Neither Man nor Beast

by Carol J Adams

  Animal defenders face the challenge of telling the truth about animals’ lives, awakening the world to the reality of how animals are treated, rather than the sanitized “down on the farm” image we are culturally spoon-fed and cling to in order to persist in oppressive actions of eating and wearing animals. We are not necessarily speaking for the animals, but making visible that which those who benefit from animals’ oppression wish to keep invisible—the way humans treat the other animals. Animals, after all, are not speechless.

  Similarly, abortion rights face the challenge that the dominant culture does not want to know the truth about women’s lives. Rather motherhood is romanticized.

  Here then are some of the philosophical issues that arise when a feminist examines the commonalities of animal defense and abortion rights.

  Premise 1: We Must Not Lose Sight of the Individual

  Animal defense theory argues that we must consider the individual animals. We must not let the fate of individual animals become deflected by concerns about species, or habitat, or the environment, or determined by what some consider to be humans’ needs to eat and experiment upon animals. It is as individuals that animals experience the consequences of their oppression.

  Resistance to recognizing the individuality of each animal is reproduced in the arguments of many antiabortionists. We hear about the millions of abortions performed each year. What we do not hear about is the experience and life decisions of each individual woman connected to those statistics. Even if a form of birth control had a 99 percent effective rate, (name one, please—abortion and abstinence are the only forms of birth control that are 100 percent effective), one out of one hundred women will find herself with an unwanted pregnancy. To this individual woman the failure of birth control is staggering. In fact, it is estimated that worldwide each woman experiences two unwanted pregnancies in her lifetime.

  It is as individuals that women become pregnant.

  The emphasis on the individual animal provides a focus for considering another aspect of the abortion rights issue: we need to recognize the singularity of pregnancy. By this I mean that pregnancy is unreproducible as a moral issue—there is no analogous rights situation to that of a woman who is carrying a fetus within her. Complex attempts to argue from analogous positions have been made. But there are none. There is no preexisting paradigm into which the question of abortion fits, because there is no equivalent to pregnancy.

  Terminal animals—animals who exist to become someone’s “meat” or “model”—have been stri pped of all that makes them individuals, as Barbara Noske observes, they have been de-animalized. We fail to view terminal animals as social creatures. All that remains when we consider animals is the outer shell of “rabbit” or “cow,” but not a relational animal. A similar process of decontextualizing the fetus occurs. Whereas animals in most people’s imaginations are only body, the fetus has been disembodied, floating as though in space and not at all dependent on a woman’s body for sustenance. The fetus can become the sole focus of the concern when the context of women’s lives is absent, just as the animal can be the object of human’s use when the context of their own lives is stripped away. In both cases, that which is the social part of the context, that which experiences the consequences of decontextualizing—the pregnant woman and the living, breathing rabbit—disappear. They, animals and woman, are the absent referents.

  If any “individuality” is referred to by the antiabortion side, it is that of the aborted fetus. The claims of the fetus are often articulated as though they exist in a moral vacuum, detached from any individual woman. This is an example of Cartesian dualism, which those unfamiliar with the arguments of animal defenders need to know is one of the prime sources for the oppression of animals. Cartesian dualism ratifies the human/animal split by claiming that there is a rational/feeling dualism. Cartesian dualism also ratifies the woman/fetus split. Just as we humans are animals, and our rationality cannot exist separate from our embodied and feeling selves, the fetus is not separate from a woman; it is within her. Consider Barbara Ehrenreich’s apt description as she discusses the misleading way we are told to visualize the fetus: “as a sort of larval angel, suspended against a neutral background. But no fetus—no living fetus—is suspended anywhere, but anchored to the placenta, housed in the womb, and wrapped in the flesh of a living woman.”7 Or as feminist ethicist Beverly Harrison points out, to impute an “agency of self development” to cells and tissue is deceptive, for it implies that the process of fetal formation is “not biologically dependent on the pregnant woman’s life system.”8 To separate the fetus from the pregnant woman in discussing the issue of abortion is disingenuous. It is dishonest. It is misogynist. Just as speciesist discourse eliminates the individual animals, the fetishization of the fetus eliminates consideration of the individual woman. This is, of course, their intent.

  Premise 2: Self-determination for Women and the Other Animals

  Controlling animals and controlling access to abortion is the opposite of self-determination and liberation. Chickens, cows, mice, pigs, and women should not be forced to be pregnant against their will. If cows had reproductive freedom, there would be no veal calves and no milk for humans to drink.

  Deceptive cultural images deflect us from understanding either animals’ or women’s right to self-determination. We may tell ourselves that animals want to be our food (like Charlie the Tuna) but this is not so. Neither is it true that the experience of birth will make an unwilling pregnant woman a mother who will automatically love her baby.

  Access to abortion is a fundamental aspect of women’s freedom, for these reasons:

  • Women’s lives are at stake when abortion is criminalized. Abortion is never eliminated, it exists within cultures whatever the law dictates about its legality. For centuries it was a submerged part of women’s culture. The question is not will abortions be available but what types of abortion will be available, and for whom?

  • Voluntary legal abortion improves women’s physical and psychological health.

  • The availability of abortion insures that women will more likely reject hazardous forms of contraception such as depo-provera.

  • Birth control failure is responsible for over 40 percent of unintended pregnancies.9

  Premise 3: The “Sentiency” of the Fetus and of Animals Are Not Similar

  Is the situation of the fetus legally or morally equivalent to that of animals? Tom Regan, in The Case for Animal Rights, discusses this briefly, but focuses his discussion on “the soon-to-be-born.” We do not know, or as he says, “it is not obviously true” whether the soon-to-be-born have beliefs, desires, and the like. As a result, “the rights view leaves the question central to this debate an open question.”10 Which, of course, it must because at some point we use social criteria to determine what are claimed to be biological facts.

  This is how the case was recently made to me:

  1. Individuals who behave as if interested in their own well-being and who possess the anatomical structures necessary for perception of and response to environmental stimuli should have their interests respected.

  2. Fetal humans [sic] develop such behaviors and anatomical structures between five and nine weeks after conception.

  3. Fetal humans [sic] between five and nine weeks after conception have a prima facie right to respect of interests.

  My field work when I was a divinity school student was being an aide at an elite medical school’s first trimester abortion clinic. I asked once to see an aborted fetus. It was no longer than an inch. While many nonhuman animals may thrive at this size, no human animals have. Are not social categories being used when it is claimed that this fetus has perception of and response to environmental stimuli akin to any animal? Since social categories obviously reflect the dominant culture, and the dominance of our culture is clearly gender- and species-based, then a series of a priori presumptions has already predetermined what perception means, and how response is measured.

>   Is a fetus an individual? Does a fetus behave as an individual? What behaviors, precisely, are exhibited by the fetus during the first trimester? A fetus of twelve weeks has muscle reflexes but no developed nerve cell pathways in the brain’s cortex that would enable it to experience pai n. While I am wary of any claim to “scientific” information, since it is precisely these sorts of claims that are used against antivivisection arguments, I do wish to point out that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists issued a statement on Pain of the Fetus (apparently in part as a response to the deceptively narrated film The Silent Scream). The statement, issued February 13, 1984, reads:

  We know of no legitimate scientific information that supports the statement that a fetus experiences pain early in pregnancy.

  We do know that the cerebellum attains its final configuration in the seventh month and that myelinization (or covering) of the spinal cord and the brain begins between the twentieth and fortieth weeks of pregnancy. These, as well as other neurological developments, would have to be in place for the fetus to perceive pain.

  To feel pain, a fetus needs neurotransmitted hormones. In animals, these complex chemicals develop in the last third of gestation. We know of no evidence that humans are different.

  As one chairperson of a department of pediatric neurology said: “Pain implies cognition. There is no brain to receive the information.”11 Or as a researcher on the genetic control of brain development states: “An embryo may have fingers, hands, a nose and eyes, even reflex movements, but still no mind. . . . The early embryo, before the development of the mature human brain, has only one quality to distinguish it from all other living things: It has the potential to become a human being.”12

  A fetus, if allowed to develop, may reach the stage at which it has interests; an animal has actual interests.

  The speciesism of Homo sapiens is perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in the protestation about the fate of the human conceptus and zygote, while the sentiency of the other animals is declared morally irrelevant because they are not human beings. Some have a definition of meaningful life that is so broad as to encompass a newly fertilized egg, yet so narrow that it does not consider fully-grown animals with well developed nervous systems and social sensibilities. Is it only human beings who should be ends and not means and does human being truly mean zygote? This leads to the next premise:

  Premise 4: Our Definition of Personhood Is Culture-Bound

  The concept of personhood is not value neutral, so there can be no value-free inquiry into this subject. For centuries, “person” excluded all but Euro-American males, so the idea that by discussing personhood we have entered into some secure ground is itself false. Notions of personhood are dictated by the culture in which persons and others live. Let us be reminded, too, that “it is frequently overlooked or dismissed in the debate about the ‘morality’ of abortion that the corollary of ‘fetal personhood’ is forced motherhood.”13

  Will the fetus achieve personhood before women do?

  Do pregnant women, the only ones who experience a direct relationship with the fetus, define personhood differently from others, and does this offer a reasonable guide to this discussion? In fact, between 92 and 96 percent of legal abortions in this country occur within the first trimester, and over half occur within the first eight weeks. “These data are significant in understanding popular values about ‘fetal life.’ They confirm the sense that most women have, in term pregnancies, of developmental differences that correspond to differences, changes, in their relationship/obligation/bond to the fetus.”14

  According to Ruth Macklin, a “low standard” and a “high standard” for personhood exist. If you have a “low standard” then a zygote qualifies for personhood; in this case, though, “scientific development affords a convenient source of objective data used to support antecedently-held views.” Macklin suggests that the properties an entity must have in order to satisfy the criteria for personhood are both a potentiality principle and encephalographic activity (which can be used for both the beginning and the end of personhood). This “high standard” for personhood recognizes a neonate or infant beyond a few months or a year.15 Of interest, this high standard, would be inclusive of animals, too.

  Animal defenders extend the notion of personhood to animals. When we watch someone who has a companion animal interact with that animal, we see in that relationship a recognition of that animal’s individuality, or, in a sense, that animal’s personhood: given a name, touched and caressed, a life that interacts and informs another’s. The dominant culture reduces some animals to nonpersonhood status, keeping them in intensive farms, where they are treated as animal machines, while others, what feminists might call the token few, are elevated to personhood status.

  Premise 5: The Moral Dilemmas of Abortion Rights and Animal Rights Are Different

  The dilemma abortion rights faces is that women are not recognized as competent moral actors. The dilemma animal defenders face is that animals are not recognized as possessing legitimate moral claims upon us.

  Women are not recognized as competent moral actors. It is obvious that women have always had abortions; that the women’s community developed a variety of ways to end an unwanted pregnancy; that this was not condemned within this women’s community, though the men’s community throughout the ages has had varied views about the meaning of this.16 What has been variable about abortion is its legality or criminalization, not its existence. It has always been a woman’s choice and always will be one.

  After surveying 350 primitive, ancient, and preindustrial societies, George Devereux concluded “there is every indication that abortion is an absolutely universal phenomenon, and that it is impossible even to construct an imaginary social system in which no woman would ever feel at least impelled to abort.”17 From this I deduce the following: women, despite the overwhelming misogyny of moral theory that has posited them as unable to make moral decisions, can and do make moral decisions quite capably. In this regard, they place an unwanted pregnancy within a continuum that remains largely unseen to the outside world’s human male moral hegemony. As Beverly Harrison describes it:

  From the standpoint of a woman’s experience, a . . . basic . . . moral question operates: “What am I to do about the procreative power that is mine by virtue of being born female?” The question of abortion arises only in this wider human context. . . . A woman’s basic constructive line of moral action is responsible life planning in relation to her procreative power. The habit of discussing abortion as if it were a “discrete deed” is a way of formulating the abortion issue as a moral question abstracted out of, and hence irrelevant to, the way it arises in women’s lives. . . . The well-being of a woman and the value of her life plan always must be recognized as of intrinsic value in any appeal to intrinsic value in a moral analysis of abortion.18

  The dilemma of animal defense is the resistance of most people to recognizing that animals have legitimate moral claims upon us. Now I know that this requires us to reopen the question, “Does the fetus have a moral claim upon us?” Or, to put it a different way, “At what point in a pregnancy does a fetus have a moral claim upon those of us who are not its potential mother?” And what do these moral claims mean? At the point at which a pregnancy becomes a civil, political, public concern (if there is a legitimate point at which this occurs, the Supreme Court says that it is after the second trimester), does it not also become a civil, political, public claim? (By “concern” I mean an issue that is something that the body politic may rightly debate and respond to legislatively; by “claim” I mean a situation that requires a material response by the body politic, rather than an ideological or legal one.) Rather than narrowly focusing on the responsiblity of the potential mother to produce a healthy child and then criminalizing her behavior for failing to honor this responsibility, are we not all responsible for creating a world where all children can be born healthy? For instance, insuring the continued funding of the Women and Infant C
hildren Program (while lobbying for vegetable protein substitutes to heavily relied upon dairy products), funding of prenatal care, child-care provisions, elimination of environmental carcinogens, etc.

  A poignant case illustrates what occurs as a result of the narrow definition of moral claims: the US government believes in animal experimentation. Funds are given to make animals drug addicts. Meanwhile, funds are cut for drug detox centers. A pregnant woman is refused admittance at a drug detox center because they have no room as a result of budget cuts. She stays hooked on drugs, and is then charged with endangering the life of of her yet-unborn child.

  The lack of social responsibility to the legitimate claims of living beings is appalling and interwoven.

  Premise 6: Identification with the Vulnerable Requires Defining Vulnerability

  Some animal defenders and antiabortionists share an intense identification with those they perceive as vulnerable. What determines whether they will identify with the vulnerable, voiceless unprotected fetus instead of the vulnerable, unprotected lab animal, veal calf, or pound animal?

  To examine this fully is beyond the scope of this preliminary exploration, but a few issues should be flagged. Andrea Dworkin’s Right-wing Women makes a compelling case that the reasons women become involved in the antiabortion movement are because they are aware of the immense amount of antiwoman violence in the world, and by situating themselves within the matrix of the traditional family and its values, they are assured of a form of protectionism (or so they think).19 However, the motivations for men involved in the antiabortion movement are very different. Recent profiles of the men who lead “Operation Rescue”—the group that is using civil disobedience in its attempts to prevent women from entering abortion clinics—revealed that the men see feminists as responsible for their downward mobility, and blame working women for their own economic troubles. They take this extreme hostility into the antiabortion movement, not—as their rhetoric proclaims—to protect the “unborn” but to punish those whom they hold responsible for their social standing. This successfully protects the men from having to develop any economic analysis that might place the blame for their situation elsewhere.20