Following on from Sentience Part 1, I will now address the conclusion of Steinbock's argument.

Steinbock’s Conclusion
Similar ambiguities affect Steinbock’s conclusion. Steinbock asserts that for killing an individual to be unlawful homicide, the individual must be sentient. However, this is ambiguous; as Don Marquis points out, this could mean that the individual will be sentient at some point in its life or it could mean that it is sentient now or it could mean that it was sentient at some time in the past.[i]

Steinbock must embrace the last of these options. If she adopts the first option, then the fetus does not lack sentience, as it will become sentient at some point in its life, hence feticide is homicide. The second option is also problematic, if the requirement is that the being is sentient now then it entails that a surgeon who actively kills a patient while he is under general anaesthetic has not committed homicide. Consequently, it is the last sense that Steinbock needs to embrace, it was sentient at some point in the past. However, this raises immediate questions. Why is sentience in the past necessary for possessing interests? On the face of it this appears simply an ad hoc manoeuvre.

At one point, Steinbock attempts to answer this question.

[N]ote an important difference between a temporarily unconscious person and a fetus. The difference is that the person who is now unconscious has had experiences, plans, beliefs, desires, etc. in the past. These past experiences are relevant because they form the basis for saying that the comatose person wants not to be killed while unconscious. “He valued his life” we might say or “of course he would want to not be killed” ... We have all sorts of desires of which we are not at any particular time consciously aware, and it would be absurd to limit our desires to what we are actually thinking about. Nor do our desires, plans, goals, or the interests composing them, vanish when we fall into a dreamless sleep.[ii]

Steinbock asserts that past sentience is important because without it an individual cannot be said to have a present desire to go on living. However, this argument returns us to the problems stated above. As Tooley and Singer have pointed out, an infant cannot have a present desire to go on living either, because infants lack the mental capacity necessary to conceive of continued existence. Consequently, the very property that Steinbock claims makes killing fetuses not a form of homicide is a property possessed by infants. The distinction she draws between feticide and infanticide then is ad hoc.

Towards the end of her paper, Steinbock appears to see some of these problems and offers a third reason in addition to the Golden-Rule and interests arguments already mentioned as to why sentience marks a critical difference.[iii] Steinbock appeals to, what she suggests, is a plausible account of personal identity, the psychological continuity account.

According to the psychological continuity account of personal identity, having a certain set of past experiences is what makes me the person I am, and the experiences I have, my experiences. What makes experiences at two different times experiences of the same person is that they are appropriately related by a chain of memories, desires, intentions and the like. So people’s past experiences are precisely what makes their futures theirs.[iv]

Steinbock is arguing that a fetus and the infant it becomes are not the same individual; they are, rather, different individuals. In order for an individual in the past to be the same individual as me there must be a psychological link between this earlier individual and myself. I must have desires, intentions etc that it once had or, most importantly, I must remember conscious episodes that it had. In order for an earlier individual to have these psychological links with me, it must have been sentient. Consequently, there is an important difference between a fetus and an infant because an infant is sentient. It is possible for me to have been that infant. It was the same individual that I am but at an immature stage. However, this is not true of a pre-sentient fetus. On the psychological continuity account of individual identity, it is impossible for a pre-sentient fetus to have been me. I never was a fetus, some other individual was.

Again, this argument seems to entail that infanticide is not homicide. By applying the standard psychological continuity account, it is very difficult to find the requisite psychological link between the infant that developed into me and me today. Defenders of infanticide, such as Tooley and Singer, appeal precisely to this account to argue that we are not the same individual as the infant that developed into us. Tooley, in his monograph Abortion and Infanticide, cites numerous empirical data to show that according to the Psychological identity account, a person is not identical to the infant that developed into him or her.

Steinbock’s response to this problem is surprisingly weak; she simply states that “it may be that a more sophisticated account [of identity]”[v] can be worked out. Merely claiming there “may be” a solution is not an adequate response. If the opponent of feticide were to respond to Steinbock’s objections by saying, “maybe my position can be modified to avoid those objections”, I doubt she would consider herself answered. Until such possibilities become defensible actualities, sentience does not give us any reason for discriminating between infanticide and feticide.

This discussion has repeatedly led to the conclusion that accounts based on sentience do not provide a basis for concluding that feticide and infanticide are any different. Not only are the arguments mustered in favour of feticide problematic, the very features of feticide that are alleged to render killing fetuses permissible are features also present in infanticide.

[i] Don Marquis, “Why Most Abortions are Immoral,” in Advances in Bioethics: Bioethics for Medical Education, Vol. 5, ed. Rem B. Edwards & E. Edwards Bittar (Stamford, CT: JAI Press, 1999), 239-240.
[ii] Bonnie Steinbock, “Why Most Abortions are Not Wrong,” in Advances in Bioethics: Bioethics for Medical Education, Vol. 5, ed. Rem B. Edwards & E. Edwards Bittar (Stanford, CT: JAI Press, 1999), 252.
[iii] Ibid., 252-54.
[iv] Ibid., 253.
[v] Ibid., 254.

RELATED POSTS:
Is Abortion Liberal? Part 1
Is Abortion Liberal? Part 2
Sentience Part 1
Viability
Abortion and Child Abuse: Another Response to Farrar
Abortion and Brain Death: A Response to Farrar
Abortion and Capital Punishment: No Contradiction
Imposing You Beliefs Onto Others: A Defence
Published: Boonin's Defense of the Sentience Criteria - A Critique
Published: Abortion and Capital Punishment - No Contradiction

Following on from Is Abortion Liberal? Part 1 and Is Abortion Liberal? Part 2, discussion in the comments section turned to the issue of sentience. Commenters asked whether perhaps sentience is the property that a newborn possesses and a fetus does not that warrants such unequal application of the non-initiation of force principle by liberals. Is sentience the property that enables the liberal to be consistent in otherwise violating the non-initiation of force principle when it comes to abortion, by permitting feticide, and yet not when it comes to liberal opposition of infanticide?

Some commentators claim that feticide is not homicide until the fetus is sentient. Bonnie Steinbock made perhaps the most sophisticated defence of this position. In an article summarising her position Steinbock states, “my thesis is that killing fetuses is morally different from killing babies because fetuses are not, and babies are, sentient”.[i] She states that she finds the notion that feticide is on a par with infanticide and hence homicide, “completely implausible” because:

A newborn can feel, react, and perceive. It cries when it is hungry or stuck with needles. Very soon after birth it cries from boredom or loneliness as well and can be soothed by being rocked and held. By contrast, the first-semester fetus cannot, think, feel, or perceive anything.[ii]

I propose two responses. Firstly, I will analyse Steinbock’s argument in favour of this thesis, then I will criticise her conclusion in a subsequent post. In both cases, I will argue that Steinbock does not provide a reason for thinking that feticide is different from infanticide. On the contrary, her arguments in favour of feticide are also arguments in favour of infanticide.

Steinbock’s Argument
Steinbock argues that being sentient is essential for possession of interests.

[S]entience is important because nonsentient beings, whether mere things (e.g., cars and rocks and works of art) or living things without nervous systems (e.g., plants), lack interests of their own. Therefore, nonsentient beings are not among those beings whose interests we are required to consider.[iii]

Why is sentience necessary for possession of interests? Steinbock says “[I]t is only sentient beings to whom anything matters... since non-sentient beings cannot be hurt or made to suffer it does not matter to them what is done to them”.[Emphasis original][iv] Elsewhere Steinbock states that what is necessary for a being to have interests in something is that it desires or wants the thing in question.

Steinbock’s argument then rests on these claims. Firstly, that killing an individual is homicide only if continued life is in the interests of that individual. Secondly, an individual cannot have an interest in living unless it cares about living. Thirdly, that sentience is necessary to be able to care about anything.

This argument equivocates on two separate senses of the word ‘interests’. Interests can refer to things a person is interested in, what a person likes or cares about; in this sense, tramping is one of my interests. On the other hand, to talk of someone’s interests can mean to talk about what is best for him or her, what enhances and promotes his or her welfare.

When we examine the second premise of this argument it is clear that it is true only if interests are defined in the first of these senses. In order for something to be in someone’s interests in the first sense, then it must matter to him or her. He or she must care about the thing in question. It is not necessary for a person to have interests in the second sense. A thing can be in someone’s best interests even if he or she is not interested in it. Matters in the best interests of children such as nutritious food, clothing, shelter and education are often things they have never taken an interest in. People who suffer from mental illness can fail to take care of their interests correctly. Consequently, the second premise of the argument is true only if the word ‘interest’ is used in the first sense.

However, if the first premise is to have any plausibility at all then interests must be understood in the second sense. If one has a duty to refrain from taking something from an individual only if the individual cares about the thing in question, then depriving the insane or children of what is in their best interests will not be wrong as long as they are not interested in it. Infants lack the mental ability to conceive, and hence, care about their future existence so infanticide would not be homicide by this line of reasoning. The argument is unsound.

This problem with Steinbock’s position leads naturally to a second one. From the quotes above Steinbock seems to think that sentience is not only a necessary but also a sufficient condition. She concedes that it would be wrong to kill unwanted infants but adds that this is different from killing a fetus “because fetuses are not, and babies are, sentient”.[v]

The problem is that her above argument does not justify this conclusion at all. What the argument says is that sentience is necessary for possessing interests. Moreover, it explicitly states that in order to have an interest in continued existence, an individual’s existence must matter to it; it must care about it in some way. While sentience is clearly necessary for caring about one’s continued existence various other factors are also necessary.

Michael Tooley has argued one must also be able to conceptualise one’s continued existence and this requires awareness of one’s self as a subject of future experiences. An infant does not acquire the neurological capacity for this until some time after birth. In fact, an infant’s awareness of itself and future-orientated preferences to live are less developed than those of a mature cow. Consequently, if the premise of the argument offered is correct then infants do not have an interest in continued existence and consequently infanticide is not homicide.[vi]

Steinbock offers a second argument in favour of sentience as a significant threshold.

“[G]olden rule”- type reasons do not apply to nonsentient beings. That is, no one would explain opposition to burning the flag of the United States of America by saying, “How would you like it if you were a flag and someone burned you?[vii]

Here, Steinbock appeals to a version of the Golden Rule. This rule prescribes consistency in one’s ethical judgments so that if one holds that it is permissible for you to do a particular action X to another person in certain circumstances then one must also hold that it is permissible for someone to do X to you in the same circumstances. Steinbock’s point is that such consistency is impossible with non-sentient beings. It does not make sense for one to object to destroying a flag because if one were a flag I one would not object to being burned. Flags after all cannot object to anything.

Again, Steinbock’s argument relies on concealed ambiguities. Harry Gensler has distinguished two different interpretations of the Golden Rule. In one, the rule asks for our reaction to a hypothetical case involving ourselves. On the other it asks how we would react if faced with the actual case itself.[viii]

Two examples demonstrate the difference between these two interpretations; a temporarily-unconscious individual and a case of infanticide. Taking the unconscious individual first, the first interpretation of the Golden Rule asks, would I object to the idea of someone killing me if I ever fell into a temporary coma? The second interpretation asks, would I object to being killed if I were, in fact, already in a coma? The answer to the first question is yes, I do object to the idea of someone killing me in the event I fell temporarily unconscious. I do not think it permissible for a surgeon to kill me while I was under general anaesthetic, for example. However, the answer to the second question must be no. If I were already unconscious, I could not object to being killed. While unconscious, I would not be capable of objecting to anything at all.

The infanticide example demonstrates these differences further. Applying the first interpretation I would ask, would I object to the idea of being killed when I was an infant? The second interpretation asks, would I object to being killed if I was an infant? Again, I would answer yes to the first question but no to the second. I do object to the idea of being killed when I was an infant. However, I clearly could not object if I were an infant because infants lack the cognitive development to be able to object or even understand what it means to object to being killed.

Returning now to Steinbock, it is evident from her discussion that she is interpreting the Golden-Rule in the second way. Her question, “how would you like it if you were a flag and someone burned you?” asks us how we would react if we were a flag. Such a question is absurd because as a flag we could not have any cognitive reactions at all. However, interpreted this way it is equally absurd to apply the Golden Rule to infants or the temporarily unconscious. Consequently, if feticide is not homicide because the Golden Rule questions interpreted in this manner do not apply to fetuses, then killing infants and killing the temporarily unconscious are also not homicide.

On the other hand, if the golden rule is interpreted the first way a different result emerges. It remains absurd to ask whether I would object to the idea of being killed in the event that I became a flag. It is dubious that I could ever be a flag, that a human adult and a flag could ever be the same individual. However, it does make sense to ask whether I object to the idea of being killed when I was an infant or when I was a fetus. This is because rational agents like myself once were fetuses and infants. The fact that a being is a potential rational agent makes it possible for rational agents to ask Golden Rule questions about them.

Steinbock’s arguments for the sentience threshold are unsound. Further, when conjoined with certain facts of neurology they entail that infanticide is not homicide. The claim that feticide is not homicide while infanticide is appears ad hoc and arbitrary.

I will address Steinbock’s conclusion in my next post, Sentience Part 2.

[i] Bonnie Steinbock, “Why Most Abortions are Not Wrong,” in Advances in Bioethics: Bioethics for Medical Education, Vol. 5, ed. Rem B. Edwards & E. Edwards Bittar (Stanford, CT: JAI Press, 1999), 248.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Michael Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) 47.
[vii] Steinbock “Why Most Abortions are Not Wrong,” 248-49.
[viii] Harry Gensler, “Abortion and the Golden Rule,” in The Abortion Controversy 25 Years after Roe v Wade: A Reader, ed. Francis Beckwith & Louis Pojman (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1998), 323.

In my previous post, Is Abortion Liberal? Part 1, I argued that liberals who support the non-initiation of force principle can support abortion only on two grounds;

(a) the fetus is a person but its existence inside the mother without her consent constitutes a form aggression, and hence, the mother’s action of killing it is defensive; or,
(b) a fetus is not a person.

I will now address each of these in turn.

Is the Fetus an Aggressor?
Consider first (a), the contention that a fetus can be considered an aggressor because it is intruding upon a woman’s body without her consent; an intrusion grave enough to justify the use of lethal force. In this respect then, being subject to an unplanned pregnancy would be on par with being the recipient of a serious assault such as being raped or severely beaten.

Frank Beckwith and Steve Thomas in Consent, Sex and the Pre-Natal Rapist, have demonstrated several problems with this claim. It leads to the conclusion that, in certain circumstances abortion is justified without the consent of the woman.

Consider the following scenario. A young woman is involved in a car accident and is rendered unconscious by her injuries. She is brought to a hospital where, still comatose, she is examined by a doctor. While performing some tests, the doctor determines that the woman has been pregnant for several weeks. Furthermore, suppose that evidence comes to light to suggest that the woman is unaware of her pregnancy, perhaps her close friends know nothing of the pregnancy, her diary shows no knowledge of being pregnant, and so on.

Adopting McDonagh's understanding of pregnancy as morally equivalent to rape or assault, what is the doctor's obligation to this unconscious patient? It would seem that, under these conditions, the doctor is morally required to perform an abortion to rid his patient of the 'massive intrusion' being imposed upon her by her unborn offspring. After regaining consciousness, the woman would have to be told that she's undergone an abortion for a pregnancy of which she was not aware, for there was good evidence that no consent had been given and that she was under assault.[i]

Beckwith’s point is that if the fetus is morally or legally on par with an aggressor who intrudes upon a woman’s body without her consent, such as a assailant or rapist then it would follow that in the case sketched above the doctor would be justified (and arguably would have an obligation) to abort despite the fact that no consent from the women had been obtained.

Consider, that if one saw a person having sex with an unconscious woman and one knew the woman had not consented, it would be absurd to wait for the woman to wake up to see if she wanted to consent to sex. One would be obligated to intervene. “[T]he doctor in the midst of the situation, aware of the pregnancy in the absence of consent, must see it as the rape-in-progress of his unconscious patient. How could he do anything else but end the assault?”[ii]

Now I assume that liberals would oppose the idea that any woman who both does not know she is pregnant and is unconscious should be subjected to an abortion without her consent. If this is the case then it is clear that they do not think that an unconsented to pregnancy constitutes an act of serious aggression.

If the fetus is an unjust aggressor then liberals are committed to coercive abortions. If coercive abortions are not liberal then the fetus is not an unjust aggressor.

Is the Fetus a Person?
If the fetus is not an unjust aggressor then a liberal defense of abortion must be based upon (b), the idea that a fetus is not a person, a being that possesses the rights to life, liberty and property that liberals believe the state exists to protect.

Now a fetus is clearly a human organism. After 14 days at least, it is an individual living being that is a member of the species homo sapiens. To justify abortion via (b), the liberal needs to tell us what property a human being possesses that grounds the right to not be subjected to the initiation of force, to not be killed. Further a liberal must also be able to plausibly maintain that a human organism does not acquire this property until after the fetal stage.

Peter Creswell takes the view,

[T]he foetus is not yet a human being, but a part of a human being – the mother – who has rights over it. To be an actual, rather than merely potential, human being is, among other things, to be physically separate, which a foetus is not.[iii]

This claim is erroneous. First the “parts of” relationship is transitive; if a brick is part of a wall and the wall part of a house then the brick is part of the house. If a fetus is part of a woman’s body it follows then that any organ that is part of the fetus will be part of the mother. A woman pregnant at eight weeks then possesses four arms, four legs and two brains. If the fetus is male, she will have both a vagina and a penis and be both male and female. Conclusions that are even more bizarre follow if the woman is pregnant with twins. She could have three faces, three brains, six arms, two penises and a vagina, three hearts, six kidneys and so on.[iv]

Moreover, PC’s contention that “to be an actual human” one must be “physically separate” entails that conjoined twins are not human. Consider conjoined twins Bob and Scott. If Bob is a human being then since Scott cannot live independently of Bob, Scott must not be a human person (the converse is equally true).

Yet it is difficult to see what property Bob has that Scott lacks which would justify considering one of them human and the other not simply because neither is dependant of the other. It appears then, that one would be forced to conclude that they both are and are not, human. Perhaps PC is simply giving a poorly worded defence of the viability criteria, which I have previously critiqued here.

However, the usual liberal response is to ground the right to not be subjected to the initiation of force, to not be killed, in certain psychological capacities that human beings typically display; such things as sentience, rationality, self-awareness, autonomy, etc.

Despite the pervasive appeal of this approach, it faces serious problems. Boonin notes that those who attempt to ground humanity in the amount of brain development an organism has face a dilemma. “Any appeal to what a brain can do at various stages of development would seem to have to appeal to what the brain can already do. Or to what the brain has the potential to do in the future.”[v]

Either option leads to problems for a defender of the permissibility of abortion who does not also want to endorse infanticide. This is because “by any plausible measure dogs, and cats, cows and pigs, chickens and ducks or more intellectually developed than a new born infant.”[vi] Suppose, then, one takes the first horn and appeals to what the brain can already do. However, unless one wishes to affirm that cats, dogs and chickens are human beings, “appeals to what the brain can already do” will “be unable to account for the presumed wrongness of killing toddlers or infants.”[vii] Suppose, then, one takes up the second horn of the dilemma and appeals to “what the brain has the potential to do in the future;”[viii] Boonin notes that this will entail that feticide is homicide. “If [such an account] allows appeals to what the brain has the potential to do in the future, then it will have to include fetuses as soon as their brains begin to emerge, during the first few weeks of gestation.”[ix]

A couple of examples will illustrate this. Suppose the liberal appeals to sentience, the capacity for consciousness and the ability to perceive pleasure and pain. This criterion will mean abortion is permissible up to 24 weeks.[x] The problem is that this criterion also catches cats, dogs, cows, and chickens as well all. All of which are as sentient if not more sentient than new born infants and post-24 week fetuses.

If the liberal draws the line at sentience, he/she will have to hold that farming, butchers shops, McDonald’s restaurants, Kentucky fried Chicken restaurants all engage in unjustified aggression against people because they kill sentient beings without their consent. Further, to remain consistent, the liberal will have to maintain a policy of outlawing all these industries and prosecuting those who engage in them for murder and cannibalism.

Suppose the liberal appeals to more advanced psychological states such as self-awareness, rationality or autonomy. Such accounts of the grounding of rights will exclude the animals mentioned above and will exclude human fetuses. The problem is, according to this account, newborn infants are not persons either.

In a definitive study of infanticide, Michael Tooley compiles an impressive array of neurological and physiological data that demonstrates that infants are not persons in this sense until some time after birth.[xi] The price of this line of inference is the reduction of newborn infants to the ethical level of cows. A newborn cow, and certainly a mature cow, is more person-like than an infant is. It is difficult to understand by this view why killing and eating infants is any more problematic than consuming a Big Mac.

Of course the liberal can avoid this by claiming that it is the potential to acquire properties such as rationality, self-awareness, autonomy, not their actuality that matters. This will enable one to claim infants are protected by the non-initiation of force principle and will exclude animals. But the problem of course is that foetuses will also be protected by the non-initiation of force principle because fetuses also have the potential to possess these properties.

In summation, liberal proponents of the non-initiation of force principle can only support abortion if they are willing to be inconsistent and arbitrary in their application of the principle or if they are willing to endorse not just infanticide but the eating of newborn infants or state mandated vegetarianism or coercive abortions. These policies are an anathema to most liberals; as such, abortion is not liberal.

UPDATE: In response to comments below see Sentience Part 1 and Sentience Part 2.

[i] Francis J. Beckwith & Stephen Thomas, “Consent, Sex, and the Prenatal Rapist; A Brief Reply to McDonagh’s Suggested Revision of Roe v Wade,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 17: 3 (2003): 4.
[ii] Ibid, 6.
[iii] Peter Creswell, “Not PC: Cue Card Libertarianism – Abortion”, http://pc.blogspot.com/2005/05/cue-card-libertarianism-abortion.html.
[iv] Here I am influenced by Peter Kreeft, The Unaborted Socrates (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1983), 45-47 and Francis J Beckwith, Politically Correct Death, 124.
[v] David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 125.
[vi] Ibid, 121.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Ibid.
[x] It is generally accepted that sentience occurs around 24 week’s gestation. There is some dispute over this and some scientists date sentience in the first 10 weeks of gestation.
[xi] Michael Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) Ch. 11.5.


RELATED POSTS:
Is Abortion Liberal? Part 1
Sentience Part 1
Sentience Part 2
Viability
Abortion and Child Abuse: Another Response to Farrar
Abortion and Brain Death: A Response to Farrar
Abortion and Capital Punishment: No Contradiction
Imposing You Beliefs Onto Others: A Defence
Published: Boonin's Defense of the Sentience Criteria - A Critique
Published: Abortion and Capital Punishment - No Contradiction

Laws permitting abortion on demand are often deemed to be liberal. Further, political liberals are frequently ardent defenders of such laws. I think these conclusions are mistaken. In a series of two posts I will provide some reasons why.

Most contemporary liberals advocate a form of the harm principle, famously articulated by Mill in On Liberty,

The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.[i] [Emphasis added]

Mill here draws a distinction between other-regarding actions, actions that harm other people, and self-regarding actions, those that harm oneself. He argues that society, either by law or by social pressure, cannot justly regulate any action a person performs unless it is other-regarding; that is, it harms people other than the agent him/herself. As Mill’s position is typically interpreted harm is understood to be governed by the principle volenti non fit injuria (where there is consent, there is no injury) and hence refers to things done to other people without their consent. On this interpretation, self-regarding actions are those that people consent to and that harm no non-consenting, third party. As Mill himself notes, a self-regarding action is that “which affects only himself, or affects others with their free and voluntary, and undeceived consent”.[ii]

The most common version of the harm principle is known as the non-initiation of force principle; Rothbard sums it up well,

The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the “nonaggression axiom.” “Aggression” is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else. Aggression is therefore synonymous with invasion.[iii]

I do not subscribe to the harm principle or the non-initiation of force interpretation of it (I give some reasons why here). However, in this series of posts I will adopt it for the sake of argument so as to examine what follows for abortion. Abortion involves killing a fetus, usually by dismembering it. Moreover, the fetus does not consent to it. Hence if a Liberal is to support abortion he/she must do so for only one of two reasons. Either,

(a) the fetus is a person but its existence inside the mother without her consent constitutes a form aggression, and hence, the mother’s action of killing it is defensive; or,
(b) a fetus is not a person.