by Martin Smith
Is Kamala Harris, Vice President of the United States, nothing more than a clump of cells?
If the answer to this question is yes, then Harris is a mere artefact of Nature, a trivial epiphenomenon resulting from the blind action of entropy upon matter and thus of no greater significance than a stone, a tree or a star, and we would be forced to ask ourselves: are not the waves of adulation [1] which have washed over her in recent weeks somewhat misplaced, if not outright absurd? After all, why laud a thing of Nature? If, on the other hand, Harris is something more than a mere clump of cells, then we could quite readily set about identifying solid philosophical underpinnings to support the praising of her virtues. This might seem like an abstruse and fruitless consideration but, as I hope to show in this article, it actually serves as a useful standpoint from which to challenge an idea which seems to be prevalent amongst many of those both within and without Harris' camp, in the US and elsewhere: the idea that age, race or some other non-substantial biological or sociological factor can serve as a determinant of personhood.
I suspect that many reading this blog, and indeed many who have praised Harris for her various socio-political achievements will, almost be default, share my own view that she is very much more than a mere clump of cells and that to assert the opposite is at once condescending and nihilistic. However, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that if many of those who are close to Harris - specifically her political bedfellows and financial benefactors - followed the logic of their own arguments, they would think precisely that Harris is nothing more than a mere clump of cells or that, at the very least, she could be re-classified as such should it be deemed necessary by an overarching sociological expedient.
Harris and Planned ParenthoodKamala Harris has close ideological [2], political [3] and financial [4] connections with Planned Parenthood, one of the leading organisations within America's multimillion-dollar abortion industry [5]. It is part of this industry's modus operandi to refer to unborn children using terms such as 'clumps of cells' [6], particularly at gestations where, visually everything speaks to the contrary [7], but also earlier gestations where the faculty of reason supplies where the eyes cannot [8a-d]. Anything that humanises the unborn reduces the number of abortions performed and, consequently, revenue [9]. Hence, within the abortion industry, terms such as 'baby' or 'child' are strictly avoided, despite these terms being used normatively in ordinary speech to describe unborn children at all stages of gestation [10].
So much for Harris' associated, but what of Harris herself? Upon which side of this language divide does she sit? In answering this question, much may be deduced from the various concrete actions that she has undertaken in favour of abortion, these having been vaunted by Planned Parenthood themselves [11]. Thence, we learn that Harris was part of a successful movement that advocated for abortion liberalisation in Texas in 2016 [12] and that in 2019 she proposed a plan to impose Federal Government blocks on any attempts by individual States to restrict abortion [13]. It is also a matter of public record that Harris voted against the 2019 Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act [14] which would have required medical staff to attempt to save the lives of babies born alive during their abortions [15]. Furthermore, Harris is connected to two legal actions concerning the secret filming of Planned Parenthood doctors in which the doctors discussed the trade of body parts which they harvest 'to order' from aborted babies [16]. Thus, in 2015, when she was California State Attorney, Harris' agents were tasked with entering the property of the film-maker, David Daleiden, in order to seize his footage and other digital equipment [17], a move which contributed to him being charged in March 2017 with breaching privacy laws [18]. In a counter-case launched in May 2020, Daleiden is suing Harris, Planned Parenthood and other parties claiming that their legal actions against him violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments [19]. Whilst these court cases are bogged down in the legal minutiae governing undercover journalism, the underlying facts laid bare by the films themselves have not been disputed, with Planned Parenthood responding to the revelations by stating [20] that the harvest and trade of aborted baby body parts is legal under US law [21].
By deftly shifting the argument away from the harvesting and trade of baby body parts per se, onto instead the legality of the means by which the trade was brought to light. Planned Parenthood may well have protected themselves against any changes to their working practices. However, what they cannot now hide is the untenable semantics inherent to their business operations: what is spoken of 'front of house' as unwanted, amorphous clumps of cells [6] are redefined as, for example, "kidney", "heart" [22a], "calvarium" [22b], "eyes", "brains" and "limbs" [22c] when commodified out "the back door" to representatives of biomedical research companies [23]. Quite how the 'Gestalt switch' could operate between such radically different ontologies of unborn children and their body parts is seemingly unfathomable and, in any case, beyond the scope of this article. Instead, we shall explore the use of the 'front of house' term "clump of cells" (or similar words) to characterise what in every instance of normal discourse would be referred to as a baby. Such use of language is presumably a key part of the cognitive process that leads to liberal mindedness towards abortion as it achieves the very dehumanisation of the unborn child that is so necessary, indeed axiomatic, to the entire pro-abortion/'pro-choice' edifice. However, as I hope to explain in the remainder of this article, not only is the dehumanised 'clump of cells' perspective flawed both physically and metaphysically, this perspective also undermines the arguments for the immorality of actions which all people of good will would rightly abhor, not least the diminution of women's rights.
Too Few Cells?
Inherent to the characterisation of unborn children (particularly those in the first trimester) as an amorphous collection of cells is that the relative fewness of those cells presents some sort of point of significance to the moral worth of the children in question. It is indeed true that very young children consist of relatively few cells and that it takes many years to reach the approximately 37 trillion cells that are found in an average adult [24]. But it is also true that one adult may consist of many more cells than another and adults comprise more cells than children. Are we, therefore, to say that adults have a greater moral worth or a greater degree of personhood than children, merely on account of adults consisting of more cells? Are thinner children dehumanised relative to fuller-bodied children? Surely not and by extension the comparative fewness of cells in an unborn child is neither here nor there when considering its moral status. But, even if we ignore the manifest absurdity of implicitly connecting 'number of cells' to personhood or moral status and we pretend that there are no problems with determining where the numerical 'cut-off' lies in terms of whether the killing of the subject is legitimate or not, one cannot escape the simple fact that number of cells is an essentially arbitrary feature of human personhood and therefore no different in this respect to equally arbitrary features of cells such as their colour. And yet the dehumanisation of whole peoples on the grounds of cell colour is roundly and rightly decried by all right-minded people. Why, therefore, is it considered immoral to dehumanise on the grounds of cell colour, not least in order to kill a person, but not on the grounds of cell number? [25]
Morphologically Subhuman?
One response on the part of abortion advocates to questions concerning the arbitrariness of cell number is to say that this criterion is a mere proxy for either the morphology or the global capacity of the unborn child, or some mixture of both of these factors. But I am afraid that we are on no firmer ground here either. Taking the morphological argument first, an argument which roughly speaking justifies abortion on the grounds that the aborted 'entity' bears little or no resemblance to a person, we are compelled to point out that the structural appearance of ex vivo human beings varies enormously, indeed almost hilariously so. The morphological variations we see in the womb, both as a function of gestation and also by comparison to post-natal human beings, are indeed interesting, but they cannot form grounds for a final, ontological reckoning of the nature of being in question. Six-month-old babies, with their relatively short, chubby legs and their barely-concealed, distended viscera, often look quite unlike children of just a few years their senior. And, as many of us will also have experienced, very elderly people often appear - absit iniuria verbis - as little more than a crumpled heap of skin and bones even in the absence of a particular pathology. Without even starting down the road of considering the huge morphological differences commonly beheld by one adult compared to another, the notion that visual appearance has a bearing on moral status is clearly nonsensical. Nevertheless, some may still insist that human zygotes and embryos, lacking, as they do, arms and legs and such like, are so far removed from the human form typically encountered that they really are some form of subhuman and therefore do not deserve the same protection as older persons. Perhaps the best response to this view is to point out that human embryos look exactly like human beings - human beings at just a few hours or days old [26]. The fact that they might look like nothing in particular to the untrained eye is irrelevant to the consideration of their ontological status.
Lacking Capacity?
All of this leads to the last-gasp defence of the 'mere clump of cells' approach to abortion justification, a defence which tends to focus on the issue of global capacity, or rather the apparent lack of such capacities in unborn children, particularly when compared to post-natal human beings. We often hear statements such as "The fetus cannot think/feel/enjoy social relationships/[fill in the blank] . . . and therefore is not a person/human being/moral subject/[fill in the blank] in a proper sense and so can be lawfully killed." The weakness in this standpoint is twofold. Firstly, many if not all of the absent capacities cited as being grounds for dehumanising the unborn are also absent either temporarily or permanently in many born persons and yet it is far from obvious as to why protection under the law from homicide should be differentiated by age. Secondly, this standpoint is, I am afraid to say, rooted in a profound empirical ignorance. The current body of knowledge concerning the development of a baby in the womb is mind boggling and has enjoyed especially rapid growth in recent years following the invention of 4D scanning [27].
Unborn children in their third trimester can be watched as they sleep and wake in regular cycles, hiccup, stretch, somersault, blink when startled by loud noises and adjust their swallowing of amniotic fluid in response to the presence of sweet or bitter substances, accompanied by facial gestures of pleasure or displeasure accordingly [28]. In other words, they do many of the things that new-born babies do, hence it is not for nothing that the first three months of a child's post-natal life are often referred to as 'the fourth trimester' [29]. Anyone who thinks that a baby's location and its method of receiving nutrition are substantive matters in relation to its moral worth have clearly never met a new-born baby before; new-born babies have exactly the same extent - as opposed to mechanism - of hopeless dependence on their mother (or another adult) as they do when in the womb and so if dependency on another human being for basic life supporting needs are grounds for dehumanising unborn children then there are no grounds for infanticide being illegal either. But what of gestations earlier than the third trimester, prior to the phase of fetal maturation? At every stage of gestation back to conception all we see is layer upon layer of exquisitely organismal behaviour - human organismal behaviour - with all its associated capacities. For example, at 12 weeks, almost the entire fetal body responds to touch, from 10 weeks thumb-sucking and yawning are observed, the first breathing motions are seen at just 8 weeks, fingers, toes, eyes and eyelids are all formed by 7 weeks and astonishingly the heart begins beating 3 weeks and one day after fertilisation [30]. Even at the zygote stage, gamete-like characteristics vanish in the first moments after conception, with zygotic genes being expressed within 8-10 hours after fertilisation [31]. At no stage during embryogenesis is there some sort of amorphous, subhuman cluster of cells. In truth the zygote possesses, intrinsically capacities from its very outset that render it arguably the most remarkable stage of a human being's entire life. Certainly, a far cry from its frequently belittled status as a single cell of little or no moral value.
Conclusion
In the supposedly enlightened times in which we live, are we now content with the understanding that everything in the Universe - including the fullness of human experience - is reducible to matter, energy and their associated laws? I do not presume to know what the range and weighting of responses would be to this question, but I do think that a firm "yes" is implied by the materialist thinking guiding the general direction of travel in Western European and, to a lesser extent, North American societies. In consequence, anything that is not perceived to fit within the philosophically flimsy concept of 'empirical fact' is dismissed or expunged from socio-political discourse, most especially in relation to the nature of personhood, morality and the origin and status of mankind in relation to the natural order.
Despite this ascendancy of a rather narrow and intellectually attenuated conception of rationality, a blind eye is turned to objective scientific observations concerning the biology of the unborn: we can watch babies walking in the womb [32], operate on them in utero to mitigate the effects of conditions such as spina bifida [33] and we even - I am sorry to say but it is true - watch babies 'run for their lives' from the suction tube that is about to 'terminate' them during ultrasound-guided abortion [34]. It seems that we are in the grip of a humanism which, as so often in the past when it has taken hold, knows not - or chooses not to know - a human being when it sees one [35]. Thus, in spite of all the evidence, all the gleaming rationality to the contrary, unborn babies are dehumanised as mere clumps of cells, their ontology obfuscated amidst a cloud of euphemisms and their lives sacrificed on the altar of women's rights when in fact there can be no such thing at all until the most basic right of all - the right to life - is given back to the babies from which all adults mature.
Thank you for reading this article.
If you are struggling after an abortion experience, Abortion Recovery Care and Helpline (ARCH) may be be able to help you. See https://www.archtrust.org.uk/ or call 0345 603 8501.
References
[2] See Harris’s speech beginning 24 minutes into this clip from
October this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Yj5nJpb7aw&feature=emb_title
[3] See clips of Harris speaking in support at a Planned
Parenthood event, interspersed within this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOh7ltZ9VY0&feature=emb_title
[4] According to the ‘fact check’ article at: https://www.capradio.org/articles/2020/10/13/politifact-california-social-media-posts-push-false-claims-about-kamala-harris-and-planned-parenthood/ “Planned Parenthood’s
political arm recently spotlighted Harris “as a defender of reproductive rights and
health care.” She has received tens of thousands of dollars in
campaign finance contributions from Planned Parenthood affiliated groups,
including $15,000 during her 2014 campaign for re-election as attorney general,
according to the California Secretary of State’s website.”
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_Parenthood
[6] See the testimony of the former Planned Parenthood worker
Patricia Sandoval from 32-37 minutes at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qJR-IAtAe8&list=PLs31UGAeCFmBn2RkuE1ZUN90_XtGabdsY&index=2&t=0s&app=desktop
[7] See https://www.spuc.org.uk/News/ID/384643/Irish-doctor-was-sick-in-the-corridors-after-late-term-abortion and also 35-37 and 40-45 minutes into
reference [6] where testimony is given of how women are not allowed to see the
ultrasound screen during an abortion.
[8a] Consider the argument for organismal continuity as
articulated by Alexander Pruss, Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Wako, Texas: https://uffl.org/vol12/pruss12.pdf, [b] see Chapter 2 of Abortion Matters by,
A. McCarthy, Philos 2018, [c] see Laura Klasson’s
straight forward answer to the question of personhood’s onset by way of the
satirical ‘magical birth canal’ at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNgwsT295G8, and [d] the question of unborn personhood is considered in depth
in The
Soul of the Embryo, D. Jones, Continuum 2004.
[9] See the testimony of former Planner Parenthood worker Abby
Johnson 3 minutes into this clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQpz6qartl4. Also see 44-45 minutes into reference [6].
[10] See p20-21 of The Ethics of Pregnancy, Abortion and
Childbirth by H. Watt, Routledge 2016.
[11] See statements 2 and 3 at https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/elections/kamala-harris
[12] https://twitter.com/KamalaHarris/status/1277649036523249665
[14] See the ‘Nay’ list at https://cqrcengage.com/nrlc/app/vote/388633?0
[15] How common it is for babies to survive their abortions can
only be estimated based on sample studies. For example, a study of three US
states from 2016-19 revealed 40 such cases (https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/abby-johnson-babies-born-alive-botched-abortions). In the case of the UK, such instances are not centrally
collated (see https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2017-12-12/118932). However, one study reported 102 abortion
survivals in the West Midlands between 1995-2004 (https://obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1471-0528.2007.01279.x). There are also many individual cases that
have been documented, such as that of Jack Harper in 2016 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/meet-baby-who-miraculously-survived-7528182, Mohammed Khan in 2018, who died in his
mother’s arms shortly after his abortion https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/7353896/abortion-failed-give-birth-live-crying-baby-died-arms/ and
Melissa Ohden (now 42) https://www.spuc.org.uk/News/ID/384448/I-was-left-to-die-as-medical-waste-Abortion-survivors-testimony-prompts-questions-around-failed-abortions.
[16] https://www.centerformedicalprogress.org/cmp/investigative-footage/
[18] See weblink in reference [4]
[19] See the legal paperwork here https://www.centerformedicalprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200512_CMPvPP_1_Complaint.pdf and also this summary given by Daleiden himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Yj5nJpb7aw&feature=emb_title
[21] https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/guidance/public-law-103-43/index.html
[22a] See a Planned Parenthood doctor
speaking from 7 minutes (kidneys and hearts) and [b] from 6 minutes (“cal”, ie.
calvarium) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tgez97aG74&feature=emb_title, and [c] see also page 2 of this
testimony by former abortion technician Dean Alberty: http://mv3462p2bnv2ptxqp33ikj2j-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/INVESTIGATE-2012-Fetal-Body-Parts.pdf
[23] The use of tissue from aborted babies for research purposes
is too large a topic to be considered in depth in this article, suffice to say
it is a widespread practice as explained here https://www.spuc.org.uk/Portals/0/ThemePluginPro/uploads/2020/12/10/The%20Commercial%20Use%20of%20Aborted%20Children%20by%20Liam%20Gibson.pdf. By way of a recent example, see this work published in September
2020 by scientists at the University of Pittsburgh where human fetal skin was
grafted onto mice for the purpose of the “Development of humanized mouse and
rat models with full-thickness human skin and autologous immune cells” (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-71548-z).
[24]
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2013/10/23/how-many-cells-are-in-your-body/
[25]
For a longer discussion on this question in relation to the inconsistency of
the BLM movement, see http://portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com/2020/07/calling-out-blm-and-ukgov-all-lives.html
[26]
See p20 of reference [10].
[27]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_ultrasound
[28]
https://www.ehd.org/movies-index.php
[29]
https://www.nct.org.uk/baby-toddler/emotional-and-social-development/what-fourth-trimester
[30]
https://www.ehd.org/movies-index.php
[31]
See from 48 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcCXQ084iJY
[32] https://www.ehd.org/movies.php?mov_id=119
[33] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Armas
[34] See this testimony from former Planned Parenthood worker Abby
Johnson: https://www.facebook.com/theACLJ/videos/i-knew-i-had-witnessed-a-human-death-in-this-heartbreaking-video-a-former-planne/10155006932960047/ and also this accurate dramatization of her experience in the movie Unplanned
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBLWpKbC3ww.
[35] There were 42.6 million abortions during 2020 according to data compiled by the WHO, thus making abortion by far and away the leading cause of death worldwide: https://www.spuc.org.uk/News/ID/384687/426-million-abortions-in-2020-the-leading-cause-of-death-worldwide
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