Robert Barnes, Fetal Life, and Brain Death

In some recent videos Robert Barnes makes an interesting observation, most people who believe life begins at conception seem to care more about abortion than about miscarriages, particularly those which happen within the first few weeks of pregnancy (e.g. during the zygote or blastocyst stage). However, logically speaking, it seems that a person should be equally concerned about both cases. Indeed, what makes them both tragic is the loss of human life and both cases equally result in a loss of human life.

This inequality of concern seems inconsistent to Barnes, and he takes it as evidence that people do not actually believe that the human organism in its earliest stages of development is actually a full human being, equal in dignity and worth to a fully developed human. If one embryo dies in a miscarriage and another in an abortion, they are both equally dead, and we should work equally to prevent both situations. The fact that vehement pro-lifers care less about miscarriage shows that they care less about one of the lives that was lost—a situation which, to put it strongly, should be impossible for those who think that all embryonic life equally has the full worth of a more developed human.

In this post I’m going to consider this claim, namely that a person having differing levels of care about early abortion vs miscarriage provides good evidence that such a person actually believes that humans in early development are not really human beings with the same value as developed humans. Particularly I’ll focus on whether this is true for the ardent pro-life crowd that verbally espouses that human life begins at conception, each human life is of equal value and humanity, and actively tries to prevent abortion.

Comparing explanations

To put this a little more formally, Barnes is arguing that the explanation for unequal care is unequal humanity / value. But is this explanation the best explanation? If unequal care always, or even usually indicates a belief in unequal value then it would seem reasonable to accept that the unequal value thesis is probably true. The problem is unequal care very frequently does not indicate unequal value. Everybody cares for different people to different degrees. I care for my child more (speaking literally, I take do more taking care of him) than I care for some human in Kazakhstan that I’ve never even heard of. Does this mean I consider that Kazak to be less human than my son? I hope not! Very frequently, spending more time and resources caring for one person more than another is explained by having greater responsibility for that person (e.g. my child), and / or having a greater prudential ability to care for that person (e.g. I am more able to care for someone who lives close rather than far away), rather than explained by ranking peoples degree of humanity and intrinsic worth.

Now simply because responsibility & ability frequently explains different treatment doesn’t mean that Barnes’ thesis must be false. But how are we to rank his inhuman thesis against prudential thesis? Well, one other data point to consider is what people say. We could ask those pro-lifers whether they think the zygote is fully human or not, and if they are people of honesty and character, their answer should impact our analysis. Now, in my experience, ardent pro-lifers are at least as honest as other people and hence their verbal testimony must tell against Barnes’ thesis.

But the instant reply—what if they are self-deceived? Well, again we shouldn’t throw out people’s self-conceptions willy-nilly, but setting this aside, where would we look for more evidence here? Well, if a person’s actions towards different people fit with the different degrees of responsibility and ability to care then this would tell in favor of the prudential. To begin with we’ll just assume that a citizen’s responsibility for another’s unborn who might be killed vs miscarried is the same (we’ll come back to this in a bit). But prudentially speaking there is a wide difference. It is more doable to act to prevent the unborn from being killed then to act to prevent the unborn from being miscarried. Hence prudentially it makes sense to focus on abortion.

Now you might object that this is wrong, one can do equally or more to stop miscarriages. I personally doubt that, but keep in mind that what is most important here is the person’s set of beliefs about the world. Hence if according to that person’s set of beliefs (even if they turn out to be false) if abortion is more preventable than miscarriage, then he is acting consistently with the prudential thesis. And, to be honest, people believing they can do more to prevent abortion than miscarriage is the most common situation. For instance, a person can think, “I can vote based on abortion, I can donate to crisis pregnancy centers, I can talk the women in my life who are or might get pregnant about abortion…”

But what comes to mind for miscarriage, particularly the early miscarriages that we are talking about here. These can happen before anyone even knows there’s a pregnancy! How are you supposed to act to prevent miscarriage that no one knows exists? It certainly doesn’t seem as obvious as the steps to prevent abortion. There are some things like taking vitamins, not drinking alcohol, etc., but implementing these isn’t as obvious for someone I don’t know. Further we often assume it’s already being done and hence I need to take no action. To make matters even more obscure, the causal correlation for these is not as strong—preventing malnutrition and alcohol intake will not always prevent death by miscarriage. Contrast this with abortion. Preventing an abortion will always prevent the death of the unborn by abortion. Hence even here it seems prudential reasons favor focusing on abortion.

This brings up another test (or subtest), does the action of the ardent pro-lifer act differently with regards the very small human (zygote, blastocyst), and the small human (fetus with brain activity and heartbeat). If these are treated differently in the same prudential / responsibility situations that would indicate a belief that the organism is held in different esteem (regardless of stated opinion). With regards abortion, ardent pro-lifers believe abortion is evil from the moment of conception onward. While they do not always push for such strict laws, the reason they don’t is typically prudential—they don’t think society will accept such laws and they can’t get the them passed. What about miscarriage? Well, in my anecdotal experience, these pro-lifers tend to be some of the most concerned about helping pregnant mothers. They encourage the taking of vitamins, not doing drugs, avoiding alcohol, as well as eating acting healthily. All the ardent pro-lifers I know affirm such steps throughout the entire pregnancy. This is true even for those who are trying to get pregnant (in fact the only people I know who’ll chew out a woman for drinking alcohol who is just trying to get pregnant but doesn’t think she is yet, are ardent pro-lifers, but YMMV. Course, whether chewing someone out in this situation is ethical is a question for a different time).

Conclusion

All of this is to say that I think Barnes’ case is quite weak. Being more concerned with preventing abortion than miscarriage does not provide much evidence that avid pro-lifers are inconsistent in their inner belief that the very small unborn are fully human. Indeed, when we look at a fuller set of circumstances the evidence swings decidedly away from his position.

Note that this is true even though we simply assumed one of Barnes’ premises that is quite contested—namely, that it is equally bad that the unborn die by accident (miscarriage) as by murder (abortion). However, it is widely believed that the negative result of immoral action is worse than the same result that happened via an non-blameworthy accident. For instance, we think there is something worse about a man being deliberately bludgeoned to death by a hammer, than by that same man being accidentally killed when his hammer suddenly broke and struck him in the head. And, there is a good reason for this intuition. In both cases it is evil that the man is dead. But in the first case, there is also the moral evil of murder, and hence there is even more evil in the first case than the second.

If we are (among other things) trying to minimize the amount of evil in the world, it seems pretty straightforward that we should put more effort into preventing greater evil. The application is straightforward. This means, ceteris paribus, more effort should be put into preventing abortion than miscarriages. Again, I think Barnes is wrong even without this consideration, but it is icing on top the carriage cake.

extra odds and ends

Of course Barnes says other stuff on this topic as well. For instance he links people’s lack of thinking through the ramifications of the life-begins-at-conception thesis to a lack of sincere belief. But this is tenuous and tendentious at best. If we discount beliefs being sincere because we don’t think of all the ramifications of a belief then no one is sincere. And we see lots of examples of this. Transgender activists who shout, yell, and vote all based on their beliefs are sincere, even though many of them have never worked through the implications of their arguments—e.g. a person can just as validly self-identify as a poached egg.

Not working out all the implications of ones beliefs is actually the standard way humans think. Its incredibly difficult, mentally, emotionally, and physically, to try and work through the implications of everything you believe. Only the greatest of philosophers managed to even come close to attempting the project, and there were always unforeseen implications of their systems. Rational consistency and sincerity come apart.

Despite this, I think Barnes exaggerates the lack of system thinking and consistency in ardent pro-lifers. Ages ago they worked to outlaw fetal stem cell research on life-begins-at-conception grounds. Further they’ve been consistently dealing with the conundrums raised by their view, e.g. do you save a 5 year old child or 1000 embryos from a burning building.

Final challenge

I have two challenges for Barnes. First, if Barnes thinks there’s actual inconsistency here, let him put it into a formal logical argument. Show me from premises to conclusion how believing birth begins at conception leads to a logical contradiction. I’d wager that one of two things will happen. Either 1) he’ll wind up with a body of propositions that some people might find strange but that don’t actually contradict, or 2) he’ll manage to formulate a contradiction but only at the cost of including a premise that a life-at-conception believer actually rejects.

Second, I’d like Barnes to share the kind of evidence or argument that it would take for him to change his mind. So Barnes, what would it take for you to accept that life begins at conception—that the earliest human organism is a human being with full human dignity, value, and worth?

Now I truly do not mean this as a ‘gotcha’ moment. I’ll go ahead and answer my own challenge. I believe life begins at conception and here are three of the things that would change my mind. Scientifically, if it can be shown that a zygote is not an organism, an independent being with its own life and existence, I would change my mind. Philosophically if you could show there was a property that was essential to being human that the embryo lacked I’d change my mind. Similarly, if you could make a theological argument showing God denied the full humanity of the zygote I’d change my mind. 

So Barnes, what would it take?