Who or what is the unborn? This is a question we answer without hesitation in everyday life. We tell a young child there is a baby in mummy’s tummy, or tell an older child she was conceived in Spain. We show photos and ultrasounds and explain how sperm meets egg - and that, we say, is how you came to be.
Most of us recognise that we are bodily beings - living human beings, not disembodied ghosts. Like other such beings, we normally begin at fertilisation but are members of a unique kind of living being: a thinking, choice-making, rational human kind of being. The growing, maturing foetus is clearly not a potential but an actual life - a living member of our own kind. He or she is a “thinking kind of animal”, rather as a canary is a “flying kind of animal” - even if some canaries are too young or sick to fly, and some humans are too young or sick to think.
Mental capacities and thoughts come and go, but I exist before I have thoughts, in between my thoughts, and while I am too sick to have thoughts at all.
Further, unbeknownst to me, as soon as I exist at all, I already have a stake in my own wellbeing. Any baby, born or unborn, has objective interests in her own future life: interests of a kind no less real for the fact she cannot yet assert or understand them. The newborn, like the unborn, cannot take an interest in very much but nonetheless has interests both short-and longer-term in her welfare and survival.
Such interests should be respected by others, as those of a member of the rational human family. Morally speaking, there is no such thing as a “subhuman human” or a human “non-person”; rather, human beings are equal in their basic interests and their basic human rights. Moving at birth away from our mother’s body and her archetypally maternal personal shelter and support is a momentous social event but does not create our basic interests or the rights we already share with our mother and all human beings to have those interests respected.
Parents are guardians, not owners
To say that all human beings have morally significant interests in their own wellbeing does not mean these interests can or should be positively promoted on every possible occasion. What it does mean is that everyone’s interests must be respected and not unfairly attacked or impinged on.
We cannot always save everyone we would like to save, but that does not entitle us to attack or assault an innocent human being, to try to benefit ourselves or someone else. Nor does this change if that human being, born or unborn, has just been diagnosed with a terminal condition.
The sheer presence of a human being has value: each of us is valuable not just for what we do, but for what we are. And our basic rights are affected neither by a terminal prognosis nor by family members’ wish to end our lives: a wish born often out of fear, despair, misinformation and lack of positive support.
Part of what it means to be a human being with human moral status is that no-one owns you. No one may choose to end your life for their sake, or even for your own. Parents do not own their unborn child, any more than they own a child already born - though this may be concealed by the euphemisms surrounding abortion and sometimes even by the offer of commemorative photos and footprints of the child to be aborted.
However, the unborn is a child not just for the purpose of being grieved for, but for the purpose of being protected. Parents are guardians of their child, not owners, and as such must respect the child’s dignity and rights. Offering “owner-type” choices to parents leaves them with a heavy load of guilt they should not have to bear and that may take years to resolve.
Clearly, human beings are different in very many ways - we are not all equally capable, flourishing or fortunate. That said, we are morally equal in all being members of the human family with a stake in our own future as the special, rational kind of being we are. I am not, and never was, a “thing” or something owned by someone else: neither age, size, location or level of development makes anyone a moral subperson. The unborn was me - this is where I began, and I was always morally important. In short, if we are serious about human equality, and about our bodily nature as the kind of being we are, we will exclude no one from the realm of human rights: young or old, mother or child, healthy or terminally ill, planned or unplanned, in or outside the womb.
Dr Helen Watt is senior research fellow and former Director of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre, Oxford, United Kingdom. This is an edited version of her address to the Citizens’ Assembly.