Beating Hearts: Abortion and Animal Rights (Critical Perspectives on Animals: Theory, Culture, Science, and Law)
Sherry F. Colb
Language: English
Pages: 264
ISBN: 0231175140
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
How can someone who condemns hunting, animal farming, and animal experimentation also favor legal abortion, which is the deliberate destruction of a human fetus? The authors of Beating Hearts aim to reconcile this apparent conflict and examine the surprisingly similar strategic and tactical questions faced by activists in the pro-life and animal rights movements.
Beating Hearts maintains that sentience, or the ability to have subjective experiences, grounds a being's entitlement to moral concern. The authors argue that nearly all human exploitation of animals is unjustified. Early abortions do not contradict the sentience principle because they precede fetal sentience, and Beating Hearts explains why the mere potential for sentience does not create moral entitlements. Late abortions do raise serious moral questions, but forcing a woman to carry a child to term is problematic as a form of gender-based exploitation. These ethical explorations lead to a wider discussion of the strategies deployed by the pro-life and animal rights movements. Should legal reforms precede or follow attitudinal changes? Do gory images win over or alienate supporters? Is violence ever principled? By probing the connections between debates about abortion and animal rights, Beating Hearts uses each highly contested set of questions to shed light on the other.
of our topics. In discussing the pro-life position, we will sometimes use the term “embryo” or “fetus” as a shorthand for “human zygote, embryo, or fetus.” We do so because a single word is less cumbersome than a four-word phrase but also to underscore that the pro-life position in contemporary American debates about abortion confers rights on microscopic nonsentient entities, so long as they are human. Meanwhile, in talking about animal rights, we sometimes use the term “animals” as a shorthand
extensively about people’s innate resistance to carrying out violent acts, noting, for example, that many soldiers in World War I appeared to have deliberately fired their weapons so as to miss their targets.21 One might say that it is “natural” for humans to experience psychological distress when seeing themselves carry out acts of violence; the distress is a psychic cost that motivates people to refrain from violence unless there are strong countervailing factors that favor it. The division of
means to rescue or protect human fetuses or animals. To examine what might be wrong with this inference requires us first to acknowledge its seeming appeal. Accordingly, this chapter explores the arguments for violence as a means of advancing the respective goals of the pro-life and animal rights movements. BEYOND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE To evaluate the legitimacy of activist violence, we must first define the sort of law breaking we have in mind here. We focus on violence, not on illegal conduct as
hatched chick to death an act devoid of apparent moral significance, akin to cutting your fingernails or smashing a rock into pieces? We suspect that most people will say that suffocating the baby chick is harmful. If we now ask who is harmed by the suffocating of the chick?, the answer will also be clear: Why, the chick himself, of course. And the reason will be just the same as in the abortion case: because the chick is someone, not something. THE SENTIENCE CRITERION Put more generally,
oppose certain forms of birth control on the ground that they destroy an embryo or prevent implantation of a fertilized egg are often comfortable with the common forms of contraception that prevent ovulation or conception.6 As we have explained throughout this book, we have considerable sympathy for some of the views of the pro-life movement, but we nonetheless regard our position as more closely aligned with its rival, the pro-choice movement. For that reason, we are probably not well