An examination of perspectives on one of humanity’s most contentious moral questions.

Prologue

The practice of terminating pregnancy has accompanied human civilization since its earliest recorded chapters. Ancient priests performed such procedures for reasons both sacred and profane; the old Assyrian laws, dating to the third millennium before the common era, prescribed penalties for the act—suggesting that even then, society grappled with questions that remain unresolved today.

What makes the abortion question particularly resistant to resolution is not a shortage of arguments but rather a surfeit of them. Each perspective—philosophical, scientific, religious, political—offers frameworks that appear internally coherent yet remain fundamentally irreconcilable with the others. The participants in this debate often speak past one another, not because they lack eloquence, but because they operate from premises so divergent that genuine dialogue becomes nearly impossible.

It makes little sense to discuss this issue while participants remain trapped between the gravitational pull of ancestral custom and the contrary force of contemporary sensibility—between inherited conviction and the cravings of modernity. When the very foundations of argument are contested, no superstructure of reasoning can stand stable.

What follows is not an attempt to settle the question—that ambition would be hubris—but rather to illuminate the distinct perspectives from which the question is approached, in hopes that understanding the architecture of disagreement might prove more valuable than yet another polemic.

Part I: The Philosophical Approach

Philosophy offers perhaps the oldest sustained inquiry into the morality of abortion, predating both modern science and the organized religions that would later claim authority over the question.

Aristotle, that most systematic of ancient minds, proposed a criterion that retains its relevance millennia later: “The line between lawful and unlawful abortion will be marked by the fact of having sensation and being alive.” Before the point at which sensation emerges, Aristotle did not regard abortion as the termination of anything properly human. The organism in the womb was, in his analysis, a potential rather than an actuality—and potentiality, however precious, does not carry the same moral weight as realized being.

This distinction—between potential and actual, between what may become and what already is—threads through centuries of philosophical discourse. It reminds us that the question “When does human life begin?” admits of multiple defensible answers depending on what one means by “human” and “life.”

The Stoics, those philosophers of disciplined self-mastery, advanced a position even more permissive. They regarded the fetus as “plantlike in nature, and not an animal until the moment of birth, when it finally breathed air.” For the Stoics, the pneuma—the breath, the animating spirit—entered the organism only with that first inhalation. Prior to that moment, abortion presented no moral difficulty whatsoever.

One need not endorse these ancient views to recognize their significance: they demonstrate that principled opposition to abortion is not the unanimous verdict of philosophical tradition, but rather one position among several that serious thinkers have held.

Yet philosophy also furnishes questions that complicate permissive stances:

If the decision to terminate represents a judgment about another potential being’s right to exist, by what authority is such judgment rendered? The parents—or the mother alone—assume a power over existence itself, a prerogative to determine not merely how a life will be conducted but whether it will occur at all.

Is this not precisely the patriarchal arrangement that certain movements claim to oppose—merely with different actors in the position of authority? The objection may seem rhetorical, but it points to a genuine tension: the same philosophical frameworks that justify individual autonomy in reproductive decisions might, pressed to their logical conclusions, justify other exercises of power over dependent beings that we would find troubling.

Philosophy, in short, does not resolve the question. It clarifies its dimensions.

Part II: The Scientific Perspective

If philosophy offers competing frameworks, science offers data—though the interpretation of that data remains as contested as ever.

The facts of human development are not in dispute. Fertilization—the union of gametes that initiates a new developmental trajectory—normally occurs within one day of intercourse, though the process can complete up to six days later. At this moment, the four characteristics that biologists associate with life manifest themselves or become imminent: growth, reproduction, metabolism, and response to stimuli.

At fertilization, the genetic composition that will characterize this particular organism is established. Gender, eye colour, hair colour, facial features—all are encoded in the newly formed genome. Characteristics such as intelligence and personality, though profoundly influenced by environment, have their genetic foundations laid at this same moment.

The medical textbook The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology states plainly that fertilization creates “a new combination of chromosomes that is different from that in the cells of either of the parents,” and that this constitutes “the beginning of a new human being.”

The National Human Genome Research Institute confirms that “the extent of human genetic variation is such that no two humans, save identical twins, ever have been or will be genetically identical.” The odds against a woman conceiving the same genetic individual twice exceed ten to the six-hundredth power—a number so vast that comparison fails; there are merely ten to the eightieth atoms in the observable universe.

Even identical twins, who share their genome, are biologically unique from one another due to epigenetic differences that affect how their genes express themselves.

These facts are marshalled by those who oppose abortion to argue that human life—biologically defined—begins at conception. The argument has genuine force: here is a unique genetic entity, never before existent and never to exist again, already embarked upon a developmental trajectory that, uninterrupted, will produce what everyone acknowledges as a human being.

Yet the same facts admit of different interpretations. A unique genome is not the same as a person. Biological life is not the same as morally considerable life. The potential to develop consciousness is not the same as the possession of consciousness. The acorn, however genetically unique, is not the oak.

Science tells us what is. It cannot, by itself, tell us what matters.

Part III: The Religious Perspective

For billions of human beings, questions of life and death are not ultimately decided by philosophical argument or scientific data but by religious conviction—by what is believed to be divine revelation concerning the sacred nature of existence.

The major religious traditions that emerged from the ancient Near East share, despite their differences, a common intuition: that human life is not merely a biological phenomenon but a divine endowment, bearing a sanctity that derives from its origin in creative will rather than from any qualities the creature itself might possess or lack.

In this framework, the question “When does human life begin?” receives an answer that science cannot provide: human life begins when the Creator wills it to begin, and what the Creator has willed into existence, humans have no authority to will out of existence.

The soul—that metaphysical postulate that distinguishes religious anthropology from materialist accounts—is said to be present from conception, or perhaps even before, in the eternal counsels of divine providence. To terminate a pregnancy is therefore not merely to interrupt a biological process but to usurp a divine prerogative, to destroy what bears the image of the sacred.

This perspective has tremendous psychological and social power. It provides clear guidance where philosophy equivocates and science abstains from moral judgment. It situates the individual decision within a cosmic framework of meaning. It offers the certainty that many find necessary for moral action.

Yet several observations temper the force of religious claims in public discourse:

First, religious traditions are not monolithic on this question. Historical investigation reveals considerable diversity of opinion within traditions that now present unified fronts. The moment of ensoulment has been placed at conception, at quickening, at birth, and at various points between, depending on which authority one consults and from which era.

Second, in pluralistic societies where citizens hold incompatible religious convictions—or none at all—the appeal to revelation cannot settle public policy without imposing one group’s metaphysical commitments on others who do not share them. The question of what civil law should permit is distinct from the question of what divine law commands.

Third, the religious perspective, however sincerely held, must contend with the observation that its certainties have shifted over centuries, often in response to developments in secular understanding. What presents itself as timeless truth frequently bears the fingerprints of historical circumstance.

None of this invalidates religious conviction for those who hold it. But it suggests that religious perspectives, like philosophical and scientific ones, contribute to the conversation rather than concluding it.

Part IV: The Political Dimension

Behind the philosophical, scientific, and religious arguments lies a reality that cannot be ignored: the abortion question is inextricably political, entangled with questions of power, gender, class, and the proper limits of state authority.

Who decides? This question underlies all others.

If the decision belongs to the individual woman, then bodily autonomy is affirmed as a fundamental right that the state may not override, regardless of the moral status of the fetus. The woman’s authority over her own reproductive capacity is held to be prior to any interest the state might claim in potential life.

If the decision belongs to the state, then the community asserts a legitimate interest in protecting what it defines as human life, even at the cost of individual autonomy. The woman’s body becomes, in some sense, a public matter—subject to regulation in ways that other medical decisions are not.

If the decision belongs to religious authorities—a situation that obtains in some societies—then theocratic principles override both individual autonomy and secular state interest. The woman’s choice is subordinated to doctrines she may or may not personally affirm.

Each allocation of decision-making authority produces different outcomes and different injustices. Grant absolute authority to individuals, and some will make decisions that others find morally abhorrent. Grant absolute authority to the state, and the apparatus of enforcement intrudes into the most intimate aspects of existence. Grant absolute authority to religious institutions, and pluralism itself becomes impossible.

The political dimension also encompasses the brute facts of inequality. Restrictions on abortion do not affect all women equally; they bear most heavily on those with fewest resources. The wealthy have always found ways to obtain the procedures they seek; it is the poor who face the full weight of prohibition.

This observation does not by itself determine the correct policy—the fact that a law falls unequally is not sufficient reason to abandon it if the conduct it prohibits is genuinely wrongful. But it does complicate the moral calculus in ways that purely abstract arguments tend to ignore.

Epilogue: The Irreducible Complexity

What emerges from this survey is not a conclusion but a recognition: the abortion question resists resolution because it involves genuine conflicts between values that human beings rightly hold dear.

The value of potential life. The value of bodily autonomy. The value of religious conviction. The value of pluralistic tolerance. The value of gender equality. The value of protecting the vulnerable.

These values do not arrange themselves into a neat hierarchy that all reasonable persons must accept. They conflict, and the conflict is not the result of error or bad faith but of the irreducible complexity of moral existence.

Perhaps the most honest position is to acknowledge this complexity rather than to pretend it away. Those who hold that abortion is always murder and those who hold that it is always a mere medical procedure are both, in their certainty, failing to grapple with the genuine difficulty of the question.

What we can do—what this inquiry has attempted—is to understand the perspectives in their strongest forms, to see why intelligent and sincere people arrive at incompatible conclusions, and to approach the question with the humility appropriate to matters that have resisted resolution across millennia of human thought.

The abortion question will not be settled by this essay, nor by any essay. It will continue to be contested as long as human beings must make decisions about reproduction, mortality, autonomy, and the boundaries of moral community.

What we owe one another, in this continuing contest, is not agreement but honesty—about our premises, our uncertainties, and the limits of our knowledge.

The rest is politics.

The Abortion Question: A Philosophical Inquiry

An examination of perspectives on one of humanity’s most contentious moral questions.

Achraf SOLTANI — October 12, 2019