Killing an Innocent Is Always Impermissible
According to this third argument against abortion, abortion is immoral because it is the killing of an innocent human being. Being human confers a right not to be killed, because humans occupy a special place among all other animals (and within this perspective, religious views tend to be, on average, more anthropocentric than secular ones). It is along this line of reasoning that we find views claiming that the killing of an innocent human being is always morally wrong.
At first glance, it may seem a good heuristic to say that one should never kill any human being, because it is plausible that killing them will cause them pain or deprive them of the opportunity to experience even the simplest form of pleasures. Such a rule, however, carries some odd implications. It means one would have to claim that it is never permissible to kill an innocent human being even if, by not killing him or her, one would cause the death of a million people. Imagine a scenario in which a newly opened EC facility contains only two preserved embryos. One day, workers discover that one of the embryos is infected with an extremely infectious and deadly virus. Worse yet, the cryogenic tank in which the embryo is stored has failed catastrophically, and it is only a matter of minutes before the tank ruptures, releasing the deadly virus on to a nearby city with 1 million inhabitants. The only way to prevent the outbreak and the death of a million people is to burn down the whole cryonics facility, without being able to get back in and rescue the other cryopreserved embryo. It would seem that the right thing to do is to set the cryonics facility on fire, thereby saving 1 million people at the cost of killing two embryos. If one had to claim that killing a human being is always impermissible, they would have to accept the fact that their principle would imply not setting the facility on fire, thereby indirectly killing 1 million people.
Now, obviously, the principle that it is wrong to kill an innocent human being is only a prima facie one, and not an absolute and all things considered principle. Although a few people may bite the bullet and accept all of the bizarre implications of the rule that killing a human being is always impermissible, many pro-life advocates would ultimately agree that it is permissible to kill a human being under some (perhaps a very limited number of ) circumstances. However, abortion is never one such circumstance in the pro-life perspective.
Regardless of which version of the wrongness of killing principle one endorses, the arguments against abortion that we have fleshed out are based on the shared view that killing the embryo/foetus entity would be impermissible because it would cause them to die. But it seems that these same arguments would not justify opposing cryosuspension of pregnancy. Cryosuspension does not cause the death of the embryo/foetus; it only causes them to spend a certain amount of time in a state of nonexistence (or pre-existence). However, as we saw in the third chapter, nonexistence is bad when it is irreversible and when it frustrates the desire to continue living, so it would not be bad in the case of an embryo/foetus waiting to be reimplanted. So unless there is some other reason to think that pausing the process that brings someone into existence causes them any harm, then there is no reason to think that cryosuspension of pregnancy would be morally impermissible and that it would not be a better alternative to abortion.
Reproductive Technology
Concerns about the immorality of abortions are not the only reason why some people might feel uncomfortable with the idea of having an abortion . One might think that having an abortion is morally permissible, or not even morally relevant, and yet they might still prefer not to have an abortion . One might feel sadness, regret, distress, frustration about having to make a choice that has irreversible consequences, even when the chosen option is the less bad option between the two available. Cryopreservation of embryos and foetuses would spare women and couples the distress of having an abortion that they might consider moral but that they feel uncomfortable with. This distress can be even more intense if they feel forced by the circumstances to terminate the pregnancy.
At least in some cases, people who have an abortion are not in principle against the idea of becoming parents, but they feel that they are not ready to take up that responsibility at that precise moment of their life (Finer, Frohwirth, & Dauphinee, 2005). They might have only a short-term job contract, and they might be concerned about lack of resources needed to raise a child. Or they might feel unprepared to take on parental responsibilities due to their young age. They might be worried about lacking the psychological stability required to be a good parent. It might be that in a few months, or in a few years, their economic, social, family, or emotional situation will be different and they will want to have a child.
It is because of considerations about the impact of parenthood on people’s life goals, and about what constitute good enough circumstances under which people should have children, that reproduction has increasingly become medicalized, and it has changed from a matter of chance to a matter of choice. On the one hand, there are contraceptives that prevent people from getting pregnant at the wrong time or with the wrong person, and, on the other hand, there are infertility treatments that help people to conceive when they feel that there are ideal circumstances to raise a child, but there are biological impediments to conceive.
As people age, it becomes increasingly difficult to conceive a child through natural means, and even more to conceive a healthy child through natural means. Women’s fertility starts to decline in their late 20s and early 30s, and by the time they are in their 40s, conceiving a child through natural means is difficult. But most people are focused on their careers, life projects, and finding the right person to start a family during the first three or four decades of their life. Contrary to what used to be the case in the past, the peak of women’s fertility no longer necessarily matches the time they feel that it is good for them to become mothers. This is why fertility treatments are so popular, and why many women struggle to conceive.
Given the limits currently imposed by human biology and the current incapacity of medicine to radically extend female fertility, it seems that cryosuspension of embryos (or eggs) would be a good strategy to make sure that women are as free as men to decide whether and when to become parents. Therefore, cryosuspension should be welcome also in a feminist perspective.
Cryopreservation of eggs at a young age would make it possible to utilize these eggs for IVF treatments later on in life, when one has found a partner they want to have children with. Unfortunately, at the moment cryopreservation of eggs has not given as good results as cryopreservation of embryos , so it would be safer to make and cryopreserve embryos with the chosen partner as soon as possible, and then implant them when it is more convenient. If it became feasible to extract and cryopreserve embryos that were accidentally conceived, then one could keep them in an embryo/foetus cryobank and reimplant them at a later time. This way, a woman who got pregnant when she could not continue the pregnancy, could “save up” her own embryo/foetus for a time when she actually desires to have a child, something that could spare her the distress of dealing with infertility treatments later on in life and, perhaps, of having to choose whether or not to do something they find immoral or distressing.
Therapeutic Aid
In some cases, the choice to have an abortion has to do with the health conditions of the foetus . For instance, if tests during the pregnancy reveal a severe genetic condition of the foetus , parents might decide to have an abortion in order to spare their future child the suffering that such genetic condition would inflict on them and/or to spare themselves the difficulties of raising a child with disabilities.
Moreover, even if parents decided to continue the pregnancy knowing that the foetus has a disability, sometimes they do not have the option to continue. Some conditions are not compatible with life; hence the foetus is naturally expelled by the body through a miscarriage.
Both in cases where the parents choose to have an abortion because the foetus has a disability and in cases where the foetus condition causes a mi
scarriage, cryopreservation of the foetus could be a valid alternative to abortion and miscarriage.
Hopefully, many or at least some of the conditions that are currently disabling or incompatible with life will at some point be curable. Thus, cryosuspension would give prospective parents the option to cryopreserve the embryo /foetus (in cases where the condition causes a miscarriage, they should intervene very early on) and hope that a therapy will be developed while they are still alive, so that they can actually reimplant the foetus and bring it into existence. For foetuses affected by conditions incompatible with life, this kind of intervention would represent the only hope to develop into full human beings at some point in the future. For foetuses affected by disabling conditions that would be compatible with life, cryosuspension would provide a means to buy time in the hope that medicine finds a therapy. If parents decide to reimplant them after a few years because no therapy has been developed and they think that a life with disability is better than no life at all, then cryosuspension would at least have provided such families with more time to learn how to help their future child to have a fulfilling life while carrying a disabling condition. Families often find it difficult to deal with disabilities, to learn how to best take care of a child with special needs, and to organize their home in a way that best accommodates such needs. Keeping the foetus cryopreserved for a while would give them time to prepare for the additional challenges of parenting a child with disabilities.
So it seems that cryosuspension of pregnancies of foetuses with disabilities would be useful regardless of what condition is affecting the foetus and of whether a treatment is developed for such conditions. Of course, it may be that no therapy will ever be found, so that in the end the cryopreserved embryos will never be reimplanted, or, if reimplanted, they will have to live with a disability. But it is plausible that at least for a certain percentage of these embryos that would otherwise be aborted or lost in a miscarriage, cryosuspension would provide a useful aid in providing them with a better life, or with a life at all. Also, in this case, then, cryosuspension is an option that the pro-life should welcome.
Adoption
In cases where people do not want to or cannot have an abortion (they might live in a country where it is illegal), but they also cannot or do not want to raise a child, the only option they have is to complete the pregnancy and to give the child up for adoption. This is often considered an ideal solution because it does not involve killing a foetus and depriving it of a future life, it does not force someone to raise a child under suboptimal conditions, and it allows people who cannot have their own genetically related children to adopt a child and satisfy their desire for parenthood. Yet, this solution has downsides too.
It has been observed that some women are extremely distressed when giving up their child for adoption. Some of them never overcome this traumatic experience, and their psychological well-being is forever compromised (Condon, 1986). Unfortunately, there is also data pointing to the fact that children given up for adoption and passed through different institutions or foster care homes before being adopted (some of them are never adopted) are also negatively affected by this kind of experience (Hoksbergen et al., 2003; Simmel, 2007).
So even though giving up a child for adoption is sometimes considered the best option available in case of unwanted pregnancies, in practice it seems that it can have very negative consequences, and that cryosuspension of pregnancy could be a better alternative. If cryosuspension of pregnancy were an option, people who at the moment can only give up the child for adoption, and as a consequence experience trauma, would have an alternative. They could pause the pregnancy and reimplant the foetus when circumstances are more favourable, for instance, when their economic and personal situation has improved.
But also for women who are confident that giving up a child for adoption would be the best option (they might have a terminal disease, or live in an extremely poor country), cryosuspension of pregnancy could be a useful tool. The pregnant woman could cryosuspend the foetus well before the moment of birth. This way, she could spare herself the burden of nine months of pregnancy, she could avoid to bond too much with the foetus (something that would make the separation less painful), and she would have more than nine months to look for the right adoptive family. This way, she would have better chances to find an adoptive family that matches her preferences. Moreover, an infertile woman adopting the foetus would have the opportunity to have the foetus implanted in her own womb and have time to bond with it at least for a few weeks before it is born.1 Such a solution would also spare the future child the distress of passing through various foster care homes before finding parent/s that can adopt her.
In sum, cryosuspension of pregnancy could provide a better alternative to adoption both for women who do not want to give their child up for adoption and for the ones who want to. Moreover, it would make the whole process of adopting smoother for both the prospective child and the prospective adoptive family.
Ectogenesis
When considering future technologies that could change the way we procreate, cryosuspension of pregnancy is not the only, or even the first option, that comes to mind. So-called artificial wombs or ectogenesis have been discussed for much longer, and attempts have been made to actually realize such artificial wombs that would allow foetuses to develop outside of a woman’s body (Partridge et al., 2017).
In a book published in 1984, Peter Singer and Deane Wells argued that ectogenesis would have helped to solve conflicts related to abortion by allowing unwillingly pregnant women (or women at high risk of miscarriage) to remove a foetus and transferring it to an artificial womb (Singer & Wells, 1984, p. 135). The foetus would have developed in the artificial womb and then, if not wanted by the genetic parents, it could have been adopted by other couples.
Just like cryosuspension of pregnancy, ectogenesis should have constituted a practical solution to bypass moral issues related to abortion , without actually solving such moral conflicts. Singer and Wells thought that pro-life groups would have considered ectogenesis a preferable alternative to abortion , given that it would have saved embryos and foetuses from death caused by abortions (or by miscarriages). At the same time, they expected pro-choice groups to be enthusiastic about a technological means that would have freed women from the burden of pregnancy, giving them unprecedented autonomy and control over their own body.
Singer and Wells argued that ectogenesis should have not deprived women of the opportunity to decide how to dispose of the unwanted embryo or foetus , meaning that abortion should have remained an option. However, if ectogenesis (or cryosuspension of pregnancy) were available, the reasons used to justify abortion could not be ones based on the autonomy of women and their bodily autonomy.
As we saw, there are two main lines of arguments that, either together or separately, could be used to justify abortion . One is based on the view that embryos /foetuses lack significant moral status: there is nothing wrong with killing an embryo /foetus because they do not have capacities or properties that would make them the subject of a right to live. According to a second argument, abortion is permissible because, regardless of the status of the embryo /foetus , a woman has a right to bodily autonomy; hence she cannot be coerced into keeping another human being alive through her own body, regardless of whether such human being has the moral status of a person or not (Thomson, 1976).
If abortion is justified by bodily autonomy, rather than by the lack of personhood of the foetus , then the availability of both ectogenesis and cryosuspension of pregnancy, as ways to keep the foetus alive without breaching a woman’s bodily autonomy, would imply that there is no moral reason to justify killing the foetus through an abortion .
However, although it would seem that both ectogenesis and cryosuspension of pregnancy strike a balance between women’s right to bodily autonomy (because women will have the possibility not to continue an unwanted pregnancy) and foetuses’ right to life (because the foetus will not be killed, but onl
y moved outside the woman’s womb), there are some possible downsides that have been taken into consideration. In a book published in 1998, Leslie Cannold interviewed both pro-life and pro-choice women asking them questions about, among other motherhood-related issues, ectogenesis (Cannold, 1998). Perhaps surprisingly, Cannold found that both women justifying abortion on the basis of autonomy and women refusing abortion on the basis of a right to life of foetuses agreed that ectogenesis would not be a morally viable option.
Some of the concerns expressed against ectogenesis would be likely used against cryosuspension of pregnancy. For instance, both pro-choice and pro-life women explained that they would be worried about the possible risks for the development of the foetus if it were transferred to an artificial womb. We can imagine that similar concerns would be raised about the possible consequences of cryosuspension for the development of a foetus. Some of the women interviewed by Cannold seemed to distrust scientists and/or machines, and claimed that they would not feel comfortable relinquishing their foetus to a scientist or to a machine. They were concerned not only about the impact that such procedure might have on the physical development of the foetus, but also about the possible side effects such an unusual “pregnancy” could have on the sense of self and on the overall psychological well-being of the future child well after they were born. In this respect, however, the advantage of cryosuspension of embryos and foetuses over ectogenesis is that the foetus would develop in a uterus. It would form in the woman’s body, develop in the uterus for a certain number of days or weeks, would be removed and cryosuspended, and eventually reimplanted in the uterus, where it would resume developing as it happens with natural pregnancies.
The Ethics of Cryonics Page 17