Is a 15-week limit on abortion an acceptable compromise?

Is a 15-week limit on abortion an acceptable compromise?

A recent opinion piece by George F. Will, “Ambivalent about abortion, the American middle begins to find its voice” in the Washington Post made the startling claim that the overturning of Roe v. Wade (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 2022) has resulted in “a partial healing of the nation’s civic culture.” One might think exactly the reverse. The Dobbs decision energized voters, especially women and young people, resulting in numerous Republican electoral defeats across the country. However, Will argues that the return of abortion policy to the states gives voters the opportunity of choosing moderate restrictions on abortion. Since most Americans support early abortion while opposing late-gestation abortion, Will thinks that a 15-week ban on abortion would be an acceptable compromise.

Why 15 weeks? Two reasons can be given. Almost all abortions in the US—93%—occur within the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. For this reason, making abortion illegal after 15 weeks would not, it would seem, impose serious burdens on most people seeking abortions. 

Another reason is that several European countries limit abortion on request to the first trimester, leading some US lawmakers to suggest that a 15-week ban would bring our abortion law in line with theirs. This is disingenuous, to say the least. While elective abortion is limited in some European countries, it is not banned afterwards, but is allowed on other grounds, including economic or social reasons, or a threat to the woman’s physical or mental health. Moreover, in most European countries, patients do not have to pay for abortion; it is covered under universal health coverage. The fact is that the trend in Europe has not been to limit abortion, but to expand access to it. Countries in Europe “… have removed bans, increased abortion’s legality and taken steps to ensure laws and policies on abortion are guided by public health evidence and clinical best practices.”

Were states to guarantee access to abortion prior to 15 weeks, a 15-week ban might be acceptable. However, even before Dobbs, many women in the US lacked access to abortion, due to a dearth of providers, especially in rural areas. They often had to travel many miles to find an abortion clinic, which meant that they had to arrange childcare if they have other children or take time off work. Delay is also caused by the need to raise money for an abortion, which is not paid for by Medicaid in most states, except in cases of rape, incest, or a life-threatening condition. To be sure, even if there were none of these roadblocks, some women would still not be able to have early abortions because they do not know that they are pregnant, due to youth, being menopausal, chronic obesity, or a lack of pregnancy symptoms. Any time limits will pose hardships for some people. But if access to early abortions were guaranteed, a compromise on a 15-week limit might be worth it.

I suspect that time-limit advocates are not particularly interested in making sure that women who have abortions get them early in pregnancy. They want to place roadblocks in the way of getting abortions, full stop. That these roadblocks increase the numbers of late abortions is of little concern to them, however much they wring their hands over late abortions. Abortion can be reduced by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies, something that has been shown to be achieved by access to contraceptives and science-based sex education in the schools. Remember when pro-lifers emphasized those methods? Me neither. 

My second concern is with abortions sought after 15 weeks. The reason for a late abortion may be that the woman has a medical condition that has not developed, or has not been detected, until later in pregnancy. In such cases, the pregnancy is almost always a wanted pregnancy, and the decision to terminate imposes a tragic choice.

It may be responded that all states allow abortions to be performed when this is necessary to save the pregnant woman’s life, and many allow for abortions to protect her from a serious health risk. The problem is that these exceptions conflict with standard medical care, especially in the case of miscarriage. Once the woman has begun to miscarry, the failure to remove the fetus is likely to cause her sepsis, which can be life-threatening. However, in states with restrictive abortion laws, doctors cannot perform an immediate abortion, which is the standard of care in such situations. They have to wait until her death is imminent and, in some states, they cannot remove the fetus until its heart stops. 

Ireland’s restrictive abortion law was repealed after a woman who was denied an abortion during a miscarriage died from septicemia. To the best of my knowledge, no woman in the US has died as a result of restrictive abortion laws, but some have come close. An OB-GYN in San Antonio had to wait until the fetal heartbeat stopped to treat a miscarrying patient who developed a dangerous womb infection. The delay caused complications which required her to have surgery, lose multiple liters of blood, and be put on a breathing machine. Texas law essentially requires doctors to commit malpractice.

Conservatives often portray those in the pro-choice camp as advocating abortion until the day of delivery, for trivial reasons. This is deeply unfair. If they want us to compromise on time limits, they should be willing to guarantee access to abortion before 15 weeks. They should be willing to compromise on pregnancy prevention through contraception and sex education. And they should agree to drop all restrictions on late-term abortions that make legislators, rather than doctors, in charge of deciding what is appropriate medical care for their patients.

_{Featured image: Gayatri Malhotra via Unsplash (public domain)}

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Video Interview: Introducing Academic Visitor Prof Antonio Diéguez Lucena

An interview with Prof Antonio Diéguez Lucena, professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of Málaga, Spain. Here he speaks of his research into the philosophy of biology and technology.

Elon Musk, Mars, and bioethics: is sending astronauts into space ethical?

Elon Musk, Mars, and bioethics: is sending astronauts into space ethical?

The recent crash of the largest-ever space rocket, Starship, developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, has certainly somewhat disrupted optimism about the human mission to Mars that is being prepared for the next few years. It is worth raising the issue of the safety of future participants in long-term space missions, especially missions to Mars, on the background of this disaster. And it is not just about safety from disasters like the one that happened to Musk. Protection from the negative effects of prolonged flight in zero gravity, protection from cosmic radiation, as well as guaranteeing sufficiently high crew productivity over the course of a multi-year mission also play an important role.

Fortunately, no one was killed in the aforementioned crash, as it was a test rocket alone without a crew. However, past disasters in which astronauts died, such as the Space Shuttle Challenger and Space Shuttle Columbia disasters, remind us that it is the seemingly very small details that determine life and death. So far, 15 astronauts and 4 cosmonauts have died in space flights. 11 more have died during testing and training on Earth. It is worth mentioning that space flights are peacekeeping missions, not military operations. They are carried out relatively infrequently and by a relatively small number of people. 

It is also worth noting the upcoming longer and more complex human missions in the near future, such as the mission to Mars. The flight itself, which is expected to last several months, is quite a challenge, and disaster can happen both during takeoff on Earth, landing on Mars, and then on the way back to Earth. And then there are further risks that await astronauts in space. 

The first is exposure to galactic cosmic radiation and solar energetic particles events, especially during interplanetary flight, when the crew is no longer protected by both Earth’s magnetic field and a possible shelter on Mars. Protection from cosmic radiation for travel to Mars is a major challenge, and 100% effective protective measures are still lacking. Another challenge remains being in long-term zero-gravity conditions during the flight, followed by altered gravity on Mars. Bone loss and muscle atrophy are the main, but not only, negative effects of being in these states. Finally, it is impossible to ignore the importance of psychological factors related to stress, isolation, being in an enclosed small space, distance from Earth.

A human mission to Mars, which could take about three years, brings with it a new type of danger not known from the previous history of human space exploration. In addition to the aforementioned amplified impact of factors already known—namely microgravity, cosmic radiation, and isolation—entirely new risk factors are emerging. One of them is the impossibility of evacuating astronauts in need back to Earth, which is possible in missions carried out at the International Space Station. It seems that even the best-equipped and trained crew may not be able to guarantee adequate assistance to an injured or ill astronaut, which could lead to her death—assuming that care on Earth would guarantee her survival and recovery. Another problem is the delay in communication, which will reach tens of minutes between Earth and Mars. This situation will affect the degree of autonomy of the crew, but also their responsibility. Wrong decisions, made under conditions of uncertainty, can have not only negative consequences for health and life, but also for the entire mission.

Thus, we can see that a future human mission to Mars will be very dangerous, both as a result of factors already known but intensified, as well as new risk factors. It is worth raising the question of the ethicality of the decision to send humans into such a dangerous environment. The ethical assessment will depend both on the effectiveness of available countermeasures against harmful factors in space and also on the desirability and justification for the space missions themselves. 

Military ethics and bioethics may provide some analogy here. In civilian ethics and bioethics, we do not accept a way of thinking and acting that would mandate the subordination of the welfare, rights, and health of the individual to the interests of the group. In military ethics, however, this way of thinking is accepted, formally in the name of the higher good. Thus, if the mission to Mars is a civilian mission, carried out on the basis of values inherent in civilian ethics and bioethics rather than military ethics, it may be difficult to justify exposing astronauts to serious risks of death, accident, and disease.

One alternative may be to significantly postpone the mission until breakthrough advances in space technology and medicine can eliminate or significantly reduce the aforementioned risk factors. Another alternative may be to try to improve astronauts through biomedical human enhancements. Just as in the army there are known methods of improving the performance of soldiers through pharmacological means, analogous methods could be applied to future participants in a mission to Mars. Perhaps more radical, and thus controversial, methods such as gene editing would be effective, assuming that gene editing of selected genes can enhance resistance to selected risk factors in space. 

But the idea of genetically modifying astronauts, otherwise quite commonsensical, given also the cost of such a mission, as well as the fact that future astronauts sent to Mars would likely be considered representative of the great effort of all humanity, raises questions about the justification for such a mission. What do the organizers of a mission to Mars expect to achieve? Among the goals traditionally mentioned are the scientific merits of such a mission, followed by possible commercial applications for the future. Philosophers, as well as researchers of global and existential catastrophes, often discuss the concept of space refuge, in which the salvation of the human species in the event of a global catastrophe on Earth would be possible only by settling somewhere beyond Earth. However, it seems that the real goals in our non-ideal society will be political and military.

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The Surgeries Are Immoral

Florida has made it illegal for doctors to surgically alter the genitals of minors to treat gender dysphoria. In November 2022, after the Florida Board of Medicine took an initial step toward banning “gender-affirming” procedures, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Lapado praised the board’s members for “ruling in the best interest of children in Florida despite facing tremendous pressure to permit these unproven and risky treatments.” The pressure was indeed quite strong. But describing the procedures as “unproven and risky” misleadingly suggests a technical difficulty that could be fixed with better data or tools.

The real problem is more basic: the surgeries remove healthy organs without good reason. That’s not risky—it’s harmful and morally wrong. The people who seek such surgeries are trying to alleviate very real suffering, but whether surgery addresses such suffering humanely is not a question patients are automatically best positioned to answer. That’s true of any patient seeking any medical procedure.

The question is both a moral and a political one. If the surgeries grievously injure the vulnerable people they’re supposed to help, then patients shouldn’t seek them, doctors shouldn’t administer them—and voters and legislators should seriously think about banning them.

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In many surgeries, acts that would normally be harmful and wrong are made beneficial and right by special circumstances. Sticking pieces of metal into a human hand is normally wrong to do, but certain hand surgeries require it. What makes that morally acceptable? Besides having particular shapes, hands have certain functions, like grasping and pushing and pulling. These functions aren’t accidental. Being able to perform them is what makes a hand good at being a hand. When a hand is limp or broken, then what would normally be harmful to the hand—adjusting bones, pricking its skin—is helpful if it’s what a surgeon needs to do to get the hand working normally.

 

The basic principle goes back at least to Aristotle. The parts of an organism ought to serve the whole organism. Helping someone’s organs function as parts of their body is how doctors care for a patient’s physical well-being.

Some of the surgeries administered to treat gender dysphoria involve acts much more extreme than small incisions. Hysterectomies, mastectomies, and penectomies don’t just alter but remove organs. Sometimes, taking out an organ is morally quite right—if an organ is cancerous, for instance, or at serious risk of becoming cancerous. Again, organs ought to serve the good of the whole organism—which, minimally, means that organs shouldn’t host agents of harm to the organism. That’s why bilateral mastectomies can often be the right treatment for breast cancer (or for the genetic risk of breast cancer), why hysterectomies can be the right treatment for cervical cancer, and so on.

For removing an organ to be morally permissible, you need a very powerful reason—something like countering a mortal threat from the organ. It’s true that there are cases in which removing a perfectly healthy organ from a patient is morally acceptable—live organ donation, for instance. But in all cases of licit organ donation, the functions performed by the donated organ are performed by organs that remain in the body. That isn’t true for the surgeries covered by the Florida ban.

The big question is whether something about gender dysphoric patients can justify the surgeries we’re talking about. I think the answer is no.  Even assuming the psychological facts most favorable to proponents of the surgeries, and even assuming ideal conditions of autonomous consent, the surgeries are unjustified and therefore harmful. Compassion demands acknowledging the pain of transgender people; it equally demands not performing surgeries that make their lives worse.

___________

Some patients seeking the treatments we’re discussing claim to be assigned to the wrong sex, to have a gender (a psycho-social sense of self) that doesn’t match their body. Surgery, this argument goes, could settle the conflict between, say, a female gender and a male body by surgically reforming the latter to mesh harmoniously with the former.

I think it is always an error to say you’re a woman trapped in a man’s body. Whether one is male or female is determined not by psychology, but by organs that serve distinct reproductive roles. Interestingly enough, this point actually seems to be accepted by those who say the bodies of gender dysphoric patients should be altered from one sex to the other. If whether someone is male or female isn’t determined by reproductive organs, why should gender dysphoria be treated by altering just those organs? The problem is not misassigned sex, because sex cannot be assigned or misassigned or reassigned. It can only be embodied.

But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that you could be a woman trapped in a man’s body. Surgery wouldn’t change that. Altering a man’s genitalia may disable him from engaging in reproductive acts, but it does not—indeed, it cannot—produce the organs that enable a woman to engage in reproductive acts. A man cannot become a woman, no matter what a surgeon does to his genitalia. If that weren’t true, then the many people who in the history of human cruelty have had their genitals forcibly removed would have thereby been moved closer to membership in the opposite sex. But that is simply not so.

 

Altering a woman’s genitals doesn’t make her into a man, and altering a man’s genitals doesn’t make him into a woman. Even assuming that the proponents of the surgeries are right about the psychological states of patients before the surgeries, the surgeries don’t achieve their intended result.

___________

Perhaps what’s morally relevant isn’t whether a surgery switches the patient’s sex, but whether it gives the patient psychic relief. If the patient is psychologically improved by the surgery, does that make the surgery morally permissible? Whether something gender-related caused a patient distress before the surgery isn’t relevant to our question; all that matters is whether the patient feels better afterward.

As before, let’s grant the proponents of surgery their best-case psychological scenario. Assume these surgeries do, in fact, induce relief, contentment, a sense of wholeness, or some such positive mental state. Here’s the problem: any positive mental state will be an unfitting response to the physical harm caused by the surgery. The patient might feel better, but they will feel better about a situation about which they ought to feel worse, so the surgery will have replaced one mismatch between mind and body with another.

Consider, for example, the mental state of fear. Fear is that distinctively unwelcome, repellent, dominating frisson. Fear is appropriate for dangerous situations and a bad fit for harmless ones. Fear has norms. There could be such norms only if fear, in addition to being a feeling, also depicted the world outside the mind in a certain way. To be afraid of something is for one’s mind to claim that the something is threatening, dangerous, to be avoided. If a situation is in fact dangerous—if fear is making a true claim about the situation—then fear is the right response. Otherwise, it is not.

As it is with fear, so it is with contentment, pleasure, relief, and other mental states. They can be judged appropriate or inappropriate only with reference to the situations to which they respond. Take contentment, for instance—that calm state of desire for things to continue as they are. That’s the correct response to a loving marriage or a good job. But it’s an incorrect response to injustice, because injustice ought to be rectified, and contentment is a state of satisfaction. Or take relief, that lessening of felt urgency or pressure. Relief is a good response to, say, the successful end of an important and difficult project, but not to the accidental, unexpected death of a beloved child. The same goes for pleasure, that warm feeling of attraction and inner harmony. Taking pleasure in another’s suffering is wrong, because suffering calls for sympathy, a desire to aid the victim, and perhaps anger.

For one’s mental states to respond improperly to the world is a sad thing, and it calls for compassion, not blame. People who have been depressed know how frustrating it is to feel numb at what ought to elicit joy or sadness. I know people for whom everyday stuff is terrifying. This is an awful experience, not because terror is always bad—it’s often fitting and valuable—but because everyday stuff just doesn’t call for terror.

The mental states we are discussing can be valuable only if they fit the situations to which they respond. So, even if removing a healthy sexual organ makes a patient content, the contentment itself is valuable and worth aiming at only if the removal of the healthy organ is something with which one ought to be pleased. But considered on its own, the removal of healthy organs is physically harmful.

Surgeons who try to relieve their patients’ pain by stunting or removing healthy organs are doubly in the wrong: they are harming their patients’ bodies, and they are doing it in order to induce an inappropriate mental response. It would be similar for a doctor to help a teenager cut herself to alleviate her anxiety.

___________

But maybe we should take a longer-term view of benefits to patients. Let’s say that some surgery relieved a patient of psychic distress that had blocked the patient from having the friendships they wanted, the job they hoped for, or some other aspect of human flourishing. Would the gain to the patient’s life outweigh the direct harm of the surgery?

No, because well-being shouldn’t be instrumentalized that way. Imagine that some people said you could be friends with them, but only if you did some degrading thing in public, or if you slept with every member of the group, or if you stole from your grandmother, all these acts would be as immoral as physical self-harm. Moreover, they’re not the sorts of things good friends would ask of someone, since good friends try to promote one another’s well-being, not to harm it.

Let’s imagine a friendship between two people, one of whom has gender dysphoria (but who has not had any surgeries). Besides the standard duties of friendship, the friend without dysphoria has duties owing to the other’s dysphoria: sympathetically acknowledging their distress, helping them to accept identity in their body, encouraging them to seek psychiatric treatment, and so on. If anything, surgery would make these duties harder to discharge, even if the surgery delivered psychic relief. The patient would be physically worse off (because they would have lost healthy organs) and would not be mentally well either (because they are now psychically relieved at having sustained a physical injury). Advancing the health of the dysphoric friend would mean undoing the psychological effects and alleviating the physical harm done by the surgery. Not advancing the health of the dysphoric friend would mean neglecting a basic purpose of friendship—to help unwell friends to get well, which at a minimum requires not acquiescing in their belief that they are well when the belief is false.

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Up until now, I’ve been exploring whether the surgeries can be justified by their benefits to a patient’s mental health, or to some part of their life that might be affected by mental health. I’ve assumed the psychological facts that are most favorable to proponents of the surgeries, and still, a good justification for the surgeries hasn’t been found.

It could be that we have been looking for the justification in the wrong place. Maybe it’s not the patient’s improved mental health (as well as related goods, like friendship) that makes a surgery moral, but rather autonomous consent to the surgery. In the preface to his book When Harry Became Sally, Ryan Anderson discusses a 2018 New York Times op-ed by Andrea Long Chu, who identifies as a transgender woman. Chu intended to undergo vaginoplasty surgery in the coming days, but he didn’t expect the six-hour procedure to make him happier or relieve his dysphoric thoughts. To Chu, that was beside the point: “no amount of pain, anticipated or continuing, justifies … withholding [the surgery]. … [S]urgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want.”

 

If a surgery considered in itself is wrong, it’s difficult to see how consent could make it right. Consent just doesn’t seem to have that power. Consider some other wrongful acts: tearing the wings off of butterflies, cheating on an exam, lying to a friend. Does the fact that one freely chooses to do these things somehow make them morally right? On the contrary, to quote the great liberal political theorist Joseph Raz: “Demeaning, or narrow-minded, or ungenerous, or insensitive behavior is worse when autonomously chosen or indulged in.” When a human being acts wrongfully and autonomously, she isn’t an accidental part of chain of events that produces something undesirable. She’s consciously willing the wrong thing.

At this point, a proponent of the surgeries might dig in their heels and say we have unlimited moral sovereignty over our bodies. I find it hard to argue against this opinion, though I find it equally hard to imagine how one might argue for it. But consider the consequences. Torture, live vivisection or burial, slavery, drowning, and so on would all be considered morally acceptable, as long as someone freely signed a consent form. Our basic dignity would be exchangeable if only we agreed to the exchange. The idea is obscene.

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None of the potential justifications for the surgeries has passed muster. If the surgeries aren’t justified, then the extreme acts they involve—such as amputation—are not helpful but severely harmful. That means patients shouldn’t request the surgeries, and doctors shouldn’t agree to perform them.

Generally, the medical profession can be counted on not to perform harmful procedures. Patients who have Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), for example, believe that they would be better off if an arm or a leg were amputated. Both BIID and gender dysphoria involve a deep alienation from one’s body. But while many doctors in America do remove organs to treat gender dysphoria, they do not amputate limbs to treat BIID (according to Dr. Peter Brugger, a Swiss research physician who’s published extensively on the disorder, whom I interviewed over email). This is not—so far as I can tell—because the law prohibits it.

Sometimes there are good reasons for the law to step in and just say no to a procedure. Many American states have made it illegal to perform gay conversion therapy. The risk of serious harm was judged too high to leave to the medical field to regulate. Sex-reassignment surgeries, which are increasingly popular to perform and risky to oppose publicly, should be banned on similar grounds. Such surgeries aren’t a run-of-the-mill vice like excessive smoking that the state should, given limited resources, leave to individuals. The surgeries do direct, grievous, physical, irreparable harm to the vulnerable, under the auspices of medical care.

There is a very brave and growing movement to persuade states to ban these surgeries, along with puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones, for minors. Proponents of such bans often argue that we lack empirical data about the treatments, that there may be bad long-term psychological effects to such treatments, and that minors are at a delicate stage in life and should wait until they have grown up (by which time their gender dysphoria may have abated).

I worry that appeals to data outsource the final word to the researchers in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. Given the present state of these professions, does anyone have serious doubts about the results the experts will deliver?

 

Untethered to a principled view that the surgeries are wrong, the anti-surgery camp may find itself making concession after concession—to the poignancy of severe cases of gender dysphoria, to the independence of the medical profession, to ignorance about the long-term effects of the surgeries (which ignorance could be remedied only by letting the surgeries be performed and observing the results), and, of course, to patient autonomy.

Instead, we should oppose the surgeries with an account of human freedom ordered toward the goods that make freedom a blessing rather than a curse. The goal of self-government, at the political level, is to help citizens govern themselves fruitfully in their personal lives. Addiction, loneliness, our inhumane sexual culture, and the ever more popular desire to reconfigure one’s body with surgery aren’t isolated problems—they result from a national refusal to put political and cultural heft behind the conditions of genuine flourishing.

Unfortunately, American conservatives are wary of political appeals to flourishing. They prefer to talk about freedom and leave matters there. That was fine when America’s enemy was the Soviet Union and when American culture generally promoted the fruitful use of freedom. What about when America allows 100,000 people to die from alcohol and opioids in one year, sees over half of all marriages dissolve, can’t find enough military recruits, empties out church pews, and fills heads with TikTok, porn, and Adderall? Americans are used to thinking of their free society as a humane society, and the more humane for being free. But a society can be both free and inhumane if that society’s culture and laws are neutral about the virtues enabling the proper uses of freedom.

Conservatives need to choose between their impulse to let people live as they damn well please and their opposition to the grisly stuff being done by scientists and surgeons. One of these days, artificial intelligence and medical technology are going to get together and transform flesh-and-blood men and women into bespoke apparatuses of circuitry and steel. What will conservatives say then?

Certain limits cannot be transgressed without abolishing our humanity. The time to build a political coalition around the significance of our embodied personhood is now, when the practice to be opposed is the not-terribly-alluring one of cutting off the genitalia of vulnerable people. Next time, conservatives may not be so lucky.

Putting Children at the Center of Family Policy

The landscape around marriage and the family has drastically changed over the past sixty years. Culturally, adult sexual desire, choice, and identity have been elevated as the highest goods. Legally, no-fault divorce transformed what used to be the most child-friendly institution the world has ever known into a vehicle of adult fulfillment. Same-sex marriage took that adult-centric mindset to its logical conclusion. Technologically, we severed sex from babies with the birth control pill and then separated babies from sex with IVF and surrogacy.

What do these profound changes to the American family have in common? The answer is that—in culture, law, and technology—too many people are prioritizing what adults want above the natural rights of children. All too often, children are the real victims of marriage and family policy, suffering the loss of fundamental rights while their voices are rarely heard.

As we debate pro-family policy in the post-Dobbs era, we should recognize and respect the rights of children, especially each child’s right to a biological mother and father in a loving and durable union. Despite the deep political differences that exist among Americans, we were each born of one man and one woman, and we each understand the importance of being loved by the man or woman who gave us life, or the pain of being denied a relationship with one or both.

Our departure from the historic understanding of marriage as the union of one man and one woman is rooted in the careless neglect of the rights of children. To get back on track, and to formulate effective pro-family proposals, we must put children at the center of our efforts to form culture, shape policy, and resist new technological threats to marriage and the family.

 

Biology Matters

Despite rapid cultural, legal, and technological change, children’s rights and needs remain the same. Pop cultural mantras such as “love makes a family” have failed to produce child outcomes comparable to those of the traditional family. The gender-neutralizing of marriage and parenthood law and the proliferation of reproductive technologies have not erased the benefits children receive from being raised by a man and woman. Our best efforts to remake the family are powerless to change the realities of the child. What is that reality? That when it comes to making and raising children, biology matters.

This means that pro-family policy needs to prioritize biological parents. There are three key reasons to start from here. First, children are more likely to thrive and feel loved if they are raised by their biological parents. Not only are one man and one woman required for a child’s life to begin, but a child’s biological parents are statistically the two adults most likely to ensure that the child be safe and loved. For many years, social science studies have consistently shown that unrelated adults tend to be less invested in and protective of children. Similarly, the Pew Research Center found that people in stepfamilies “typically feel a stronger sense of obligation to their biological family members than to their steprelatives.”

This empirical research supports the testimonies of children who have been denied a biological connection with their parents. In the words of one woman who experienced many years of feeling rejected and insignificant within the context of a stepfamily situation:

Behind the scenes, my original siblings and I have all experienced much pain as a result of combining families because of the favoritism to my step-siblings by my stepmom. … I guess you could say that often the husband goes along with whatever the wife puts effort into, and there is often a distinct difference in the effort the mom naturally puts into her own kids. As a result, her kids were favored over my original siblings.

Second, biological parents can grant children a more rooted and stable sense of identity, helping children to answer the question “Who am I?” We can best understand how biology affects a child’s identity by listening to the children who were raised without the security it promises. According to a survey by the American Adoption Congress, 65 percent of adoptees expressed a desire to meet their birth parent and 94 percent expressed the desire to know which birth parent they resemble most. According to a 2020 survey by the resource center We Are Donor Conceived, a majority of their members “hope to form a close friendship with their biological [donor] parent” and believe that there is a “basic human right to know the identity of both biological parents.”

Third, biological parents provide the complementary benefits of mothering and fathering in the life of a child. Despite the media’s efforts to assure us that gender is a social construct and academic studies with dubious methodologies purporting to show that same-sex-parented children fare “no different,” robust social science scholarship continues to demonstrate what we’ve always known: kids often suffer without a loving male and female parent. Biology matters because it ensures that children at least have the possibility of receiving the range of benefits that mothering and fathering provide, even if those benefits are not always fully realized.

 

Changing the Story, Shaping the Culture

Our culture has shifted drastically, but children haven’t changed. In fact, they continue to be victimized by practices and policies that prioritize adult desires above children’s rights. It’s past time to start putting them at the center of our national conversation. That begins with clearly and courageously defending children’s rights by shaping culture, reforming law, and rethinking our approach to technology.

First, we need to recognize that building a stronger and healthier marriage culture means building an understanding of marriage as a matter of fundamental justice for children—because that’s exactly what it is. To help achieve this, we should leverage the emotional power of personal narrative in shaping political outcomes. Put simply: to protect children’s rights and to strengthen marriage and the family, we need to tell a better story.

Those who prioritize adult desire over children’s needs have continually succeeded in shaping laws and culture, redefining marriage along the way, not because they have a corner on natural law, strong research, or reliable data. They continue to destabilize the family because they elicit a more sympathetic view of their victims—adults seeking validation of their sexual feelings, choices, and identity. In response, traditional marriage advocates too often relied on cold statistics. To change the culture, we need to broadcast stories of the true victims—children—who have suffered under the redefinition of the modern family. The best counter to an article itemizing the struggles of two men seeking to be fathers via surrogacy is the story of a girl with two fathers who desperately wanted a mother.

But same-sex couples who adopt shouldn’t be singled out. It’s also important to highlight the child-harming impact of no-fault divorce, sperm and egg donation employed by both heterosexual and homosexual couples, and single motherhood or fatherhood by choice. All adult groups are guilty of victimizing children. For this reason, we must insist that all adults—single, married, gay, straight, fertile, and infertile—deny their own wants so the rights of children are protected. This approach emphasizes that we’re not discriminating against certain adults; instead, we’re fighting for every child.

In time, we might replace vacuous phrases like “love is love” with deeper, more substantive insights that remind us that kids are not commodities and that adults should sacrifice for kids, rather than insisting kids sacrifice for us. As the next generation emerges from the most fragmented families of our nation’s history, spotlighting child loss will increasingly resonate.

 

Supporting Pro-Family Policy

As I suggested last year, the marriage movement needs to change hearts and change laws. When it comes to marriage law, bad laws and bad rulings prohibit making relational distinctions between same-sex and opposite-sex couples. Thus, pro-child lawyers and policymakers must propose creative legal incentives based not on adult relationships with one another, but on adult relationships with children.

In particular, we need state-level proposals that reward biological parents for raising their children together in a married relationship. By employing language like this we convey that such incentives aren’t just good for children, but for society as well:

THIS STATE will offer tax breaks to the biological parents of children who are in a married relationship. The state extends a $400-per-child annual credit while the child’s biological parents are married to one another, and $700 annually per child if the parents married prior to the child’s birth.

Biological parents are statistically the safest, most connected to, most invested in, and most protective adults in a child’s life. This tax credit protects children by incentivizing the formation of a household where children suffer the lowest rates of neglect and abuse, obesity, drug use, poverty and incarceration.

This child tax credit also minimizes the need for government anti-poverty funds, child protective services, academic support, police involvement, and other state emergency aid.

This approach offers three advantages. First, it eschews words such as mother, father, man, and woman, focusing on the rights and needs of children rather than the claims of specific adult categories. Second, it applies equally to unrelated same-sex and opposite-sex homes, reinforcing the idea that this is about protecting children rather than discriminating against adults. Third, it focuses the debate not on the legitimacy of adult feelings, but on the family structure data—which is exactly where the marriage debate should have been all along.

For those wondering about programs and benefits for couples who adopt, hefty statutory and tax programs already incentivize adoption, and most states rightly treat natural and adoptive children the same. What is needed now is incentive that reinforces bonds between children and their biological parents.

Beyond marriage, we must put children at the heart of legal efforts to roll back no-fault divorce, recalibrate the anti-father family court system, reject the adulteration of children’s birth certificates, and limit the definition of parenthood to biology and adoption. The goal would be for the next generation of policy and legal thinkers to be seen as arguing for children, rather than against adults.

Resisting Technological Threats to the Family

In addition to forming culture and changing law, we should resist and reverse the expansion of the lucrative fertility industry, which is built on the denial of children’s rights. Annually, the fertility industry probably has a more destructive impact on unborn life than abortion. The pro-family movement must understand that abortion and reproductive technology are two sides of the same child-commodifying coin, and act accordingly. The children who do emerge from the IVF process alive have often had their right to their mother and father violated via use of “donor” sperm and/or egg.

 

Of course, we should extend empathy to heterosexuals struggling with infertility, as well as support our friends and family with same-sex attraction or unwanted singleness. At the same time, we should work tirelessly to oppose the availability and abuse of technologies that victimize children. We must insist that if technology is to be involved in baby-making, it cannot violate the rights of the most vulnerable. As such, we should consider the following proposals:

• Ban embryo-freezing. This practice is responsible for nearly one million souls on ice in America. Every embryo that is created should be implanted fresh, with no “leftover” or “surplus” babies to be discarded, experimented on in the name of research, or “donated” to another couple.
• Ban “donor” sperm and egg. Regardless of whether they are raised in a heterosexual, homosexual, or single household, use of third-party gametes is always a violation of children’s rights.
• Ban surrogacy. Whether gestational or traditional, commercial or altruistic, surrogacy intentionally severs the maternal bond which is critical to the well-being of children. When children experience maternal loss as a consequence of unexpected tragedy, we mourn. When that maternal loss is inflicted intentionally, we should also see it as an injustice.

When it comes to marriage and the family, we must seek to form culture, change laws, and resist technological threats, because children’s lives and well-being are at stake. If we center the rights of children in every conversation about family structure, good policy will follow. If we fail, children will continue to be neglected and treated as commodities to satisfy adult desires.

Children will not, and cannot, change. The question we need to confront as we seek to strengthen marriage and the family in the post-Roe era is: will our culture, law, and technology protect children, or victimize them?

How Brain-to-Brain Interfaces Will Make Things Difficult for Us

Written by David Lyreskog

 

A growing number of technologies are currently being developed to improve and distribute thinking and decision-making. Rapid progress in brain-to-brain interfacing, and hybrid and artificial intelligence, promises to transform how we think about collective and collaborative cognitive tasks. With implementations ranging from research to entertainment, and from therapeutics to military applications, as these tools continue to improve, we need to anticipate and monitor their impacts – how they may affect our society, but also how they may reshape our fundamental understanding of agency, responsibility, and other concepts which ground our moral landscapes.

In a new paper, I, together with Dr. Hazem Zohny, Prof. Julian Savulescu, and Prof. Ilina Singh, show how these new technologies may reshape fundamental components of widely accepted concepts pertaining to moral behaviour. The paper, titled ‘Merging Minds: The Conceptual and Ethical Impacts of Emerging Technologies for Collective Minds’, was just published in Neuroethics, and is freely available as an Open Access article through the link above.

In the paper, we argue that the received views on how we (should) ascribe responsibility to individuals and collectives map poorly onto networks of these ‘Collective Minds’. The intimately collective nature of direct multiple-brain interfaces, for instance, where human minds can collaborate on and complete complex tasks without necessarily being in the same room – or even on the same continent! –  seem to suggest a collectivist moral framework to ascribe agency and responsibility. However, the technologies we are seeing in R&D do not necessitate the meeting of criteria we normally would turn to for ascription of such frameworks; they do not, for instance, seem to rely on that participants have shared goals, know what the goals of other participants are, or even know whether they are collaborating with another person or a computer. 

In anticipating and assessing the ethical impacts of Collective Minds, we propose that we move beyond binary approaches to thinking about agency and responsibility (i.e. that they are either individual or collective), and that relevant frameworks for now focus on other aspects of significance to ethical analysis, such as (a) technical specifications of the Collective Mind, (b) the domain in which the technology is deployed, and (c) the reversibility of its physical and mental impacts. However, in the future, we will arguably need to find other ways to assess agency constellations and responsibility distribution, lest we abandon these concepts completely in this domain.

Sending the Wounded to the Front

The battle against transgender ideology will be won by the wounded.

Chloe Cole’s recent discussion at the Heritage Foundation shows that the victims of the transgender movement are the ones who will defeat it. The eighteen-year-old is a flesh-and-blood refutation of the supposed medical authority and scientific expertise of the trans movement. The wounded bodies and psyches of detransitioners rebut the trans movement’s claims to compassion and expertise. Their scars are marks of its fallibility, and their existence shows that the science is not settled. They are living proof that the affirmation-only approach is hurting people.

But sending them to the frontlines of the fight against transgender ideology—and against the medical-pharmaceutical complex that profits from it—is asking a lot from those who are already hurt. The courage of Chloe’s testimony is evident in the vulnerability it requires to share intimate details about her body, her mental health, and her social and family life. The cost of telling the truth about transition is surrendering a lot of privacy. For example, Chloe related that “after about a year or so being on testosterone I started experiencing some urinary tract side effects. I was more prone to getting UTIs [urinary tract infections] and sometimes I would even get blood clots in my urine.” Few adults would want talk about this on a national stage, especially as part of a heated culture-war debate. Yet she is doing this while still a teenage girl.

This youthful courage in turn highlights how very young she was when the medical profession endorsed her internet-induced trans identity and began altering her body through puberty blockers, testosterone, and surgery.

She was only fifteen when they amputated her breasts. This surgery was done on the theory that children can know themselves to be born in the wrong body, and that in such cases total affirmation, including medical transition, is the best treatment. Indeed, activists, including doctors and therapists, often present transition as necessary to prevent suicide—transition the kids before they kill themselves. This was the line given to Chloe’s parents, who were reluctant about her transition. But as Chloe said, “they were told that if I wasn’t allowed to transition as I pleased I would have been at risk of suicide.”

Her worried parents were right to be reluctant, and the supposed experts were wrong. Chloe’s transgender identity was not the product of an innate, immutable gender identity, but the result of being an awkward young girl under the influence of the internet. As she explained,

I didn’t really get along with the other girls and I started to wonder what exactly was setting me apart from them. I started to become a little bit insecure about this and I also started developing some body issues. . . . I started using social media after I got my first phone at eleven; the first platforms I used were primarily Instagram and Snapchat. Both of those are very image-oriented, and I would see a lot of very, you could say, idealized or sexualized images of adult women and young women on there . . .  that I didn’t really match up to. . . . [C]ompared to other girls I felt like I looked like a boy and it just felt like I couldn’t really match up to other women.

But there is a way out of the unrealistic expectations that our toxic culture pushes on girls: stop being one. The social media algorithms helped send this message to Chloe, pushing a torrent of pro-trans content at her.

This dynamic, in which a poisonous environment for young women makes transition more appealing, was also present offline. Chloe related how, after she had begun transitioning, there was a bully who “one day towards the end of the school year, he actually sexually assaulted me; he groped my chest. . . . I never really thought that anybody would notice that part of me, but he did, and he took advantage of me and I wanted to hide that part of me for the rest of my life. I didn’t want anything to do with it, and I didn’t want the attention that I thought it would bring me.” She tried to ignore the assault, but the trauma of it pushed her further toward having her breasts amputated, which was done within two years of the incident.

 

Chloe’s experience illuminates why there has been an enormous increase in adolescent girls claiming to be transgender. This surge ought to raise red flags even among those who otherwise accept the claims of gender ideology, but it has been largely brushed off. Chloe’s story shows how gender ideology offers these girls an explanation for, and a way out of, the awkwardness and discomfort of female adolescence—difficult times that are being made much worse by the internet. Social media ensure constant comparison to, and judgment by, what seems like the entire rest of the world. And, as in Chloe’s case, there are the sexual abuses and assaults that many young women suffer. No wonder these girls don’t want to be themselves anymore.

Furthermore, there is very weak evidence to support the claim that the psychological distress of gender dysphoria should be treated with permanent chemical and surgical bodily modification. That this idea has organizational backing from medical associations just provides a perfect example of how professional groups can be captured by a determined band of activists whom no one wants to offend. Other than activists or the ambitious (or academics, who tend to be both), most doctors are too busy to bother much with the groups that represent and regulate their profession. And so transgender activists and their allies have had it all their own way, and are now insisting that the science is settled. They are even trying, with success in some states, to ban any alternative to the affirmation-only model of treating children who claim to be transgender.

But the science isn’t settled, as Chloe Cole and a multitude of other detransitioners prove. In her case, though she didn’t realize it at the time, “it was actually my transition that was worsening issues that were going unaddressed, or even creating new issues.” For instance, though she could now pass as male, she was still attracted to boys, which meant that “my dating pool was pretty restricted and this was a major point of distress for me over the years . . . I was really insecure about this since I had a lot of shame and I felt lonely.” Transitioning had not solved her social or emotional problems, and she began realizing that it had been a mistake. She began to privately experiment with living as a young woman again: “I didn’t live as a girl and I didn’t have breasts anymore but in the comfort of my room or whenever nobody was home I would—I bought some skirts and dresses and my old girl clothes in secret and my feelings about this just got worse over time and I never really talked to anybody about it.”

But she found her courage, first to tell her family, and then to tell the world. The stories of Chloe and other detransitioners are the ultimate rebuke to the arrogant claims of activists and the medical groups they have captured. It is, of course, also important to point out all the flaws in the studies trans activists cite, from poor design to small sample sizes to follow-up loss to short time frames. We should also note that many studies are inapplicable to our situation; studies of carefully screened European adults are unlikely to predict much about American adolescents who are getting cross-sex hormones after a single telehealth appointment. But no intellectual critique can match the condemnation of transgender ideology that is presented through the wounded bodies of patients who have been mutilated by their own doctors. Claims of compassionate expertise wither before their scars and stories.

It is not just that the transition regime of surgery and chemicals has left Chloe with “complications years after the fact, some of which have popped up just last year,” though the high rate of complications and side effects from medical transition is a scandal. Rather, it is also that transitioning took things from her that she, as a child, was utterly unable to give informed consent to. She related how painful it was to learn that “breastfeeding is a major part of building the bond between mother and child and that that bond will later affect a child’s social and emotional and cognitive development and I realized that when I got my breasts taken away there was so much more that was taken away. . . .  I felt like a monster.”

But Chloe is not the monster. The monsters are those who are encouraging children to chemically sterilize themselves; the monsters are those who are profiting from amputating the healthy breasts of confused adolescent girls. And by showing everyone who the real monsters are, detransitioners provide support for the many additional victims of transgender ideology. The supposed urgency of affirmation been used to dismiss the claims of other victims, especially women and girls who have lost rights and opportunities as trans-identified men push into female spaces. Female athletes have had to compete against men; female prisoners have had to share cells with men—including violent rapists—and girls and women across America can no longer assume that their locker rooms, bathrooms, and changing rooms are for women only.

 

Additionally, there are the parents who have had their rights violated or lost their children to this ideology. There are the many people who have been punished or threatened for questioning gender ideology in their workplace. And there are many more, from the academy to Wall Street to the union hall who have been intimidated into silence as gender ideology has swept through American culture and institutions.

Transgenderism is culturally powerful and financially lucrative—every troubled teenage girl who identifies as trans is worth a fortune to the medical–pharmaceutical complex. Greed and ideology are a potent combination, so it is no wonder that almost all safeguards have been abandoned when it comes to transitioning children.

But this greed may be their undoing. Just as the stories of those who have detransitioned disrupt the transgender narrative, their lawsuits may bring down the medical and pharmaceutical cartels that profited from hurting them. The transgender monolith will fall as its victims stand up to it.

Even “Compassionate” Killing Is Wrong

Canada has recently been in the news due to its imminent legal expansion of assisted suicide to include the mentally ill, beginning in March 2023. The Canadian government specifies that an “expert panel” will be used to evaluate the requests of the mentally ill “in a safe and compassionate way.” The virtue of compassion, which the Canadian government here invokes on its own behalf, is concerned with the best interests of the sufferer. So the question naturally arises: is it really “compassionate” for the state to offer death as an aid to the sufferer? Is it just?

To answer these questions, one must consider the state’s duty to its citizens. On this topic, there are few better guides than the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero. Some things he gets right (the state’s duty to preserve justice and protect the well-being of its citizens) and others he gets wrong (the occasional permissibility of suicide). But if Cicero’s teachings are supplemented with Christianity’s teachings on suicide, we get a clear understanding of why assisted suicide cannot be counted among the state’s duties to its citizens.

 

In Book 1 of On Duties, a truly indispensable landmark in the history of political ethics—and Cicero’s last philosophical composition—Cicero says this (all translations in what follows are my own):

Absolutely all those who intend to preside over the commonwealth must observe Plato’s two precepts: first, that they guard what is useful for the citizens in such a way that they refer all of their actions to it, having forgotten about what is advantageous to themselves. Second, that they care for the entire body of the commonwealth, lest, while they guard some part of it, they abandon the rest. (On Duties 1.85)

Prima facie, this perhaps lends some support to the Canadian government. After all, those who are seeking death certainly believe that that is what is most useful to them; the government is merely assisting them in obtaining what they find useful. This would appear to fulfill Plato’s first precept as Cicero describes it.

And indeed, when it comes to suicide, Cicero allows that it is sometimes licit when done for the sake of honor. In On Duties 1.112, he points to Cato the Younger’s preference of death to subjection to Julius Caesar—“since nature had bestowed unbelievable seriousness on him”—as an example of honorable suicide. So if the magistrate is responsible for safeguarding what is advantageous for citizens, perhaps virtuous suicide should be legal. In other words, can suicide be both honorable and useful?

To answer this question, we must consider how honor relates to expediency.

Cicero devotes the third and final book of On Duties to showing that the useful and the honorable are never in conflict. If they were, injustice might sometimes be advantageous, as Thrasymachus argues in Book 1 of Plato’s Republic. But Plato has Socrates argue that any such advantage is merely apparent, for acting unjustly harms both the perpetrator and the victim. Cicero stands in this broad Socratic tradition: the one who commits an injustice for the sake of advantage is prevented from being a good man (On Duties 3.76); his victim suffers the consequences in his life, his property, or his reputation. Furthermore, unjust actions destroy fellowship among human beings, and thus contradict our very nature as social creatures. Therefore, they can never be useful.

 

From the foregoing discussion, it becomes clear that the state cannot facilitate suicide without committing a grave injustice. Despite Cicero’s exemption for honorable suicide, even these are not just: all suicide is by definition the extrajudicial killing of a person who, in legal terms, is innocent. Cicero is right that the useful and just, ultimately, cannot conflict. Therefore, even if someone’s self-slaughter seems convenient and advantageous—perhaps because his suffering is great, or because his quality of life is low—it can never be so since it is unjust.

Here, Christianity’s tradition of political and moral reflection can provide further guidance. The late Roman church father Augustine takes up the question of suicide in the first book of his City of God in dealing with the question whether consecrated virgins who had been raped had justification for killing themselves. The question may strike modern ears as absurd, but it was not a crazy one at the time given that the Roman tradition answered questions like this in the affirmative, as the example of Lucretia shows.

But Augustine disagrees with his Roman forebears on the basis of the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament and the Two Great Commandments of the New Testament. He remarks,

For it is not for nothing that nowhere in the Holy Scriptures can we find God commanding or permitting us to inflict death upon ourselves either for the sake of gaining immortality or for the sake of keeping or freeing ourselves from any evil. For in fact it must be understood that we have been prohibited from doing this when the law says, “You shall not kill,” especially because it did not add, “your neighbor,” as it does when it forbids bearing false witness: “You shall not,” it says, “bear false witness against your neighbor.” Nevertheless, it does not provide grounds for someone to think himself innocent of this crime if he has borne false witness against himself, since he who loves has received the rule that guides the love of one’s neighbor from himself, since it has been written, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (City of God 1.20)

In this passage, Augustine draws attention to two of the Ten Commandments: “You shall not kill” (or “murder”) and “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” He notes that the latter includes a qualification that the former does not, and yet this does not mean that one can bear false witness against oneself; such dishonesty would obviously still be wrong.

Why? Because self-love—that is, the high regard in which we naturally hold ourselves—provides the standard for the love of one’s neighbor: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” If we are forbidden to tell lies about our neighbor, then we are by implication forbidden to tell lies about ourselves because of the necessary ethical link between treatment of self and treatment of neighbor.

 

In the same way, if we were explicitly forbidden to kill our neighbor, we would by implication also be forbidden to kill ourselves, and the latter prohibition would be the ethical and logical foundation of the former. But the commandment against killing does not even offer the kind of apparent grounds for casuistry that the commandment against bearing false witness does, because no qualification is made with respect to one’s neighbor. It simply states that all unjustified killing is wrong, with no exceptions—including killing oneself. Therefore, suicide violates the Ten Commandments. Not even Cato, says Augustine, is off the hook.

The Ten Commandments are especially helpful in this discussion because they are summaries of the moral or natural law. Human societies have generally acknowledged that unjustified killing is wrong. When they make exceptions for the sake of expediency, they need to be reminded of what the moral law requires. This is true regardless of whether the inquiry concerns the killing of others or of oneself: both involve the taking of an innocent human life, and thus the same standard should be applied to each.

What does such a suggestion yield, if we combine the insights of Cicero and Augustine? Cicero teaches us that the conflict between true expediency and justice is an illusion. Augustine reminds us that killing the innocent is wrong. Physician-assisted suicide is ultimately the killing of the innocent. Therefore, any attempt to justify such an action on the grounds of apparent utility—here represented by two impulses that are good in themselves, that is, compassion and a desire to alleviate suffering—must be found wanting. If suicide is an action that is unjust in itself, no utilitarian arguments in its favor, however rhetorically compelling or seemingly ethical, can transform it into a just action.

The first and most important purpose of the state’s laws is to establish justice, the most basic principle of which is the protection and preservation of life. Canada’s regulations regarding so-called “medical assistance in dying” are fundamentally contrary to this purpose. In a just political order they would be overturned.

Mummification and Moral Blindness

By Charles Foster

Image: The Great Sphinx and Pyramids of Gizeh (Giza), 17 July 1839, by David Roberts: Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Words are powerful. When a word is outlawed, the prohibition tends to chill or shut down debate in a wide area surrounding that word. That tendency is much discussed, but it’s not my concern here. It’s one thing declaring a no-go area: it’s another when the mere use or non-use of a word is so potent that it makes it impossible to see something that’s utterly obvious.

There has recently been an excellent and troubling example. Some museums have started to change their labels. They consider that the use of the word ‘mummy’ demeans the dead, and are using instead the adjective ‘mummified’: thus, for instance ‘mummified person’ or ‘mummified remains’. Fair enough. I approve. Too little consideration is given to the enormous constituency of the dead. But using an adjective instead of a noun doesn’t do much moral work.

Consider this: The Great North Museum: Hancock, has on display a mummified Egyptian woman, known as Irtyru.  Visitor research showed that many visitors did not recognise her as a real person. The museum was rightly troubled by that. It sought to display her ‘more sensitively’. It’s not clear from the report what that means, but it seems to include a change in the labelling. She will no longer be a ‘mummy’, but will be ‘mummified’.  She is a ‘mummified person‘:  She’ll still remain in a case, gawped at by mawkish visitors.

The museum manager told CNN that he hoped that ‘our visitors will see her remains for what they really are — not an object of curiosity, but a real human who was once alive and had a very specific belief about how her body should be treated after death.‘

Let that sink in.

Whoever Irtyru was, she did indeed have a ‘very specific belief about how her body should be treated after death’. It did not involve lying in Newcastle, causing school children to scream. To describe her as ‘mummified’ rather than ‘a mummy’ does nothing whatever to address the offence of displaying her in a way wholly inconsistent with that ‘very specific belief’. That the museum apparently thinks it does is a symptom of moral blindness. There is a real issue about the display of Irtyru: it is not addressed by tweaking a word. More worrying is that that tweak seems to render invisible the very moral issue it purports to address. I’m not saying that Irtyru shouldn’t be displayed: I am suggesting that changing a word is no substitute for proper deliberation – let alone real change.

This is an example of a more general and sinister malaise. Virtue signalling has taken the place of serious, difficult ethical discourse.

 

 

 

A Case for a March for Children

The March for Life has been and continues to be a powerful defense of the sanctity of life. But the pro-life movement should consider expanding its horizons and looking to related causes that are also worth public demonstrations. Indeed, equally important as protecting the unborn is protecting the institutions of marriage and the family. Now that abortion restrictions are legal, pro-lifers should add a march for all children, not just the unborn.

The harms that children face have multiplied in recent decades, and those who are devoted to the cause for life should take a broader view. A March for Children would recognize the unborn, but also the children harmed by declining respect for marriage and increased use of assisted reproductive technology. It would furthermore underscore the importance of both mothers and fathers for a child’s well-being. The idea behind the March for Children is simple: if the institution of marriage is respected and strengthened, families—most of all children—will flourish. Just as the March for Life focused on the importance of legislative and judicial steps to protect unborn children, a March for Children would fight for legislative policies and judicial decisions that aim at strengthening the institution of marriage, which helps ensure the protection of all children.

The Success of the March for Life

As pro-lifers consider what a March for Children might look like, they should study the March for Life’s successes so that they can build on them. The March for Life began in 1974 when a group of 20,000 marchers met in Washington DC. By 2003, thirty years on from Roe v. Wade (1973), the March attracted around a quarter of a million people. This success has surprised many, especially in light of the increased frequency of abortions between 1973 and the present day.

But the vast scale and growth of the March for Life speaks directly to the strength of the movement’s argument. Indeed, it focused its language on protecting something inherently and intrinsically good. It is not a march against something, but a march for something. Even more important, it is not just a march for something that is good in particular instances, but rather for something that is irreducibly good in all instances.

By contrast, those who defend access to abortion appeal to personal freedom, which is a good that is not absolute. The limits of personal freedom are recognized in a wide variety of other circumstances: someone has the freedom to pursue a personal hobby, such as playing a musical instrument or painting. But that freedom is limited by that person’s higher duty to his children. There are plenty of circumstances in which limits on personal freedom are necessary to protect more foundational goods, including children in the womb.

A March for Children would share the same advantages as the March for Life: obviously, all children are irreducibly good just as all human lives are; and by focusing the what’s good for children, the March for Children would also stand for something, as it seeks to protect children by defending marriage and family life.

The Strength of a March for Children

As successful and transformative as the March for Life has been, its appeal is obviously limited to those who recognize the personhood of unborn children. Unborn children should certainly be defended, and the continued success of the March for Life will only lead to more babies’ being born and protected.

But as many have made clear both before and after the Dobbs decision, it is time to expand the conversation. Many have emphasized the importance of respecting the whole of life, from conception to natural death. And it is necessary for mothers, especially those without family or resources, to receive support from their communities, churches, and even government.

All of these are valid areas for concern. But focusing on all children for a nationally organized movement would come with certain advantages: concern for children is shared across the political spectrum, and there is less disagreement over who counts as a child than there is over when life begins in the womb. Beyond the broader consensus behind protecting children, they are (as mentioned earlier) a population facing many threats today: redefinitions of marriage and the damages caused by assisted reproductive technology (ART), to name a couple of the foremost.

 

Children, Marriage, and ART

Both of these threats would be addressed by a March for Children in a coordinated way. First, children are positively harmed by redefinitions of marriage (both redefinitions of its composition and its permanence). Simply observing sociological data, it is no secret that, as Andrew Cherlin writes in his highly acclaimed 2010 book Marriage-Go-Round, children who are raised in stable, two-parent homes, free from recurring transitions of spouses and partners, show much greater emotional health than those who do experience a continual transition in family structure. This would mean a March for Children must push back against the horrific invention of no-fault divorce laws, which undermine the permanence of marriage and repeatedly cause tremendous family transition. Often (though not always), couples end up splitting for no other reason than personal fulfillment at the expense of the developmental well-being of a child.

A March for Children would also confront redefinitions of marriage and would seek to limit it to one man and one woman. For all of the talk about the divorce rate among heterosexual couples, economists Doug Allen and Joseph Price confirm that relationships and marriages that involve multiple persons or are same-sex are far more unstable than their monogamous, heterosexual counterparts. Even more disconcerting, this instability seems to increase if a same-sex couple has children in the home. Again, this instability is a danger to the child’s emotional and social development and so should be stopped in order to protect children from harm.

Additionally, a March for Children would be well served by involvement from those who were harmed as children by ART. ART is a medical innovation that treats children as nothing more than a commodity for one’s own personal fulfillment, with wanton disregard for the emotional health of the child produced. This harm is twofold: first, through ART procreation is accomplished completely out of personal desire, achieved through a financial transaction and an artificial process. If one’s relationship with his child is based on personal desire removed from sex, it weakens his sense of the parental obligation to care for that child, regardless of what his preferences are in that moment. Maintaining the connection between procreation and marital union strengthens a couple’s sense of obligation to their child, since the child results from an act that is by its very nature self-giving.

Second, ART denies a child’s right to both a biological mother and a biological father. Adoption does the same thing, but it is fundamentally different from ART. As Jean C. Lloyd has written in these pages, “Adoption unfolds as a gift to both parties, but it exists to repair something that in the natural order of things would never happen.” Often ART intentionally brings children into the world knowing they will be permanently separated from their biological parents. If ART is used by a single female for the purpose of having a child without a spouse, the child is left with only one real parent. Or if same-sex couples have children, they inevitably rely on a third party’s eggs or sperm. A March for Children should thus also focus on these harms and thereby underline the importance of a biological mother and biological father for a child’s developmental health.

 

Why a March?

The question remains: why a march for children? Why not just leave things up to lobbying organizations or think tanks? My aim is not to do away with those organizations that are currently doing this good work, but rather to strengthen their work. Marches throughout American history have been used to show grassroots support in a way that no one nonprofit on the Potomac can do. The NAACP is an organization with many chapters and offices around the country, but the most visible and effective strategy during the civil rights movement was getting people out on the streets and organizing the March on Washington in 1963. Similarly, there are many organizations that today fight for the rights of unborn children, but the most visible and effective demonstration of the broad support that exists for the protection of life is the March for Life. There are plenty of organizations that fight for children, but none can be as powerful as thousands of American citizens coming together in the streets.

Indeed, a March for Children could create breakthroughs that might not be possible for the March for Life, as important as it is. The widespread disagreement about when life begins limits what the March for Life can accomplish. While it is good to frame one’s argument around a strong intrinsic good like the life of an unborn child, the argument loses some of its salience if not everyone agrees about when the good comes to exist. A March for Children could be very effective because there are no convincing arguments being advanced in favor of redefining who qualifies as a child once a child is born.

All of these points show the strength of the idea of beginning a March for Children similar to the longstanding March for Life. Creating consensus around what counts as life is not as problematic as defining childhood. Consensus exists on the latter point. The question is, how will we use it to protect those who need protection the most?