Abortion is a hot-button issue in which both sides claim the moral high ground and use emotionally charged rhetoric.
On the pro-choice side of the debate, people argue that women’s fundamental rights include the right to control their own bodies as they choose, a position summed up in the slogan, “My body, my choice.” They share heartbreaking stories of women who desperately wanted to become mothers but likely would have died had they carried a fetus to term, or whose fetus had life-threatening defects (such as multiple missing organs).1 They also ask how poor women or teenage girls who barely have the resources to care for themselves could morally be compelled to take on the cost and commitment of pregnancy and a child.2 Further, the pro-choice side regards it as horrific to force a victim of rape to give birth to the child of her attacker—extending the violation of her body and rights.3
On the antiabortion side, many believe that a fetus (or what some call an “unborn child”) has a right to life. For instance, as Texas Governor Greg Abbott put it, “Our creator endowed us with the right to life and yet millions of children lose their right to life every year because of abortion.”4 Antiabortionists often paint a horrifying picture of innocent babies ruthlessly slaughtered by loose women and vicious doctors. They share stories of women who regret their abortions, and some even compare abortion to slavery.5 Dean Nelson, executive director of the antiabortion group Human Coalition Action, for example, wrote, “The reality of a slave who had no rights and was powerless is similar to a child in the womb whose rights are not affirmed.”6
Both sides claim that the other violates rights. To understand which (if either) side is correct, we must understand what rights are, where they come from, and how they apply in this context.
What Are Rights, and Where Do They Come From?
Some, such as Abbott, claim that rights are endowments granted by God. This claim is problematic for many reasons, not the least of which is that there is no evidence for God, much less for God-given rights. If people could point to the evidence for God and for God-given rights, they would. They can’t, so they don’t. The whole notion is to be accepted on faith—that is, in the absence of evidence. This makes the claim that rights come from God arbitrary and logically indefensible.
Others argue that rights are essentially government-created privileges—privileges we have only insofar as governments grant them. But there is no evidence that any government action can create rights; governments can only permit certain actions and prohibit others. If rights exist, their purpose is to inform people—including politicians—what they may do morally in regard to other people, not what the government permits them to do. If rights were government-granted privileges, any heinous actions or policies a government declared legal—from prohibiting alcohol consumption to banning homosexuality, to reinstituting slavery—would be fully rights-respecting.
So, what exactly are rights, and where do they come from? Rights, as the American founders understood, are moral prerogatives to act on one’s own judgment. The right to life is the right to act as your life requires. The right to liberty is the right to act free of coercion (as Thomas Jefferson put it, “rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others”).7 The right to property is the right to keep, use, and dispose of the product of your effort. The right to the pursuit of happiness is the right to pursue the values and goals you choose.
So, if we have these rights, where do they come from, and why do we need them?
Man, as Aristotle observed, is the “rational animal,” meaning that the use of reason is what distinguishes him from all other species. And as philosopher Ayn Rand observed, reason is our basic means of living. We live by using reason to figure out what things are and how we can use them to produce the goods we need in order to survive and thrive. This process of identification and experimentation fundamentally is what enables us to produce everything from food, clothing, and shelter to antibiotics, airplanes, and computers. Rand further observed that in order for human beings to act in accordance with our reasoning minds, we must be free from the one thing people can do to stop us from acting on our judgment: using force against us.
If a robber takes a woman’s money at gunpoint, she can’t use it to buy the things she intended to buy. If a government seizes someone’s home via eminent domain, he can’t use his property as he planned. If a government outlaws blasphemy, citizens can’t speak their minds about religion. In order to live as rational beings, people must be free from compulsion so they can act in accordance with their rational judgment. This is the source of rights: the fact that human beings require freedom from coercion in order to live as human beings. Rights are recognitions of this vital fact.
The context in which this need of freedom from coercion arises is the context in which a person (or group) can use physical force to stop another from acting on his judgment: a social context. As Rand said,
“Rights” are . . . the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual’s actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others—the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context.8
A right, Rand observed, is “a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.”9 Rights arise and are applicable only when people are living among and dealing with one another. A person alone on a desert island would still have to act on his judgment to survive, but he would have no need of the concept of “rights,” as there would be no one there who could stop him from acting on his judgment.
Does a Fetus Have Rights?
Women who live among other people—that is, in a social context—must act on their own judgment to live and thrive. Their rights recognize this fact and morally prohibit others from using coercion against them. Does an embryo or fetus, growing within a woman’s womb, also have rights? To answer this question, we must understand what embryos and fetuses are.
When sperm fertilizes an egg, a single-celled zygote is formed. After several cell divisions, the zygote may implant into a woman’s uterine lining (the zygote may not implant; if it does not, it doesn’t continue to develop). Over the course of two weeks, the implanted zygote continues to divide into multiple cells with different functions, using energy provided by the woman’s body. These cells now constitute an embryo. It is attached to the uterus via the umbilical cord and placenta, which convey oxygen and nutrients from the woman’s body to the embryo. By about eight weeks after conception, the embryo has begun to develop distinct body parts, including nubs that will become limbs and the beginnings of eyes; it is now considered a fetus, and it continues to develop within the uterus.10 Infants are biologically different from zygotes, embryos, and fetuses because they are not physically attached to or within the woman, nor totally dependent on her for their nutrition and oxygen. This is why, in addition to the different concepts we have for the major prenatal stages, we also have the concept of birth. Birth begins a new and very different stage, the stage during which rights apply to what is now a baby, an individuated human being in a social context.11
The fact that embryos and fetuses have human DNA or that they are alive does not mean that they have rights. It means that they are human, but rights don’t apply to things just because they are human; to claim otherwise is to claim that human hair clippings have rights, or that a mass murderer has rights (which he doesn’t, having forfeited his rights by murdering people). Rights, as we’ve seen, apply to humans who are individuated and in a social context (assuming they haven’t forfeited them).
A fetus does not exist in a social context; it is inside a woman. It cannot perform even the most basic biological functions, such as breathing or digesting, for itself.12 It lives only through and within the pregnant woman. And “that which lives within the body of another,” as philosopher Leonard Peikoff put it, “can claim no prerogatives against its host.”13
Whereas a fetus is a potential individual, a woman is an actual individual. She has goals, relationships, and interests. A fetus does not. To outlaw abortion is to violate the rights of an actual, individuated human being for the sake of a potential.
Antiabortionists gloss over these crucial distinctions when they claim that fetuses are individuals just like you and me and, therefore, have individual rights. For example, John Seago, legislative director of Texas Right to Life, insisted, “At the moment of sperm-egg fusion, you have an independent, individual human being who is unlike anyone else.”14 Although a zygote is genetically unique, it is neither independent nor individual. It is not individuated; it is not in a social context; it does not have rights.
Observe further that, unlike a fetus, a newborn can survive without its mother and can interact with others apart from her. Of course, a newborn cannot yet take care of himself; he cannot exercise his rights because his rational faculty is not yet sufficiently developed. So, his rights are held in trust by his parents or guardians until he can. In the meantime, parents are responsible for nurturing their children and making various decisions regarding safety, education, nutrition, and the like, and, over time, helping them to become capable of living on their own.
To outlaw abortion is to force on a woman a massive decision with lifelong consequences, thereby impairing her ability to live her life by her own judgment. This has serious repercussions throughout her life, potentially forcing her to sacrifice in her relationships, education, career, and health. It even forces her to risk death; although childbirth is safer than it once was, it is still dangerous to the mother—significantly more dangerous than abortion.15
If a woman wants to be a mother and has the resources to do so, then it makes sense for her to accept the risks and costs of pregnancy. But morally she must be free to make this choice herself. If she does not want to have a child, or can’t carry her fetus to term without intolerable risk, or discovers that her fetus has serious health issues that would substantially hamper its life and/or her life, she has a moral obligation to decide accordingly—and no one can have a right to override her judgment. Anyone who claims the right to enforce his will on her is claiming, in essence, that she has no rights; that she is property whose life course is to be determined by others.
A woman is responsible for her own life and well-being and, therefore, morally must think thoroughly about whether to have an abortion or a child given her context. She should consider the full spectrum of her values and goals (education, career, relationships, perhaps even other children) along with her health and likelihood of an especially difficult pregnancy and childbirth. In addition, she should take into account the fact that abortions in the second and third trimesters carry a higher likelihood of serious complications, meaning she may unnecessarily put her own life at risk by delaying an abortion.16 Only by rationally weighing such factors, perhaps consulting her doctor and/or partner if appropriate, can she come to the right decision in her context.
By contrast, if a woman behaves irrationally as a matter of course (for example, sleeping around without using available birth control), then she has defaulted on her responsibility to think deeply about her life and values and to act accordingly. Such behavior can create difficult choices, such as whether to have an abortion or to have a child she isn’t ready to care for. In short, a woman must think deeply about her context and values to make major life decisions—especially a life decision of the magnitude of a pregnancy, an abortion, or giving birth.
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Rights derive from the requirements of human life in a social context; they are moral principles that identify an individual’s proper freedom of action within that context. Given that fetuses do not exist in a social context but inside a woman, they do not have rights. Women do. A rational conception of a right to life means a right to live according to one’s own judgment—which means a right to pursue one’s own values, without being forced to sacrifice—including sacrificing one’s values for the sake of a potential.
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Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Jon Hersey and Craig Biddle for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article, particularly regarding rights and morality. I would also like to thank Drs. Joseph England, Ross England, and Steven Kornweiss for reviewing the medical portion.
1. Jessica Ravitz, “They had abortions late in their pregnancies. These are their stories,” CNN, April 29, 2019, https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/25/health/abortion-late-in-pregnancy-eprise/index.html.
2. Teresa Ghilarducci, “59% of Women Seeking Abortions Are Mothers Facing High Poverty Risk,” Forbes, December 24, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2021/12/24/59-of-women-seeking-abortions-are-mothers-facing-high-poverty-risk/.
3. Uki Goñi, “Girl, 11, Gives Birth to Child of Rapist after Argentina Says No to Abortion,” The Guardian, March 1, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/feb/28/girl-11-gives-birth-to-rapists-child-after-argentina-refuses-abortion; Michele Goodwin, “I Was Raped by My Father. An Abortion Saved My Life.” New York Times, November 30, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/opinion/abortion-texas-mississippi-rape.html.
4. Shannon Najmabadi, “Gov. Greg Abbott Signs into Law One of Nation’s Strictest Abortion Measures, Banning Procedure as Early as Six Weeks into a Pregnancy,” Texas Tribune, May 19, 2021, https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/18/texas-heartbeat-bill-abortions-law/.
5. Joni W. Shepherd, “When Current Events Trigger Abortion Trauma,” Focus on the Family, May 23, 2019; “Abortion Regrets: A Sad Reality for Many Women,” Sira Health, February 22, 2022, https://siragainesville.com/abortion-regrets-a-sad-reality-for-many-women/.
6. Dean Nelson, Human Coalition Action, https://hucoaction.org/.
7. Thomas Jefferson, “Thomas Jefferson to Isaac H. Tiffany, 4 April 1819,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-14-02-0191. (Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 14, 1 February to 31 August 1819, ed. J. Jefferson Looney [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017], 201–2.)
8. Ayn Rand, “Man’s Rights,” The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet, 1964), 108.
9. Rand, “Man’s Rights,” 110 (emphasis added).
10. “Prenatal Development,” Iowa State University, https://iastate.pressbooks.pub/parentingfamilydiversity/chapter/prenatal-development/.
11. “Individuated” means “existing as a distinct entity; separate”; in this context, it means a being who exists outside of and separate from its mother.
12. “Changes in the Newborn at Birth,” National Library of Medicine, https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/002395.htm.
13. Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Meridian, 1993), 357.
14. Emma Green, “What Texas Abortion Foes Want Next,” The Atlantic, September 2, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/09/texas-abortion-ban-supreme-court/619953/.
15. Elizabeth G. Raymond and David A. Grimes, “The Comparative Safety of Legal Induced Abortion and Childbirth in the United States,” Obstetrics & Gynecology, February 2012, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22270271/.
16. Almost no abortions occur in the final weeks of pregnancy unless the mother’s or the fetus’s life is in grave danger. In the United States, abortions occurring after twenty-one weeks (a normal pregnancy is forty weeks) represent only 1 percent of abortions; see “CDCs Abortion Surveillance FAQs,” November 22, 2021, https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/data_stats/abortion.htm; “Abortion: Risks,” National Health Service, April 24, 2020, https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/abortion/risks/.
