Tearing Us Apart

Why Abortion Harms Everyone and Solves Nothing

Ryan T. Anderson, Alexandra DeSanctis

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781684513543
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The political philosopher Ryan T. Anderson, bestselling author of When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, teams up with the pro-life journalist Alexandra DeSanctis to expose the catastrophic failure—social, political, legal, and personal—of legalized abortion. Hope in the Ruins of Roe Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade and returned abortion law to the democratic process, a powerful new book reframes the coming debate: Our fifty-year experiment with unlimited abortion has harmed everyone —even its most passionate proponents. Women, men, families, the law, politics, medicine, the media—and, of course, children (born and unborn)—have all been brutalized by the culture of death fostered by Roe v. Wade. Abortion hollows out marriage and the family. It undermines the rule of law and corrupts our political system. It turns healers into executioners and "women's health" into a euphemism for extermination. Ryan T. Anderson, a compelling and reasoned voice in our most contentious cultural debates, and the pro-life journalist Alexandra DeSanctis expose the false promises of the abortion movement and explain why it has made everything worse. Five decades after Roe, everyone has an opinion about abortion. But after reading Tearing Us Apart, no one will think about it in the same way.

CHAPTER ONE Abortion Harms the Unborn Child

One of us (Ryan) vividly remembers the first time he saw an ultrasound of his son. Of course, he didn’t yet know it was a son—the twelve-week ultrasound is too early to recognize the sex of the child, and Ryan and his wife Anna chose not to find out at a later ultrasound. But it was their son all the same. It was undeniable that this was a human being—a baby.

They breathed a huge sigh of relief when they first heard their baby’s heartbeat, and though they first heard it at the twelve-week ultrasound, the heartbeat itself had developed around week six. The ultrasound technician never uttered the phrase “fetus” but repeatedly said things such as, “That’s your baby’s heartbeat” and “There’s your baby’s face.”¹ At the twenty-week ultrasound, the technician made a point of identifying and taking pictures of every major organ and bodily structure.

After that first appointment, Ryan and Anna texted ultrasound photos to both sides of the family, shared the due date, and started to prepare for the baby’s arrival. Eventually, they made a public announcement, and people offered congratulations and promised to pray for both mother and baby. (Ryan felt left out.)

There’s no denying it. At least when people are happy about its existence, they will admit that the entity in the womb is a child. A human child. A human being. Though it is immature, it is not in any sense a “potential life.” It already is a life, with potential, and with a potential future. That’s why we instinctively mourn miscarriage. That’s why parents feel relieved when they hear that heartbeat on the ultrasound and are comforted when the unborn baby kicks, both signs that the life is thriving and developing well.

Abortion cuts short this potential by ending the life of the child. That’s the foundational harm in every abortion. Abortion harms the unborn child. Abortion kills the unborn child, a child who is as fully human and as fully valuable—as fully a person—as the person reading this book.

Some people try to deny this reality in order to justify abortion. They deny that the unborn child is really a human being. They try to dehumanize the child by using sterile terms outside the clinical context. (Has any expectant mother ever shared ultrasound pictures of her “fetus” with family and friends?) Some go further and refer to the child as a “clump of cells.” (Organisms aren’t clumps, but if we are going to speak this way, couldn’t each of us be considered in some sense “a clump of cells,” too?)

The first purpose of this chapter, then, is to outline the basic facts of embryology and developmental biology, exposing the foolishness—even in purely scientific terms—of attempts to dehumanize the unborn child. But we also need to respond to more sophisticated abortion advocates, who know better than to pretend that biology is on their side and who turn instead to philosophy.

These interlocutors argue that while the unborn child might technically be a human being, the child isn’t a human person. That is, according to some of today’s leading bioethicists, the unborn child is not morally equivalent to the rest of us. This argument can come in at least two forms—that of body–self dualism, which denies our embodiment, and that of moral dualism, which denies our intrinsic worth and dignity. We’ll explain these arguments in more detail, as well as why they both fail. Every human being is a person because every human being is a rational animal, and that rational-animal nature is the foundation of our intrinsic worth and profound dignity. This is true of all human beings, even if they can’t immediately exercise their rational, personal capacities; they’re still of the same nature and thus of the same worth as those who can.

Some defenders of abortion acknowledge that the unborn child is, in fact, a human being and a human person, but they argue that it isn’t the role of the state to impose any one view of morality on other people. These thinkers might describe themselves as “personally opposed” to abortion, but they are also politically in favor of giving women the choice to abort. We will show that this position is incoherent. Surely no one would say that he is personally opposed to slavery but in favor of his neighbor’s right to choose to own a slave. There are plenty of debates about the proper role of the state, and subsequent chapters will say more about them. But even those who advocate the most limited government acknowledge that a rightly ordered government must, at the very least, play a role in protecting human beings from lethal violence. Even in that “night watchman” state, it would be an appropriate use of state authority to protect unborn children from harm.

The basic case for the right to life of the unborn child rests on three theses:

1. Biological: A new human being comes into existence at conception.
2. Moral: Human beings are created equal and possess intrinsic dignity and worth.
3. Political: Governments exist to, at the very least, protect innocent human beings from lethal violence.

Finally, we consider a last-ditch argument for abortion. Acknowledging for the sake of argument that the unborn child is a human being with equal moral worth and that governments should protect people from intentional lethal violence, some abortion supporters argue that none of those considerations override a woman’s bodily autonomy. That while the unborn child might be fully human and fully our equal, and while government might rightly prohibit intentional killing, the unborn child is an unjust trespasser in a woman’s womb, and she has no duty to allow the child to continue occupying it, and thus the government has no legitimacy in requiring “forced pregnancy.” We’ll explain why this line of argument is specious and that, far from being an intruder in his mother’s womb, the unborn child is where he belongs. Furthermore, parents bear special obligations to their children, and a woman’s bodily autonomy does not justify lethal violence against the unborn.

Abortion is a grave moral evil, an act of violence against the most vulnerable members of the human family. Every abortion ends the life of an innocent human being in the womb, a child who, because he is human, necessarily possesses intrinsic worth and dignity and thus deserves to have his life protected. Parents, in particular, bear special responsibilities to their children, and thus abortion strikes at one of the most profound human relationships.

The Biological Thesis: Human Beings Come into Existence at Conception

When Ryan and Anna first saw that twelve-week ultrasound, every one of their son’s bones had already formed. His heart was beating. His blood was circulating. He was nourished through the umbilical cord. Yes, he lived inside of Anna. But unlike what many abortion proponents claim, he wasn’t a “part” of her. Nor was he just a clump of cells. He was an organism, with all his developing organs working together to sustain his whole body. He was their son. He was the same little boy that he is today, four years later. In fact, his life didn’t begin when his parents first saw him in an ultrasound. His life started some weeks earlier (but Anna won’t let Ryan write about that).

Abstracted from the abortion debate, the biology of when the life of a new human being begins is neither complicated nor controversial. We all know it.² When a sperm fertilizes an egg, a new organism comes into existence. The basic facts of biology and embryology—which have become much clearer and are now indisputable thanks to technological advancements in the decades following Roe v. Wade—make it clear that, from the moment of conception, the unborn child is a distinct, living human being, just like each one of us.³

Here’s how the authors of one prominent embryology textbook put it: “Human development begins at fertilization when a male gamete or sperm (spermatozoon) unites with a female gamete or oocyte (ovum) to form a single cell—a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.”⁴ With the exception of identical twins, each of us began life as a single cell.⁵

This single-celled organism, a zygote, forms after the sperm and egg fuse, and it rapidly develops into a blastocyst and then an embryo and then a fetus. But none of these are separate organisms. Rather, these words refer to the same human organism at different stages of development, at different ages. The zygote is the very same organism that exits the womb nine months later as a newborn child.

Abortion supporters continue to deny this scientific reality, ignoring the facts of basic biology in order to justify abortion on the grounds that the unborn child isn’t a child at all.

Some of those who defend abortion claim, for instance, that the fetus isn’t even a human being. In reality, the unborn child is from the moment of conception a living human being. The gametes—sperm in a man and egg in a woman—are genetically and functionally parts of the potential parents, but by the time fertilization is completed, a unique human being has come into existence. He or she has human genetic material entirely distinct from both mother and father—and indeed from every human being who has ever existed or ever will exist.⁶

Other times, abortion advocates argue that the unborn child is merely a part of his mother, and therefore that destroying it through abortion is akin to removing a bad tooth or a burst appendix. In a 2019 CNN interview, for example, former New York City Democratic politician Christine Quinn claimed that pro-life laws are wrong, arguing, “When a woman is pregnant, that is not a human being inside of her. It’s part of her body.”⁷ But Ryan’s son wasn’t a part of Anna’s body at all; he was a distinct human being dwelling inside her. Though the unborn child lives inside his or her mother’s womb, that human being isn’t a part of the mother’s body in the way that, say, her lungs or her heart are.

The woman’s lungs and heart are organs, organized and operating within her body and enabling it to function properly as a complete organismic whole. The unborn child, by contrast, is both genetically and functionally distinct from both mother and father. It is its own organism, organized with its own parts, its own organs such as the lungs and heart, or the cells that will later develop into these organs. The structure and function of the unborn child’s organs are parts of a distinct, complete organism dwelling inside the mother, not parts of the distinct whole that comprises the mother.

The clearest way to see this is to note that the unborn child has its own fundamentally distinct trajectory. The mother’s various organs serve the purpose of the mother’s organismic life. But the unborn child doesn’t do that. It’s not a part at the service of the mother’s body. It is its own whole, with its own pathway for growth and maturation. The various parts of that child—the organs of the fetus—are at the service of the child’s life. Looking at the different ends the parts serve, whether mother or child—or in the case of the placenta, both—helps clarify that the child is its own whole.

The unborn child is an entirely new organism—a whole human being. Yes, it is young and immature. Yes, it has yet to develop into something that looks like an adult. But the one-celled zygote is exactly what a one-day-old human being looks like, and it does exactly what a one-day-old human being does. So, too, with the eight-day-old blastocyst—that’s what a human being of that age looks like, and it does exactly what it’s supposed to do. So, too, with the twenty-week fetus. These are all complete, whole organisms, even though they are rapidly developing to reach the next stage of life.

The child in the womb needs the same things that we all need outside of the womb: nurture, care, protection, and a hospitable environment. The rapid growth that commences at conception, working to develop a full set of capacities, is a process that continues well after birth. The capacity for locomotion normally develops in the early years first as crawling, then walking, then running. The capacity for speech develops first as babbling, then as discrete words, eventually full sentences, and even foreign languages. The human brain doesn’t even finish fully developing until a human being reaches his mid-twenties. Likewise, the unborn child is no different than the newborn (or, for that matter, the adult) in its dependence on others, though the form of dependence in the womb is more radical.

This is simply to say that human development is a dynamic process, one that extends far beyond the months before birth. We come into existence as organisms who develop over time to be able to exercise more and more of our capacities. That’s what we mean when we say the newly conceived child is a human life with potential, rather than a potential life. The one-celled zygote, multi-celled embryo, fetus, newborn, toddler, teen, and adult are all various stages of a single organism’s growth and development; these stages don’t each represent different organisms but rather periods in the life of one and the same human being. Birth may be an extraordinary event, but it is not a magical dividing line. Each of us (unless we’re an identical twin) started out as a one-celled zygote and have been developing as continuous, unique biological entities ever since.

The Moral Thesis: Human Beings Have Intrinsic Value

When Ryan’s son was born, he was entirely helpless. He relied on his mother to feed him and on his father to change his diapers. And his parents joyfully fulfilled the obligations they had to care for their son. For those first few weeks, all he seemed to do was eat, sleep, and poop. Many non-human animals do the same. Yet there is a fundamental difference in terms of moral value between that newborn human being and all other forms of life. The newborn baby possesses profound intrinsic value and worth, even at that early and undeveloped stage, an intrinsic value that non-human animals don’t possess.

Nearly everything around us is valuable for its instrumental worth. We keep chickens in the coop for the eggs they lay; we value trees in the field for their shade. When the chickens stop laying eggs, off they go. When the trees are more valuable as timber or firewood, down they come. But that’s not how we value other human beings. Or at least not how we should value them. We shouldn’t value them based on how useful or productive or instrumentally beneficial they are—to us or to society.

Rather, we should value human beings as subjects who possess immeasurable intrinsic worth, who are valuable simply because of who they are, not because of what they can do for us. That is, we should value them because they are valuable for their own sake; they don’t have mere instrumental value that fluctuates based on what they can offer us at any given time.

What was true of Ryan’s son when he first came home from the hospital was true several weeks earlier at his first ultrasound. He couldn’t do much at all that was different from other animals, but his value was different in kind even then—because he was different in kind. The value he has today, and the value he had when he was born and when he was in utero, all stem from the fact that he is a person.

Because human beings are animal organisms of a special sort, we’re valuable by virtue of who we are, not by virtue of what we can do for others or what other people believe about our worth. Some give a theological explanation for this: We are made in the image and likeness of God. As his image-bearers, we have profound, inherent worth, as he created us to be with him for eternity. Others offer a philosophical explanation: We possess a rational and free nature, and any creature with such a nature is the subject of intrinsic value. Others appeal to a purported self-evident truth of philosophical theology, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights.

All three of these arguments converge on one central point: Human beings are creatures of a certain personal nature, so that the only proper response is one of gratitude, appreciation, cherishing, protecting, and valuing.

Supporters of abortion have to get around this in order to argue that abortion is a morally acceptable choice. Some concede the biological thesis that the unborn child is a unique, living human being, but they deny that all human beings have a right to life, because they believe that not all human beings have intrinsic worth. In order to do this, abortion advocates rely on personhood arguments, which attempt to distinguish between human beings and human persons, defined as individuals who have moral worth and basic rights we must respect.

Rather than denying the humanity of the unborn—which they know is a losing argument—they deny the personhood of the unborn. While some will claim the unborn child is only a “potential life,” these more sophisticated (and in some cases sophistical) supporters of abortion claim the unborn child is only a “potential person.” That is, while they concede that this is a human being, they argue that it isn’t yet a person because it can’t yet engage in personal actions.

As philosopher Christopher Kaczor has summarized it, “Several authors such as [Michael] Tooley, [Peter] Singer, David Boonin, Mary Anne Warren, and many others affirm precisely that the fetus is a biological human being but not a moral person.”⁸ Singer in particular defines a person as “a being w...