Consciousness, abortion

"Opponents of abortion may see the decline in every form of violence but the killing of foetuses as a stunning case of moral hypocrisy. But there is another explanation for the discrepancy. Modern sensibilities have increasingly conceived moral worth in terms of consciousness, particularly the ability to suffer and flourish, and have identified consciousness with the activity of the brain. The change is a part of the turning away from religion and custom and toward science and secular philosophy as a source of moral illumination. Just as the legally recognised end of life is now defined by the cessation of brain activity rather than the cessation of a heartbeat, the beginning of life is sensed to depend on the first stirrings of consciousness in the foetus. The current understanding of the neural basis of consciousness ties it to reverberating neural activity between the thalamus and the cerebral cortex, which begins at around twenty six weeks of gestational age. More to the point, people conceive of foetuses as less than fully conscious; the psychologists Heather Gray, Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner have shown that people think of foetuses as more capable of experience than robots or corpses, but less capable than animals, babies, children and adults. The vast majority of abortions are carried out well before the milestone of having a functioning brain, and thus are safely conceptualised, according to this understanding of the worth of human life, as fundamentally different from infanticide and other forms of violence."

Stephen Pinker