Professor: Early Unborn Baby “Doesn’t Have a Future as a Person and Has No Moral Status”

"Women have neither the right nor the responsibility to regulate personhood." 

By Lia Mills
Life News

LifeNews Note: The following is an open letter to Princeton University professor Liz Harmon from Lia Mills. Mills is a student pro-life activist who is the founder and director of True Choice.

Allow me to introduce myself: my name is Lia, and I am a young Canadian feminist. I was one of the hundreds of thousands of people who watched your discussion about abortion with James Franco and Eliot Michaelson. I’m writing to you today because your arguments were absolutely astounding, and I felt compelled to respond.

As someone who took Feminist & Gender Studies in university, I like to think that I am well versed in pro-abortion logic. If you have spent any amount of time in feminist academia, you will understand why I hold this perspective: convincing every man, woman, and child to become a mouthpiece for radical pro-abortion rhetoric is one of the most revered goals of modern-day feminism.

So when I first began to listen to you explain your perspective on abortion, I’ll admit that I felt certain I would have heard the argument before. I mean, I once listened to a feminist researcher at my university talk for over an hour about how abortion could miraculously eliminate poverty, end world hunger, and cure all health crises in the Global South. Understandably, after that fascinating presentation, I was convinced I had heard it all.

But you surprised me. Your reasoning around the issue of abortion was more outrageous than any I have heard before. So, after watching the video a couple times, I decided that I needed to offer a response.

As you have likely guessed by now, I am uncompromisingly pro-life. But I am not writing to you in order to defend my pro-life worldview. Rather, I am writing to you because I, like you, believe in the beauty of logic. It is my love of logic and my respect for reason that compels me to write to you today.

Liz, in the video, your argument centers around the issues of moral status and personhood. Now, I don’t want to misrepresent your perspective, so I will quote what you said in the video word for word:

“[W]hat I think is that, actually, among early fetuses, there are two very different kinds of beings. So James, when you were an early fetus, and Eliot, when you were an early fetus, all of us, I think that we already did have moral status then. But we had moral status in virtue of our futures, in virtue of the fact that we were the beginning stages of persons.” 

“But some early fetuses will die early in pregnancy, either due to abortion or miscarriage, and in my view, that’s a very different kind of entity; that’s something that doesn’t have a future as a person, and it doesn’t have moral status.”

Now, Liz, I have a major problem with your reasoning. The first and biggest issue I have is that your pro-abortion argument cannot be classified as reasoning. In fact, it cannot even be classified as reasonable. There is no semblance of logic in this argument you layout before me. If it were to be scrutinized—which it will be—it would fail due to the fact that it is intellectually inconsistent.

The crux of your argument is ultimately that an early fetus’ moral status rests entirely on whether he or she will become a person by nature of having a future. Theoretically, according to the two examples you give, it is possible to determine moral status because we know quite clearly whether the early fetuses in these two scenarios will have a future or not.

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