is because the freedom of choice is a universal right.
A: So, if we for the moment allow that freedom of choice is a universal right, why would that make a particular choice a legal right?
H: We should not make laws that take away a person’s freedom of choice.
A: I think if we examine this contention of yours even briefly, you will find yourself in an uncomfortable position. Let us take an example less contentious. What if a woman chooses to kill her seven-year-old child? Would you protect her legal right to do so based on her universal right of freedom of choice?
H: No, of course not.
A: Why not?
H: Because the child has been born. It is no longer a fetus.
A: This is a true statement, but it has no relation to what you earlier said. You did not base your argument on a universal right to freedom of choice just now but on whether the object affected by that choice was a fetus or a seven-year-old child. How is freedom of choice related to the child?
H: Well, let me rephrase things for you. A woman has freedom of choice to abort or not abort an unborn child.
A: So, the choice is qualified. The woman apparently does not have a universal right to choice at all, since if choice were a universal right it would necessarily have to be accepted whatever the object of choice.
H: Ah, but I am saying that the woman has a universal right to choose what she would do to her own body.
A: Why?
H: What a person does to herself does not affect other people.
A: So, her right to choose is given to her in any case in which her choice affects only herself.
H: Yes.
A: I can think of a number of ways in which what a person does to his body will affect other people. An alcoholic father certainly damages his own body, but his behaviour affects his entire family and, often, others as well. Would you say that he has the right to choose to be a drunk?
H: Well, alcoholism may not be a choice. It may be a disease.
A: But you would say that, in any case, he has the right to continue to drink alcohol and others around him have no right to interfere with his choice?
H: No, they should help him to recover from his alcoholism.
A: Why? Out of compassion for him or out of concern for what he is doing to them?
H: Both.
A: Yet, in either case, his freedom of choice is limited by the actions of others.
H: That is because he really has no choice as an alcoholic: his sickness controls him.
A: He may, indeed, be driven to drink, and yet he still chooses to drink. It is not his choice that determines what we do but his health. You are arguing that we do not recognize choice as the issue but health, and we intervene in opposition to his choices when he makes the wrong choice, whether freely or because of his alcoholism. Again, choice is not the issue.
H: But a pregnant woman does not make her decision to abort her fetus because she is unhealthy. Health is not the issue: choice is.
A: Certainly. But would you say her choice has no effect on other persons at all? Is she the only player, just because she is the one carrying the child?
H: Her choice may affect other people, but she is the one who has to bear the child and give birth.
A: You like to speak of the woman having a right to choose to terminate the pregnancy. In my day, women did abort their babies, but they also practiced infanticide. Just-born children would be carried off to the hills and left to die on their own, unattended--unless some shepherd rescued the child and sold it into slavery for a little money. But this was not the woman’s choice, it was the father’s.
H: I am not talking about infanticide but abortion.
A: I see, again, that you are not talking about choice, then, but about the right to put a fetus to death. We shall have to explore that further. But first, why do you not speak, as people in my day, of the father’s choice?
H: As I said, he is not having to carry the fetus and give it birth. The woman should have the right to do what she wants to do with her own body.
A: And yet we were a moment ago exploring the thought that she is not an island but makes decisions that affect other people as well. Could we at least say that what she does with her body has nothing to do with her husband?
H: No, it is her body.
A: So, a husband should not stop his wife from injuring herself? Let us say that she decides to do a very dangerous activity on the grounds that it is her choice, are you saying that her husband has no right to intervene?
H: Yes.
A: While I would disagree, I think in our situation there is more to consider. In this case, the husband is also the father of the child. When you say that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her own body, you seem to be playing with words. While her arm is not her husband’s arm, the fetus is not her body in the same sense.
H: Why not?
A: Well, her arm will not someday be delivered from her body, will it? It will never have an independent existence from the rest of her body, but the fetus will.
H: I suppose you are right.
A: Moreover, the fetus is not something her body simply grew without the seed of the father. In fact, what is in her womb is a combination of herself and her husband.
H: You are talking basic biology.
A: And that biology shows that the fetus is not her body at all. It may be in her, but it is not part of her body. And so, we cannot say that aborting the fetus is a choice to do with her own body.
H: I see what you are saying. And yet I believe she should have the right to choose.
A: We do seem to have gotten somewhere. You originally said that the woman ‘has’ the right to choose. Now you have come to say that she ‘should have’ the right to choose. We have also gotten away from saying that her choice is to do with her own body, since the fetus is, as basic biology teaches us, not her own body. I think we might need to turn to the next subject.
H: What is that?
A: Whether the fetus has a soul.
H: Oh, what nonsense. I do not believe in souls at all.
A: Perhaps we should define the soul.
H: You cannot. It is a made-up idea that does not exist.
A: We might be talking across the centuries here. By ‘soul,’ I mean what distinguishes lifeless matter from matter that is alive.
H: So, you are using the word ‘soul’ to mean ‘life’?
A: Yes. I suppose I should say that I have a slight disagreement with my teacher, Plato, on this matter. Plato thought that the soul existed apart from the body, but I believe that the soul does not exist apart from the body. In my view, the soul is what makes things alive.
H: The fetus, I would say, is not alive. It starts to live when it is born, when it is able to survive on its own—when it is viable.
A: We should be able to proceed, then, since what I mean by ‘soul’ is essentially what you mean by ‘life.’ If I may, let me offer some further thoughts on the soul. Plants can have souls since they are living things. Animals are a higher life form. People are even higher.
H: I must say, this is a new use of the term ‘soul’ to me.
A: And yet it is not merely my own notion. Often, our Greek word psyche, translated ‘soul’ at times, makes better sense in your language when translated with the word, ‘life’. And yet we can also agree that there is something different about saying that a tree has life and your cat has life, isn’t there?
H: Yes, that is obvious.
A: So, the lowest form of life can be said to have life because it takes in nutrition and grows and decays. A rock might change because of the external forces that act on it, but a tree will also change because it has these life characteristics within it. That is why I would say it has a soul—nothing more.
H: Alright.
A: Yet, would you not say the same thing about a fetus? Is it any less alive—does it have any less of a soul—than a tree?
H: Well, by your definition, it takes in nutrition and grows and is, therefore, a living thing like a tree. I still can’t call that a soul.
A: Very well. But now, let us consider animals. What characteristic of ‘soul’ do animals have that plants do not?
H: You mean, what characteristics of life do they display?
A: Yes. I’m wondering if you can come up with some things that I taught on this subject in my On the Soul even if you have not read it!
H: Well, animals are different from rocks in that they are alive, and from plants in that they not only take in nutrition and grow but they also move.
A: Very good. A tree may sway in the wind—that is, it has movement when acted upon. But an animal can move itself. It can slither, hop, walk, fly—even an amoeba can move itself. What else?
H: Animals have sensations. They have the five senses of hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling, and seeing.
A: And would you say that these characteristics of animal life are present in the fetus? Is the fetus only like a living plant, or is it also alive—have a soul!—like an animal as well?
H: I know that a fetus can move in the womb, and it certainly at some point shows signs of the senses. We have studies that have been done on this, but anybody knows that a fetus will respond to noise and feelings. Tasting, smelling, and seeing are not likely applicable in the womb.
A: And yet, immediately upon birth, a child shows it had the capacity to taste, smell, and see and continues to respond to noises and touch. Surely you would say that, just like movement, the womb is what restricted the fetus’ all five senses and not its own capacity?
H: This seems obvious. But we do not know when the fetus develops its first sensation.
A: I will grant you that—although those studies you mentioned from your era have increasingly shown how early a child has some sensations. But would you not agree that, what the fetus is is represented in its capacity? A sleeping person has the capacity for sight. A person may lose hearing for a while and then regain it but be no less alive when it has lost its ability to hear.
H: Agreed.
A: And what of a person who is blind from birth? What about a deaf person? Are they less human? Are they less alive?
H: I would not say so.
A: Even if they have no ability to gain their sight or hearing?
H: Yes.
A: And yet, a fetus, because it is human, has the capacity to develop these sensations even if he or she does not have those sensations from the moment of conception but later in the pregnancy. If the person who never develops those sensations is alive and human, surely the fetus that is growing in the womb and developing these sensations is equally so?
H: It would be difficult to dispute that.
A: And some animals display some other aspects of the soul, such as perception and reason.
H: Ah, there is something that the fetus does not do.
A: You mean reason? Of course, if an animal responds to even just one of the senses, we would have to say it has perception.
H: Yes, I mean reason.
A: Of course, some higher animals demonstrate the ability to reason, although humans are decidedly different from the animals precisely in its far greater capacity to reason.
H: Agreed.
A: And we must also say that the fetus differs from animals in this regard as well.
H: But an advanced animal—a chimpanzee, for example—can reason better than a newly born baby. Surely this is even a greater discrepancy in the case of a fetus.
A: We seem to have covered aspects of this matter already. Are you saying that a chimpanzee operating at the height of its capacity in reasoning is a higher animal than a newly born baby that is still developing its capacities? I wonder if you would shoot the baby that falls into the cage of a chimpanzee that attacks it or let it kill the baby because it is a higher life form by virtue of more developed reasoning?
H: I would save the baby. Perhaps I would do so because it is my own kind.
A: And your own kind is a higher life form than a chimpanzee. You recognize that the baby will keep developing into a highly rational human being because you are such a person yourself.
H: Yes.
A: And you can imagine someone making the other decision about you. Let us say that you suffered a terrible injury in an accident and lost major reasoning abilities for nine months while you were recovering. You would not want that person to save the chimpanzee over you because you were not functioning at full capacity at the time, would you?
H: No, I would not.
A: Then, we seem to have come to the position that the fetus has a soul—or life—in every sense of the word. Have we left any definition of life out of the discussion that could change this?
H: No. I think you have mentioned all the ways in which something could be said to be alive.
A: And we have concluded that a fetus either has or is developing its capacities to exhibit all these features of life. And, where it possibly lacks some capacity, such as advanced reasoning, it is not a diminished form of life any more than a person with a concussion is. Being human as opposed to being an animal is in the ability to develop its capacities, not in the demonstration of those abilities at some time in its life.
H: And yet, it seems that there really is a difference between a fetus that does not have the ability to reason and a seven-year-old child in school who is using her reasoning.
A: Let us, then, consider an adult who has lived a life of advanced reasoning. Let us say that this person was a physicist restricted to a wheelchair, unable to speak, but capable of advanced reasoning. You know the person I have in mind?
H: I do.
A: Now, let us say that he developed Alzheimer’s toward the end of his life. The person we have in mind did not, but let us say he did for argument’s sake.
H: Alright.
A: Would you reason that he should be put to death because he has lost his ability to reason?
H: I might. I am not sure about euthanasia.
A: I thought you might say so. But what if scientists discovered a cure for Alzheimer’s. Would you still advocate euthanasia?
H: No. The hope of recovering reason should rule that out.
A: And yet, we know that the fetus will recover—that is, develop reasoning and maybe even become a famous physicist. If you knew she would, would you not want to stop the mother from aborting the child just as much as you would want to stop the family of the physicist with Alzheimer’s from euthanizing him?
H: I find it difficult to argue with this point.
A: I appreciate your willingness to put your contentions to the test. Neither the claim that the freedom of choice is a universal right nor the claim that the fetus is not a living human being can be defended. I suppose the argument against abortion would be even stronger if we were to subscribe to something like my teacher said about the soul—that it might live apart from the physical world. In that case, we would not limit ourselves to the biological characteristics of living things. Yet, on a purely biological level, the fetus is a living human being.
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