Viability is often used by pro-choice advocates as a tool for establishing when the unborn child should be considered a person with legal rights and protections, and it is a principle that is widely used in society as a basis for law when it comes to abortion.
For such a prevalent basis for policy, it has always surprised me that the relevance of viability is so rarely explored. Viability is basically the point at which the unborn child becomes capable of surviving on its own outside the womb if given up-to-date medical treatment. To some, this capacity for independent survival is a good place to distinguish the unborn child as a separate person, but the more we try to apply the concept the more problems begin to crop up.
The first issue that I think many people will note is that viability itself is little more than a measurement of medical technology, rather than any quality or trait inherent to the child. As time goes on, we have been able to keep kids alive at younger and younger ages, and in principle, eventually, the unborn child may be deliverable at any time, perhaps even from fertilization.(1)
Clearly, we can see that a child born today in a first world country would not merely be a person by virtue of their access to advanced technology while an identical child at an identical gestational age would not be a person if they did not have access to such medical care. That just doesn’t seem very logical, and this presents a major problem for using viability as a basis for granting rights, because it really doesn’t make sense to base personhood upon a criterion determined not by anything about the individual in question, but upon the technology available to us.(2)
Now, recognizing this issue, some pro-choice advocates wonder whether it would be better to base viability upon the capacity for independent survival without any intervention at all.
This however is even more problematic, as not only would this deny personhood and justify the intentional termination of countless numbers of premature babies born at various stages of gestation who could be saved, but the reality is that all children have to be provided with some level of care and intervention at birth in order to survive. While we may underestimate the degree to which children can care for themselves, no newborn is capable of surviving on its own.
Whether one is reliant upon their mother to feed them from her breast or nourish them within the womb, they are still incapable of sustaining their own life without the labor of others. How is it that one could not be a person by virtue of their dependence on others in one case, but a person who is entitled to legal protections in the other?
This brings us to the biggest problem of all here, which is that the capacity for independent survival is something many people in our world don’t seem to possess, whether fetuses, infants, or even adults. Viability is simply a change in the nature of the child’s dependence, and being dependent upon others would not seem to change whether or not one is a person.
Ultimately, viability is a poor criterion for granting personhood at best. Like many other points offered as alternatives to fertilization, it’s usage would seem to have little relevance to the child itself, and risks logically denying personhood to other groups that we would also most certainly consider to be persons.
This article was shared in collaboration with our friends at The Lifeguard Initiative.
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