The Epistemology of Abortion

Why science can’t prove or disprove that a fetus has a right to life

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. Woody Allen once said it consisted of two questions “Is there such a thing as knowledge?” and “How can we know this?”. This formulation reveals the circularity underlying all epistemological questions, and yet we must do epistemology to answer the questions that abortion raises. There are only two ways of doing any kind of philosophy: Badly and not so badly. The people who say “I’m not going to waste my time thinking about the philosophy” have already done the philosophy before they started thinking about abortion. They have just done it badly, because they didn’t do it consciously. To paraphrase Robertson Davies, if you don’t choose a philosophical position, some philosophical position will end up choosing you.

People on both sides of this debate claim to have the science on their side. They are both correct in thinking that the science makes a difference, but both mistaken in thinking that the question can be decisively answered by science. The science can often change the shape of a philosophical question, but in the case of abortion it has not answered it, and I think it never will. That’s the ignored epistemological controversy that lies beneath the abortion debate: How can we know that a fetus or zygote does or doesn’t have a right to life? There are lots of biological facts that are relevant to this question, but we have to make certain philosophical assumptions in order to…