Wills's confusion

Garry Wills has re-produced, in op-ed form, the claims, from his latest book, to the effect that "abortion is not a religious issue."  (For earlier MOJ posts on the matter, go here or here.)  The argument remains confused and unworthy of so gifted an intellectual.

He writes, for example, "is abortion murder? Most people think not. Evangelicals may argue that most people in Germany thought it was all right to kill Jews. But the parallel is not valid. Killing Jews was killing persons. It is not demonstrable that killing fetuses is killing persons. Not even evangelicals act as if it were. If so, a woman seeking an abortion would be the most culpable person. She is killing her own child. But the evangelical community does not call for her execution."

It is no less "demonstrable" that fetuses are "persons" than it is that Mr. Wills or I are "persons."  And, the fact that one does not insist on "executi[ng]" women who cause, via abortion, the death of their unborn children does not prove that fetuses are not persons.  It might well confirm the complex nature of judgments about culpability for harms caused that go into the definition and categorization of criminal offenses, but Wills's tired debater's point is just that.

Wills suggests that the reason Catholics did not "require baptism and a Christian burial" for "well-formed fetusus" is because "the subject of abortion is not scriptural."  For a response to this strange argument, see Prof. Dellapenna's MOJ post, here.  Of course, the injunction against killing innocent persons is scriptural, and one of the distinctive features of early Christianity was precisely that the early Christians were more generous, in terms of acknowledging the equal human dignity of all persons, than the surrounding culture.  In any event, one doubts that Wills's views on the morality of contemporary practices depend, generally, on the extent to which those precise practices are singled out for specific mention in scripture.

Now, Wills is right -- but perhaps not in the way that he thinks -- when he says that abortion is not a "theological issue."  That is, the morality of abortion is not a question that needs to be answered through revelation, or by the fideistic fiat of a religious leader.  (At least, that it is wrong to kill an unborn child is no more a "theological" claim than is the claim that it is wrong to kill a 12-year old, or to torture a suspected terrorist.)

Wills writes:

If we are to decide the matter of abortion by natural law, that means we must turn to reason and science, the realm of Enlightened religion. But that is just what evangelicals want to avoid. Who are the relevant experts here? They are philosophers, neurobiologists, embryologists. Evangelicals want to exclude them because most give answers they do not want to hear. The experts have only secular expertise, not religious conviction. They, admittedly, do not give one answer -- they differ among themselves, they are tentative, they qualify. They do not have the certitude that the religious right accepts as the sign of truth.

Yes, by all means, let's turn to the scientists for resolution of Wills's bizarre beliefs that opposition to abortion requires opposition to "harvesting carrots" and that a human fetus is, like semen, "human life" in a way relevant to the abortion debate.  (Can Wills really believe -- does he have so little respect for people, just as smart and sophisticated as he is, who oppose abortion, to believe -- that those who oppose abortion do so because human fetusus are, in this uninteresting sense, animate?)  And, can he really believe that "philosophers" have something called "secular expertise", which they -- unlike "evangelicals" -- bring to bear on the question of whether or not we ought to abort unborn children, or permit their direct abortion?  If only it were true that those experts identified by Wills were as humble as he suggests! 

Now, there is also this:

The question is not whether the fetus is human life but whether it is a human person, and when it becomes one. Is it when it is capable of thought, of speech, of recognizing itself as a person, or of assuming the responsibilities of a person? Is it when it has a functioning brain?

Indeed, this is the question.  It's an important one.  It is, as Wills sometimes seems to concede, a question of morality, one that is not (remotely) resolvable by describing the biochemistry or noting the physical bulk of a fetus.