The Ontology of Abortion: Human Being and the Right to Life

What is a person? What is a thing? Abortion vs. Infanticide

Ontology deals with the nature of Being. It tries to answer the question “what is there?” with the shortest possible correct answer, in order to capture the essence of what it means to Be. The Being that matters the most to the abortion question is human Being. What, in other words, does it mean to be human? This question is not a purely academic one, because humans have certain rights that other beings don’t have. Consequently, in order to answer the ethical questions raised by abortion, we have to answer the question “what is it mean to be a human being?” Until you have some sort of answer to that question, you have no way of explaining why human beings have rights that other beings do not have.

Some of the biggest confusions in the abortion debate come from conflating three very different properties that constitute human Being. Anti-choice proponents cite scientific evidence that a fetus or embryo has only one of these properties, and then fallaciously infer that it must possess all of them, and thus be human. This is called the fallacy of ambiguity, because it involves interchangeably referring to three importantly different properties as if they were the same. These properties are, in increasing order of importance to our concerns:

1) Life:

Anti-choice people like to say “science has proven that life begins at conception.” This is…