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An increasingly prevalent argument for abortion focuses on the question of whether a child in the womb has a right to his/her mother’s body for nine months. Advocates for abortion on these grounds answer “no” and argue that the mother has a right to ‘evict’ her child from the womb. This is sometimes phrased as “no one has a right to someone else’s body.”
This argument is meaningfully different from the “clump of cells” argument and those like it which argue (somewhat absurdly) that human life begins sometime after the development of a distinct living human organism with two human parents a full set of unique human DNA.
The pro-life movement has rightly and appropriately spent decades arguing for the reality that life begins at conception; that the child in the womb is a human being with dignity and a right against being killed. The advance of medical science and the quality of ultrasounds throws this into further relief in the public consciousness with every passing year.
But advocates of abortion on the basis of the “eviction” argument may well recognize the factual and scientific reality that human life begins at conception. Their position is based instead on the true and important concept of bodily autonomy. From this point of view, outlawing abortion amounts to ‘forced pregnancy’.
In the face of this argument, demonstrating the reality that human life begins at conception is not entirely sufficient to make the case for protecting in law the youngest and most vulnerable amongst us. One must also recognize that parents have a responsibility to care for their children.
More precisely, a parent has a moral and a legal responsibility to provide the basic necessities of life for his or her child. Our society already recognizes this in law by outlawing child neglect and mandating child support payments. Thus, it follows that a mother carrying her child in the womb has a moral and ought to have a legal responsibility to provide basic life support for her child. This naturally includes carrying her child to term.
Everyone innately knows that parents are responsible for keeping their children alive. A mother does not have the right to starve her two-year-old child to death, simply because she does not feel like working to provide food for her child. She has a responsibility to work to feed her kid. This is so obviously true as to be nearly self-evident. What one must realize, though, is that this really is an imposition on her bodily autonomy. Parents give up a measure of their bodily autonomy when they choose to have children. They take on the responsibility of the labor to provide for the basic necessities of life for their children, and if they exercise their “bodily autonomy” to neglect their children, we rightly prosecute them for child neglect.
If one recognizes that parents have a responsibility to keep their children alive, and that the fetus in the womb is a human being from conception, then logically it follows that the mother has a responsibility to carry her own child to term.
As a society we have built foster care systems and operate food assistance programs like TANF and SNAP to care for children in need. These resources and many others exist to help children when their parents will not or cannot fulfill their parental responsibilities. It is good that we as a society do this. And indeed, many parents who use these services are unable to provide for their children through circumstances outside their control.
But these resources do not relieve parents of their responsibilities. A parent is still individually responsible for ensuring his or her child does not starve, food stamps or not.
It should be noted that a father has an equal share of the responsibility for his children, and that his responsibilities begin at conception too. He has an obligation to support the mother as she carries their child and to take an equal share as a father in raising his child. Laws requiring the payment of child support from fathers to mothers ought to be extended to begin at conception.
Autonomy is a critically important value. But everyone recognizes that the responsibilities of parenthood limit one’s autonomy in service of an even higher value: the needs of one’s child. The humanity of the child in the womb is clearer than ever. It is time to protect in law the most vulnerable amongst us.
