William Egginton has an op-ed in the NYT in which he suggests that neuroscience might challenge Roe v. Wade. It’s long — about 1900 words — and it’s revealing that in all the ambiguous fudging about whether a fetus is conscious, there is no consideration at all for the woman wrapped around it. In fact, she isn’t even mentioned…not once. Yes, it’s another man pontificating on the rights and privileges of the fetus as if the pregnant woman were not there. It’s astonishing how completely women vanish when they get pregnant — it’s as if some people can only see women as an incubator for the Holy and Sacred Child.

It starts out promisingly, discussing an Idaho law called the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act”, which tries to outlaw abortions by claiming that fetuses can feel pain. This is a neuroscientific claim. So Egginton asks,

So why not call an actual neuroscientist as an expert witness instead of a scholar of the humanities?

And I thought for a moment that Egginton, who I hadn’t heard of before, was perhaps a neuroscientist offering up his expertise. Alas, at the end I discover that he’s the “Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University”. He’s not making an informed contribution on the science, apparently his goal is to “criticize the hubris of scientific claims to knowledge that exceeds the boundaries of what the sciences in fact demonstrate.” So that was actually a rhetorical question which is answered by the fact that he thinks neuroscientists aren’t actually good witnesses on subjects of neuroscience. OK.

Reminder: it still isn’t an argument in which the rights of the pregnant woman are considered.

Fortunately, he dismisses fetal pain as a criterion for prohibiting abortion — not because they don’t experience pain, but because awareness of pain is not a basis for legal prohibitions. Animals feel pain, for instance, and we don’t outlaw farming and hunting. I would suggest that pain awareness is a general feature, like having a heartbeat or two eyes, that isn’t particularly indicative of a special status that demands protection (that doesn’t stop Pro-Life Across America from putting up billboards with pictures of smiling babies saying, “My heart started beating at 28 days!” — it’s an emotional appeal).

Unfortunately, Egginton then arbitrarily replaces “pain” with another amorphous concept, “personhood”.

Those wishing to abolish abortion believe that “the fetus is a ‘person’ within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.” If, as Justice Harry A. Blackmun continues in his opinion in 1973, “this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment.” If a fetus is a person, in other words, then it is not a potential human life at all, but is a fully human life deserving of full legal protection, and abortion must be murder and punishable as such. The intent of current fetal pain statutes is, clearly, to infer from the ability to feel pain on the part of a human fetus — if it can be established by neuroscience — a claim for actual human life or full personhood.

Reminder: it still isn’t an argument in which the rights of the pregnant woman are considered.

But then, in an interesting twist, Egginton uses the idea of defining personhood as a bat to pound on anti-choice activists. It would be a big mistake, he suggests, to let scientists define what a person is, because, basically, scientists are reductionist jerks, and science “can tell us nothing about the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, or the origin of human freedom”. He’s wrong. There is no god (and those humanist types can’t even freakin’ define this entity, let alone provide evidence for it), the soul is a ridiculous concept, and freedom is an interesting cognitive illusion and a political idea. He can cite Kant at me all he wants, but science has made great progress in explaining the nature of the universe and ourselves to the point where we definitely don’t know all the answers, but we know enough to constrain the wide range of possible answers to something that precludes the primitive guesses of uninformed old philosophers and theologians.

So Egginton isn’t really making an anti-abortion rant: he’s making an anti-science argument. Interesting.

When science becomes the sole or even primary arbiter of such basic notions as personhood, it ceases to be mankind’s most useful servant and threatens, instead, to become its dictator. Science does not and should not have the power to absolve individuals and communities of the responsibility to choose. This emphatically does not mean that science should be left out of such personal and political debates. The more we know about the world the better positioned we are to make the best possible choices. But when science is used to replace thinking instead of complement it; when we claim to see in its results the reduction of all the complexity that constitutes the emergence of a human life or the choices and responsibilities of the person it may develop into; we relinquish something that Kant showed more than 200 years ago was essential to the very idea of a human being: our freedom.

Well, I was trained as a neuroscientist (I’ve since drifted towards developmental biology), and if I were made dictator of the world, I can tell you what I’d say: “personhood” is not discrete and absolute, so no scientist will be able to declare a black & white switch from non-personhood to personhood (although the reverse is easier: we call it “death”). I would also say that even if we could measure it, “personhood” is a matter of degree and also is a criterion like “pain”: it’s not something we can use as a logical bludgeon to deny abortions. Even the one neuroscientist Egginton cites in his article, Antonio Damasio, talks about degrees of consciousness in animals. So much for the demonization of scientists. We are aware of the limits of our knowledge; it’s unfortunate that professors of the humanities don’t seem to be similarly aware of the boundaries of their domain.

Oh, and if I were the dictator of the world, I’d look into the eyes of the teenager who faces the sacrifice of her dreams if she bears that child, the eyes of the woman whose fetus carries a birth defect, the eyes of the victim of rape, and I’d say…”Your choice — do what is best for your life. It’s your life that matters.” That overrides all other considerations.

I’m a little surprised to learn that humanities professors don’t pay much attention to that sort of thing. Maybe we should exclude them from future deliberations on these matters.