Tweeting Scholastically against Abortion

A week or so ago some influencers posted a lament about how they “had” to abort their child after a Down syndrome diagnosis. Naturally, this set Twitter ablaze with debate over their inadequate justification for murdering their child. The debate has continued almost uninterrupted since then.

The thing about abortion debates is that they are basically the only ones to ever make me angry, and they’re also the “easiest” in the sense that the arguments for abortion are terrible. So when I get involved in these debates on Twitter, something will inevitably happen. Either I will be less charitable than normal, more excessive in laying out my argument than normal, or both.

This time around was no exception. As I ran into a particular thread and started getting into the weeds of the debate, I ran into a golden opportunity. A plucky pro-choicer produced the premise that moral protections rely on personhood, which in turn relies on agency and/or consciousness. This is, of course, a terribly weak point in pro-choice philosophy, so I decided to push back on it. We got a couple replies in before my last post, with which I got a bit carried away, began channeling medieval scholasticism in my strongest mode, and wrote a ~470 word micro-essay on the matter. It is this that I felt like sharing, mostly for an example of how scholastic concepts are still useful even today, and maybe to entertain you with how I DESTROYED my opponent with FACTS and LOGIC.1

So, below I present the oversized tweet reply in which I argue fetal personhood and the ethics of killing people. As a brief note, the footnote in the blockquote is part of the actual tweet. (I know.) But I also have attached other explanatory footnotes for you, my dear readers, in case they are useful.

The definition of a person is: an individual substance of a rational nature.2 Human nature is rational. Therefore an individual substance of human nature is a person. Therefore every human organism is a person.

The point is that whether reason is in potency or act3 makes no difference to the question quid est?4, does not what kind of being we are dealing with. And it is the kind of being that is the question here, not the state of development.

Thus, we have two questions, the ontological and then the ethical:
- Is a fetus a person? Per the argument above, yes, for it is an individual substance of a rational nature.
- Can one have the right to kill an innocent person?

I am assuming the answer to the latter is "no," (though maybe you will want to dispute this) in which case the only question is the first.

But let's say you don't like this concept of "person." Maybe you will prefer to redefine "person" such as only to cover beings whose reason and/or will are in act rather than in potency. If you take this route, the moral question changes.

Then, I would simply deny your claim that it matters where someone is a "person" by your definition, instead asserting that killing innocent human organisms is wrong whether they are "persons" in your sense of the term or not. For example, people sleeping, in a coma, or with certain mental disabilities don't have reason in act, but only mostly or entirely in potency.[^1]

You might respond to that by invoking the qualification you added before that in these cases reason has been in act and will be in act again. But an accidental fact of the past or future is a stupid criterion for determining what is in the present, as it reflects nothing inhering in the being in question.

For that matter, there are few humans whose reason is fully in act or fully in potency, so your definition opens the way to grading and ranking the moral value of human organisms according to their intellectual competence, which perhaps you would be willing to do, but it brings your view into the same territory as the kinds of racism and Nazism5 that produced things most people consider great atrocities. This is not a proof that your view is false, but it would require you to either affirm the views behind those acts or else produce an extended argument showing whether and to what extent and in what way(s) your view differs from them.

[^1] For that matter, this take on personhood renders a fetus at 8 months equal in every respect to a newborn, and you have not yet clarified whether you support infanticide or oppose late-term abortions, as your argument demands you treat the two as equivalent.