Fight for the Unconceived

Anti-abortion rights activists have developed some flattering expressions to describe themselves and their cause. The activists as "pro-lifers" waging a fight for the "unborn." I would like to reflect on implications of these terms, identify their shortcomings, and offer a neologism to the anti-abortion rights activists that respects the well-intendedness of their fight. It could overcome a nagging blindspot that has dogged the debate.

Whereas the first term, "pro-life," seems to have a truly expansive sense — who would proclaim themselves "anti-life"? — the term "unborn" refers only to the fetus, to the third of three states of pre-natal development. The "unborn" in anti-abortion rights quarters are in fact only the "soon-to-be-born." One might therefore conclude that by "pro-life" the activists mean "pro-fetus." The activists generally take little interest in other pressing life-and-death issues affecting children or humanity in general. "Pro-lifers" seem, on the whole, indifferent to the fact that millions of children under the age of five die annually from easily preventable diseases such as malaria, or that thousands die every day of heat exposure or starvation. Have conservative Catholics ever demanded Supreme Court justices who would support the federal government's supplying malaria nets to large swaths of Sub-Saharan Africa?

Something else is problematic about the activists' self-gloss. Nuclear proliferation and global warming menace the conditions of life. Since the last century, their absence in the fight waged by the American partisans of life has looked increasingly indefensible. These two issues alone threaten the futures not only of developing fetuses but also of countless unborn. As opposed to the unwelcome loss of individual fetuses, these threats are for the species existential. However conjectural their status or existence, those who are fetuses in a woman's uterus or who enjoy the statistical likelihood of emerging as a fetus in coming generations are both threatened. The threat to future generations is massive, as is the number of its potential members.  These issues' arrival on the geopolitical scene has increased the threat not only to the unborn in a narrow, biological sense, but to what I propose to call "the unconceived" — all the unborn who are not yet fetuses. The notion of the unconceived (or the unfetus) allows those who fight for the sacredness of human life not to persist in immorally neglecting the welfare of generations of humanity to come. This would preserve the partisans of life from appearing hypocritical and spare them the trouble of having to justify fixation on one stage of the earth-bound cycle of life or on only members of one, prenatal generation.

The importance of this widening of perspectives comes from the empirical evidence suggesting that threats to human life on Earth are increasing rapidly.  Our species has developed horrific hazards to its existence., is the conclusion that there is no ethics or morality — nor even any religious perspective — that would allow one to prefer the unborn who are currently fetuses to the unborn who are not yet fetuses — the unfetuses. The Bible ignores infanticide at a time when the practice was widespread and offers no reason for privileging a fetus over other developed or potential forms of life. (I explore this in my post "Is Christianity Anti-Abortion?"). Nor does Christianity provide convincing reasons for assuming that only "present" or imminent forms of life deserve respect or should be deemed sacred.

In the United States, a religious constituency rallies around conservatives because of their anti-abortion rights positioning. Although its members speak of the importance of cultivating a "culture of life" — code for anti-abortion legislation — the Bush Administration, for one, brought great harm to the natural environment on whose survival depend all sexual partners, all zygotes, all embryos, all the unfetalized and the unconceived. It broke nuclear weapons treaties and embraced nuclear proliferation as a solution to geopolitical rivalries; and these measures among others have dramatically heightened the threat posed to innumerable generations of human beings.

Even if "pro-lifers" cling to the claim (absent from Holy Scripture) that the fetus is the "origin of life," this claim neglects the fact that, without a stable, nurturing, natural and human environment, no fetus would ever be created. Granting the developing fetus the status of "absolute origin" or "divine origin" thus serves to dismiss a whole range of increasingly menacing challenges to human life and to diminish cruelly the importance of the unborn who are not yet fetuses, embryos, zygotes, or beings whose potential existence is inscribed within a life-sustaining environment.

The assumption of the fetal-restricted definition of the "unborn" is that life deserves respect only at the moment that a fetus is created, and no sooner, and not from a more general perspective. What creator of life would embrace such a presumption as that? What creator of human generations would ever feel honored or comforted by one generation's asserting that it, and its impending offspring alone, are sacred in their creator's eyes?

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