> But one can’t coherently hold that Smith was a non-person without meaningful rights because she had no mental states, yet her fetus was such a person with rights despite also having no mental states!
I agree with Silas that one could (foolishly) believe that personhood has nothing to do with mental states, but I have a different nitpick here: even if neither was a person *yet*, the fetus had much greater potential to become one than the mother. Potential-life should clearly be a moral consideration, though admittedly a small one—small enough that, in normal cases, women should have the right to abort non-person fetuses, but not so small that it should be totally ignored when there's no woman left to make that decision.
Which brings me to your thought experiment, about which you write:
> Most feminists might point out that such an act treats the woman’s body as a commodity. That it is degrading - if not to the brain dead woman, then to women as a group - for a woman’s body to be callously used simply as a means to such an end, especially when she never gave express permission for her body to be used in such a way. They might point out that such a thing both leads to and springs from a culture in which women’s bodies are not seen as fully belonging to women themselves, but are seen instead as tools that can, at potentially any moment, be appropriated to meet some stranger’s needs.
I really don't think this goes through at all! More likely, our instinctual revulsion toward the men's behavior springs from our usually faulty sexual ethics (cf. zoophilia [https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/3/2/255], non-offending pedophiles [https://philpapers.org/rec/KERPAA-7], Louis C.K.'s dead-kid-in-a-field bit [https://youtu.be/96ImL9SZDkg?si=F8XE6PQXni5Yi9Vg&t=331], etc.). Because what we're talking about isn't really a "woman's body" it's just a woman-looking thing which can't feel pain nor be harmed. And though the act still feels icky, it doesn't really bear on whether or not a woman's body "belongs to the woman herself"—because there's no woman left for it to belong to! Of course everyone has a natural right to ownership over their body, but "you" can't have a natural right without "you" existing.
I still think your conclusions are mostly right, though, for two reasons:
1. On the potential-person thing: the quality of their potential-life definitely matters. "If you could snap your fingers and create from thin air a motherless infant with unclear, possibly lifelong and severe disabilities, would it be right to do so, if you had no intention or plan for the care of this child yourself?" is a good question, the answer is no, and so the Smith case has in fact been a real debacle.
2. The fact that so many women and activists saw this as a symbol of autonomy and rights means something, maybe. If it really feels like an affront, like a claim that women don't have ownership of their bodies, then maybe it really was *meant* to be that, and we should oppose it on those grounds. I'm a bit more skeptical of this, though: when I wrote about the Smith case a month ago [https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/brain-dead-women-do-not-have-a-right], I mostly made the case that framing this as a battle about abortion is really silly and counterproductive. If anything, the feministy "take her off life support" position was *way* less intuitively sympathetic than the usual pro-choice position, because it just looked like pure downside: in essence, it means killing a fetus just to make a point. So I think feminists would be better off saying something like: "Boy, this is a really ugly situation in a thousand different ways, and as we mourn Smith's family's loss and wish for the wellbeing of all involved, it's important to remember that when women *aren't* braindead they should have full autonomy over their reproductive choices."
>> Potential-life should clearly be a moral consideration, though admittedly a small one—small enough that, in normal cases, women should have the right to abort non-person fetuses, but not so small that it should be totally ignored when there's no woman left to make that decision.
>> .... On the potential-person thing: the quality of their potential-life definitely matters. "If you could snap your fingers and create from thin air a motherless infant with unclear, possibly lifelong and severe disabilities, would it be right to do so, if you had no intention or plan for the care of this child yourself?" is a good question, the answer is no, and so the Smith case has in fact been a real debacle.
To this point, I don't think feminists (or most people generally) would judge the state of Georgia's actions to be moral even if it could be guaranteed that the child was not special needs and would have a mother!
For instance, if you casually got a woman pregnant and then announced you weren't going to care for the child or remain involved in its life, but that you hoped some family members or adoptive parents would care for the child instead, most people would think you were acting immorally. They wouldn't say that you were actually doing a good thing because there was a potential that the child would have a life worth living. And that's a case where the potential child had a much better possible outcome than the child here, where family members appear to be ambivalent, the mother is dead, and the chance for the baby having special needs is very high.
>> I really don't think this goes through at all! More likely, our instinctual revulsion toward the men's behavior springs from our usually faulty sexual ethics (cf. zoophilia [https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/3/2/255], non-offending pedophiles [https://philpapers.org/rec/KERPAA-7], Louis C.K.'s dead-kid-in-a-field bit [https://youtu.be/96ImL9SZDkg?si=F8XE6PQXni5Yi9Vg&t=331], etc.). Because what we're talking about isn't really a "woman's body" it's just a woman-looking thing which can't feel pain nor be harmed. And though the act still feels icky, it doesn't really bear on whether or not a woman's body "belongs to the woman herself"—because there's no woman left for it to belong to! Of course everyone has a natural right to ownership over their body, but "you" can't have a natural right without "you" existing.
Not to sidetrack too much, but I think I have larger disagreements with the more libertarian sexual ethics you seem to endorse here. I don't agree that (for example) our distaste for non-offending pedophiles is unfounded or an irrational relic of faulty sexual ethics. I wrote a piece a while ago about why I disagree with rationalist views on "minor attracted persons", for example; you can see the typical radical feminist perspective on that here.
Edit to finish my point: I think I would agree with you that of course Smith could not be harmed once Smith was brain dead. But I think you can still say that Smith's wishes should have been respected, and if Smith did not make it clear she would have wanted to be kept on life support in this way, or her family was ambivalent or negative about what she would have wanted, the right thing would have been for the state of Georgia to let her pass. Disregarding this in favor of a "keep the body going at all costs to save the fetus" decision suggests that the state of Georgia does not generally take into consideration the desires of women in Georgia regarding the proper use of their bodies, and that is something that would understandably disturb many feminists.
I more or less agree with your conclusions, and agree that it is a disturbing case. But being a pedant, I can't help nitpick a few things.
You claim that it is incoherent to hold that Smith was no longer a person, while the fetus was a person at the time. That just looks straightforwardly false! You seem to be assuming that one *has* to believe that personhood requires a certain sort of brain activity, or that it comes down to biological organism-ness. Consider the position: Personhood begins at conception, and ends at brain death... Contradiction? What, no! This looks like a perfectly coherent (if not contrived and strange) view, and in fact I think many pro-lifers will hold something along these lines. So it won't be particularly convincing to someone not already convinced.
Second, you say that it would be bad to bring a person into existence with the prospects of the fetus, and that is supposed to show that they shouldn't have tried to save the fetus here. But for this you again seem to be assuming that the fetus is not a person, which very few not already convinced will grant. You yourself state that once a person exists (even one with a bad life), one should make them have good lives (instead of killing them or letting them die, I assume). A better comparison seems to be: A person who will likely have a bad life in the future is about to die, but you can snap your fingers to save them. Here the case is less obvious, and I think a doctor's ethics of always trying to save lives (even though that's stupid), would commit them to saving the baby, as they did. So it seems to me like you assume what's controversial off the bat to make the case, which will be unconvincing.
I agree I could reframe my earlier point to clarify that viewing Smith as a non-person is incoherent if someone accepts the typical justifications given by the pro-life movement for thinking an organism is a person. The pro-lifers I talk to typically say that an entity has rights (particularly a "right to life", but presumably other rights as well) and human dignity iff that entity is a living human organism. Thus pro-lifers will say that an embryo is a person with a right to life despite not having brain activity because that embryo is a "unique human organism". But since Smith is also (on the pro-life definition, at least) a living human organism, she should also have rights that could be violated. If a pro-lifer dismisses this notion on the grounds Smith lacks higher brain activity, they are being inconsistent, to say the least.
To your second point, I agree that this condemnation would not be convincing to someone who holds the (incorrect, from my perspective) view that the 9 week fetus is a person. But in that part of the piece, in case I wasn't clear, I am not trying to say that the pro-lifer is being hypocritical; I'm just pointing out why feminists would condemn this *from the feminist moral framework.* Since feminists generally reject the notion that an embryo or early fetus is a person, they would find Georgia's actions immoral for the same reason we would find a young man to be acting immorally if he casually impregnated a woman and then announced that he had no intention to raise or care for that child, but hoped some family members would raise the child or that the child would get adopted. Most feminists would frown upon that even without taking into consideration the fact that the child in this case is motherless, potentially special needs, etc.
About "Personhood begins at conception, and ends at brain death... Contradiction?"
OK, but you describe this view as "contrived and strange." That a view doesn't contain an explicit contradiction doesn't mean it's plausible. That people will or won't be convinced of something might say more about them than then view in question.
Here of course the odd thing is thinking 'X's cease to be Y's when they lose Z, but they don't become Y's (only) when they gain Z."
The claim was that one cannot coherently hold those two things--that's a strong claim. Of course, whether it matters if people could be convinced is a matter of the intention of the writing in question. I assumed that it was at least supposed to give some reasons for believing that view, or show why it is plausible--but that isn't achieved by assuming the controversial premises.
I agree that it's sort of strange to think that about Z, assuming Z is supposed to be the thing that makes you a person. But I don't think pro-lifers would agree that the Z in question (i.e. a certain kind of brain activity) is what makes one a person. I suspect most will either think it's some property regarding the development of an organism, or some other property that coincides with Z in many cases but not all (e.g. any brain activity at all, or some sort of soul, or whatever).
To say more, if it's said that Adriana is somehow no longer an "organism," but the early fetus was, we need a coherent explanation of why we should agree and why that matters.
If we are told that Adriana is somehow no longer a "human being," but the early fetus was a "human being," we need a coherent explanation of why we should agree and why that matters.
If we are told that Adriana is somehow no longer a "the 'kind' of being that's a rational, moral agent," but the early fetus was "the 'kind' of being that's a rational, moral agent," we need a coherent explanation of why we should agree and why that matters.
So, lots of work needs to be done to insist that someone can "coherently" make a plausible distinction here.
I believe that all women should have unrestricted access to abortion, and I think this essay makes a powerful argument.
The argument has a misstep, however, as it rests on certain assumptions that are not universally held. The following is not true:
> But one can’t coherently hold that Smith was a non-person without meaningful rights because she had no mental states, yet her fetus was such a person with rights despite also having no mental states!
I believe that once you're dead, your body should be governed by the state for the benefit of society. In other words, organ donation / donation to medical research should be universally mandatory. I don't believe the wishes that a person held when they were alive matter once they're dead.
Therefore, I believe the state was perfectly ethical to try to rescue the fetus. Even though the fetus has no mental states yet, it has the potential to become a person, so why *not* try to rescue it?
It's evil that the state is forcing the family to pay for all this. It would also be unethical to do this if it sacrificed other greater goods, for instance, if doing this would hypothetically prevent possible life-saving organ donation.
I know others disagree because they believe differently about how bodies should be handled and how people's pre-death wills should be respected. Plenty of people are against death taxes, for instance, where I support them. But any essay about the ethics of the Adriana Smith situation should recognize this.
I've read the one argument you've shared, and the argument is invalid given that it misses one option: that Lakshmi's is just one human being and human person, and Abby & Brittany Herbal are two human being and two human persons, given that the split in the two cases in pregnancy, the latter was partially more successful than the former. Another thing is that, while it is bad to reduce a human person to some of his or her parts like his mind or consciousness, it's also bad to reduce him or her to some flesh like thinking that the extra flesh of Lakshmi is already another human being or a human person, which is similar to women being used by men, when the latter have sexual relations with the former without being married, reducing the former as mere flesh for the latter's sexual satisfaction.
And this brings me to another problem, the analogy used to appeal to bodily autonomy to justify the killing and murder of the youngest human being called abortion. No analogy can consider that in preborn babies, they are necessarily connected to having sex. No other analogy has that necessary connection. It's common sense that new human persons passes through sexual activity of his or her mother and father. But that common sense is buried, when I try to understand why others defend abortion.
While you may be right it is possible that a woman is alive, she wants her body to nourish her youngest one, but when she's dead, she'll not want it; but if we factor in that killing directly the youngest human being through is surely not to be wanted given that's a horrible murder, the killing of the most innocent human beings, we can see that any decent woman will know that her remains being used to give life to the fruit of her love with her husband is a very good to thing, something to be desired, unlike evil such as killing the youngest and most innocent fellow human person.
>> I've read the one argument you've shared, and the argument is invalid given that it misses one option: that Lakshmi's is just one human being and human person, and Abby & Brittany Herbal are two human being and two human persons, given that the split in the two cases in pregnancy, the latter was partially more successful than the former.
Obviously it's true that Lakshmi is one person and the Hensels are two people. The problem is that pro-life theory can't explain how this can be true. It seems bluntly obvious that the Hensels are two people because they have two brains that produce distinct thoughts and other mental states. Lakshmi is one person because her partially absorbed twin never developed a consciousness-producing brain. If her twin had done so, it would make sense to describe Lakshmi and that twin as two people.
So what seems to matter to personhood is not whether something is classed as a "unique human organism" but whether something has a "brain capable of consciousness and other mental states." Since a 9 week fetus lacks such a brain, it is not a person.
Both the mother and the fetus are human persons, for human persons aren't reducible to some parts they have, in this case, one's consciousness, just as racism is wrong when being a human person is reduced to some preferred part of a human person, namely one's ethnicity or skin color.
Now, the mother hasn't killed her child through abortion, given that she was still pregnant for 9 weeks. It is doubtful then that the mother wouldn't want anymore to nurture the human life formed in her, if somehow we can talk to her while being disabled so to know what she wants.
The analogy used isn't proper, for nurturing one's own child with one's own body is so good, it isn't near with being used as a sex toy.
Abortion is simply murder. No one has the right to kill a human person for any reason (if the life of the mother is in danger, an early labor can be induced without injecting the preborn with some poison or dismembering him or her, so to extract him or her dead). Each and every zygote, a fertilized egg cell by a sperm cell, is already a human person, as given their normal course (meaning without any obstruction that will kill them), they will always grow as an adult human being and not some adult cow or adult pig, just like fetuses, babies, toddlers, grade schoolers, and adolescents are all growing to an adult human being, making them knowable as really human being and therefore human person; unlike mere sperm cell or mere egg cell which doesn't grow into adult human being but just staying the same.
You can't simply assume the truth of the pro-life view - that human organisms are necessarily human persons - while in debate with someone who disagrees with that position. There are good reasons to think that this view is false - you can see for instance one of my arguments here; I have many others as well.
Nor can you simply assume that any random woman would want her brain-dead body to be used as a gestation device for a fetus. Many women feel that pregnancy without their express, ongoing consent is a grave violation, and they would not want such a thing; it's clearly very unpopular, or else so many women would not have reacted to this story with horror. Women may want sex while they are alive while not wanting their bodies to be used by a necrophiliac after they are brain dead; similarly, women may want to be pregnant while they are persons yet not want their bodies used to gestate a fetus after they are brain dead.
> But one can’t coherently hold that Smith was a non-person without meaningful rights because she had no mental states, yet her fetus was such a person with rights despite also having no mental states!
I agree with Silas that one could (foolishly) believe that personhood has nothing to do with mental states, but I have a different nitpick here: even if neither was a person *yet*, the fetus had much greater potential to become one than the mother. Potential-life should clearly be a moral consideration, though admittedly a small one—small enough that, in normal cases, women should have the right to abort non-person fetuses, but not so small that it should be totally ignored when there's no woman left to make that decision.
Which brings me to your thought experiment, about which you write:
> Most feminists might point out that such an act treats the woman’s body as a commodity. That it is degrading - if not to the brain dead woman, then to women as a group - for a woman’s body to be callously used simply as a means to such an end, especially when she never gave express permission for her body to be used in such a way. They might point out that such a thing both leads to and springs from a culture in which women’s bodies are not seen as fully belonging to women themselves, but are seen instead as tools that can, at potentially any moment, be appropriated to meet some stranger’s needs.
I really don't think this goes through at all! More likely, our instinctual revulsion toward the men's behavior springs from our usually faulty sexual ethics (cf. zoophilia [https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/3/2/255], non-offending pedophiles [https://philpapers.org/rec/KERPAA-7], Louis C.K.'s dead-kid-in-a-field bit [https://youtu.be/96ImL9SZDkg?si=F8XE6PQXni5Yi9Vg&t=331], etc.). Because what we're talking about isn't really a "woman's body" it's just a woman-looking thing which can't feel pain nor be harmed. And though the act still feels icky, it doesn't really bear on whether or not a woman's body "belongs to the woman herself"—because there's no woman left for it to belong to! Of course everyone has a natural right to ownership over their body, but "you" can't have a natural right without "you" existing.
I still think your conclusions are mostly right, though, for two reasons:
1. On the potential-person thing: the quality of their potential-life definitely matters. "If you could snap your fingers and create from thin air a motherless infant with unclear, possibly lifelong and severe disabilities, would it be right to do so, if you had no intention or plan for the care of this child yourself?" is a good question, the answer is no, and so the Smith case has in fact been a real debacle.
2. The fact that so many women and activists saw this as a symbol of autonomy and rights means something, maybe. If it really feels like an affront, like a claim that women don't have ownership of their bodies, then maybe it really was *meant* to be that, and we should oppose it on those grounds. I'm a bit more skeptical of this, though: when I wrote about the Smith case a month ago [https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/brain-dead-women-do-not-have-a-right], I mostly made the case that framing this as a battle about abortion is really silly and counterproductive. If anything, the feministy "take her off life support" position was *way* less intuitively sympathetic than the usual pro-choice position, because it just looked like pure downside: in essence, it means killing a fetus just to make a point. So I think feminists would be better off saying something like: "Boy, this is a really ugly situation in a thousand different ways, and as we mourn Smith's family's loss and wish for the wellbeing of all involved, it's important to remember that when women *aren't* braindead they should have full autonomy over their reproductive choices."
>> Potential-life should clearly be a moral consideration, though admittedly a small one—small enough that, in normal cases, women should have the right to abort non-person fetuses, but not so small that it should be totally ignored when there's no woman left to make that decision.
>> .... On the potential-person thing: the quality of their potential-life definitely matters. "If you could snap your fingers and create from thin air a motherless infant with unclear, possibly lifelong and severe disabilities, would it be right to do so, if you had no intention or plan for the care of this child yourself?" is a good question, the answer is no, and so the Smith case has in fact been a real debacle.
To this point, I don't think feminists (or most people generally) would judge the state of Georgia's actions to be moral even if it could be guaranteed that the child was not special needs and would have a mother!
For instance, if you casually got a woman pregnant and then announced you weren't going to care for the child or remain involved in its life, but that you hoped some family members or adoptive parents would care for the child instead, most people would think you were acting immorally. They wouldn't say that you were actually doing a good thing because there was a potential that the child would have a life worth living. And that's a case where the potential child had a much better possible outcome than the child here, where family members appear to be ambivalent, the mother is dead, and the chance for the baby having special needs is very high.
>> I really don't think this goes through at all! More likely, our instinctual revulsion toward the men's behavior springs from our usually faulty sexual ethics (cf. zoophilia [https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/3/2/255], non-offending pedophiles [https://philpapers.org/rec/KERPAA-7], Louis C.K.'s dead-kid-in-a-field bit [https://youtu.be/96ImL9SZDkg?si=F8XE6PQXni5Yi9Vg&t=331], etc.). Because what we're talking about isn't really a "woman's body" it's just a woman-looking thing which can't feel pain nor be harmed. And though the act still feels icky, it doesn't really bear on whether or not a woman's body "belongs to the woman herself"—because there's no woman left for it to belong to! Of course everyone has a natural right to ownership over their body, but "you" can't have a natural right without "you" existing.
Not to sidetrack too much, but I think I have larger disagreements with the more libertarian sexual ethics you seem to endorse here. I don't agree that (for example) our distaste for non-offending pedophiles is unfounded or an irrational relic of faulty sexual ethics. I wrote a piece a while ago about why I disagree with rationalist views on "minor attracted persons", for example; you can see the typical radical feminist perspective on that here.
https://defendingfeminism.substack.com/p/a-feminist-critique-of-the-map-movement?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Edit to finish my point: I think I would agree with you that of course Smith could not be harmed once Smith was brain dead. But I think you can still say that Smith's wishes should have been respected, and if Smith did not make it clear she would have wanted to be kept on life support in this way, or her family was ambivalent or negative about what she would have wanted, the right thing would have been for the state of Georgia to let her pass. Disregarding this in favor of a "keep the body going at all costs to save the fetus" decision suggests that the state of Georgia does not generally take into consideration the desires of women in Georgia regarding the proper use of their bodies, and that is something that would understandably disturb many feminists.
I more or less agree with your conclusions, and agree that it is a disturbing case. But being a pedant, I can't help nitpick a few things.
You claim that it is incoherent to hold that Smith was no longer a person, while the fetus was a person at the time. That just looks straightforwardly false! You seem to be assuming that one *has* to believe that personhood requires a certain sort of brain activity, or that it comes down to biological organism-ness. Consider the position: Personhood begins at conception, and ends at brain death... Contradiction? What, no! This looks like a perfectly coherent (if not contrived and strange) view, and in fact I think many pro-lifers will hold something along these lines. So it won't be particularly convincing to someone not already convinced.
Second, you say that it would be bad to bring a person into existence with the prospects of the fetus, and that is supposed to show that they shouldn't have tried to save the fetus here. But for this you again seem to be assuming that the fetus is not a person, which very few not already convinced will grant. You yourself state that once a person exists (even one with a bad life), one should make them have good lives (instead of killing them or letting them die, I assume). A better comparison seems to be: A person who will likely have a bad life in the future is about to die, but you can snap your fingers to save them. Here the case is less obvious, and I think a doctor's ethics of always trying to save lives (even though that's stupid), would commit them to saving the baby, as they did. So it seems to me like you assume what's controversial off the bat to make the case, which will be unconvincing.
I agree I could reframe my earlier point to clarify that viewing Smith as a non-person is incoherent if someone accepts the typical justifications given by the pro-life movement for thinking an organism is a person. The pro-lifers I talk to typically say that an entity has rights (particularly a "right to life", but presumably other rights as well) and human dignity iff that entity is a living human organism. Thus pro-lifers will say that an embryo is a person with a right to life despite not having brain activity because that embryo is a "unique human organism". But since Smith is also (on the pro-life definition, at least) a living human organism, she should also have rights that could be violated. If a pro-lifer dismisses this notion on the grounds Smith lacks higher brain activity, they are being inconsistent, to say the least.
To your second point, I agree that this condemnation would not be convincing to someone who holds the (incorrect, from my perspective) view that the 9 week fetus is a person. But in that part of the piece, in case I wasn't clear, I am not trying to say that the pro-lifer is being hypocritical; I'm just pointing out why feminists would condemn this *from the feminist moral framework.* Since feminists generally reject the notion that an embryo or early fetus is a person, they would find Georgia's actions immoral for the same reason we would find a young man to be acting immorally if he casually impregnated a woman and then announced that he had no intention to raise or care for that child, but hoped some family members would raise the child or that the child would get adopted. Most feminists would frown upon that even without taking into consideration the fact that the child in this case is motherless, potentially special needs, etc.
Many pro-lifers would say that the embryo is a person.
About "Personhood begins at conception, and ends at brain death... Contradiction?"
OK, but you describe this view as "contrived and strange." That a view doesn't contain an explicit contradiction doesn't mean it's plausible. That people will or won't be convinced of something might say more about them than then view in question.
Here of course the odd thing is thinking 'X's cease to be Y's when they lose Z, but they don't become Y's (only) when they gain Z."
The claim was that one cannot coherently hold those two things--that's a strong claim. Of course, whether it matters if people could be convinced is a matter of the intention of the writing in question. I assumed that it was at least supposed to give some reasons for believing that view, or show why it is plausible--but that isn't achieved by assuming the controversial premises.
I agree that it's sort of strange to think that about Z, assuming Z is supposed to be the thing that makes you a person. But I don't think pro-lifers would agree that the Z in question (i.e. a certain kind of brain activity) is what makes one a person. I suspect most will either think it's some property regarding the development of an organism, or some other property that coincides with Z in many cases but not all (e.g. any brain activity at all, or some sort of soul, or whatever).
Well, it really then depends on what "coherently" means, or means here.
BTW, I wrote something similar a few weeks ago:
https://bioethicstoday.org/blog/what-should-have-happened-in-the-tragic-case-of-adriana-smith/
To say more, if it's said that Adriana is somehow no longer an "organism," but the early fetus was, we need a coherent explanation of why we should agree and why that matters.
If we are told that Adriana is somehow no longer a "human being," but the early fetus was a "human being," we need a coherent explanation of why we should agree and why that matters.
If we are told that Adriana is somehow no longer a "the 'kind' of being that's a rational, moral agent," but the early fetus was "the 'kind' of being that's a rational, moral agent," we need a coherent explanation of why we should agree and why that matters.
So, lots of work needs to be done to insist that someone can "coherently" make a plausible distinction here.
I believe that all women should have unrestricted access to abortion, and I think this essay makes a powerful argument.
The argument has a misstep, however, as it rests on certain assumptions that are not universally held. The following is not true:
> But one can’t coherently hold that Smith was a non-person without meaningful rights because she had no mental states, yet her fetus was such a person with rights despite also having no mental states!
I believe that once you're dead, your body should be governed by the state for the benefit of society. In other words, organ donation / donation to medical research should be universally mandatory. I don't believe the wishes that a person held when they were alive matter once they're dead.
Therefore, I believe the state was perfectly ethical to try to rescue the fetus. Even though the fetus has no mental states yet, it has the potential to become a person, so why *not* try to rescue it?
It's evil that the state is forcing the family to pay for all this. It would also be unethical to do this if it sacrificed other greater goods, for instance, if doing this would hypothetically prevent possible life-saving organ donation.
I know others disagree because they believe differently about how bodies should be handled and how people's pre-death wills should be respected. Plenty of people are against death taxes, for instance, where I support them. But any essay about the ethics of the Adriana Smith situation should recognize this.
I've read the one argument you've shared, and the argument is invalid given that it misses one option: that Lakshmi's is just one human being and human person, and Abby & Brittany Herbal are two human being and two human persons, given that the split in the two cases in pregnancy, the latter was partially more successful than the former. Another thing is that, while it is bad to reduce a human person to some of his or her parts like his mind or consciousness, it's also bad to reduce him or her to some flesh like thinking that the extra flesh of Lakshmi is already another human being or a human person, which is similar to women being used by men, when the latter have sexual relations with the former without being married, reducing the former as mere flesh for the latter's sexual satisfaction.
And this brings me to another problem, the analogy used to appeal to bodily autonomy to justify the killing and murder of the youngest human being called abortion. No analogy can consider that in preborn babies, they are necessarily connected to having sex. No other analogy has that necessary connection. It's common sense that new human persons passes through sexual activity of his or her mother and father. But that common sense is buried, when I try to understand why others defend abortion.
While you may be right it is possible that a woman is alive, she wants her body to nourish her youngest one, but when she's dead, she'll not want it; but if we factor in that killing directly the youngest human being through is surely not to be wanted given that's a horrible murder, the killing of the most innocent human beings, we can see that any decent woman will know that her remains being used to give life to the fruit of her love with her husband is a very good to thing, something to be desired, unlike evil such as killing the youngest and most innocent fellow human person.
>> I've read the one argument you've shared, and the argument is invalid given that it misses one option: that Lakshmi's is just one human being and human person, and Abby & Brittany Herbal are two human being and two human persons, given that the split in the two cases in pregnancy, the latter was partially more successful than the former.
Obviously it's true that Lakshmi is one person and the Hensels are two people. The problem is that pro-life theory can't explain how this can be true. It seems bluntly obvious that the Hensels are two people because they have two brains that produce distinct thoughts and other mental states. Lakshmi is one person because her partially absorbed twin never developed a consciousness-producing brain. If her twin had done so, it would make sense to describe Lakshmi and that twin as two people.
So what seems to matter to personhood is not whether something is classed as a "unique human organism" but whether something has a "brain capable of consciousness and other mental states." Since a 9 week fetus lacks such a brain, it is not a person.
Both the mother and the fetus are human persons, for human persons aren't reducible to some parts they have, in this case, one's consciousness, just as racism is wrong when being a human person is reduced to some preferred part of a human person, namely one's ethnicity or skin color.
Now, the mother hasn't killed her child through abortion, given that she was still pregnant for 9 weeks. It is doubtful then that the mother wouldn't want anymore to nurture the human life formed in her, if somehow we can talk to her while being disabled so to know what she wants.
The analogy used isn't proper, for nurturing one's own child with one's own body is so good, it isn't near with being used as a sex toy.
Abortion is simply murder. No one has the right to kill a human person for any reason (if the life of the mother is in danger, an early labor can be induced without injecting the preborn with some poison or dismembering him or her, so to extract him or her dead). Each and every zygote, a fertilized egg cell by a sperm cell, is already a human person, as given their normal course (meaning without any obstruction that will kill them), they will always grow as an adult human being and not some adult cow or adult pig, just like fetuses, babies, toddlers, grade schoolers, and adolescents are all growing to an adult human being, making them knowable as really human being and therefore human person; unlike mere sperm cell or mere egg cell which doesn't grow into adult human being but just staying the same.
You can't simply assume the truth of the pro-life view - that human organisms are necessarily human persons - while in debate with someone who disagrees with that position. There are good reasons to think that this view is false - you can see for instance one of my arguments here; I have many others as well.
https://defendingfeminism.com/2022/10/04/personhood-and-conjoined-twins/
Nor can you simply assume that any random woman would want her brain-dead body to be used as a gestation device for a fetus. Many women feel that pregnancy without their express, ongoing consent is a grave violation, and they would not want such a thing; it's clearly very unpopular, or else so many women would not have reacted to this story with horror. Women may want sex while they are alive while not wanting their bodies to be used by a necrophiliac after they are brain dead; similarly, women may want to be pregnant while they are persons yet not want their bodies used to gestate a fetus after they are brain dead.