One of the most popular pro-choice talking point for abortion is the sentience argument. They believe that sentience determines personhood, whether someone has a right to life.
This article will examine the sentience argument and dismantle it using the logic and reason.
In This Argument…
- Why the sentience and the personhood arguments are desperate attempts from the pro-choice activist to justify abortion
- The conservative pro-life argument against sentience being used as a way to define personhood
Table of Contents
The Sentience Argument for Abortion
The pro-choice claim hinges on the idea of personhood, with sentience defining it. Sentience is the capacity for something to experience feelings and have cognitive abilities. Neuroscience shows conscious feeling cannot emerge until about 24–25 weeks’ gestation, when thalamocortical connections are in place.
While pro-choice activists sometimes concede that a human life is created at conception, this sentience, according to this personhood argument, determines whether a human life has a right to life, whether it is valuable.
Those who peddle this talking point claim that because a fetus is not sentient until a certain point, abortion should be legal up until that certain point. To give the pro-choice side credit, this is at least a valid attempt to solve the abortion issue, but let’s look at how quickly it falls apart.
The Conservative Rebuttal to the Sentience Argument
Scientifically, a human life begins at conception. Pro-choice activists often concede this point, but shift the playing field to the personhood argument to justify abortion. While the personhood argument is a desperate attempt to win the abortion debate, it still doesn’t hold water for the pro-choice side.
Backing up the personhood argument is the idea of sentience. Let’s look at the conservative argument against the pro-choice sentience claim:
- Why Sentience? Why is sentience a marker? Why not heartbeat? Or birth? Or experience? Why does sentience magically grant us the right to life? Pro-choice activists don’t have a universal principle, it’s often subjective, based on utility, independence, or emotional intuition. If dignity is based on traits, you can just keep shifting the line and this line of thinking has brought about atrocities. You don’t become a person by earning it through traits. You are a person because you are a member of the human family. That’s the only consistent, objective standard that protects everyone. But even if we let the pro-choice sentience claim take this huge psychological leap that allows them to define when personhood begins by certain traits for some reason, we can still dismantle the sentience claim.
- Many People Temporarily Lose Sentience, Can We Kill Them? Many people enter states where sentience is diminished or absent, such as during fainting, seizures, comas, or deep, dreamless sleep. That doesn’t mean we can legally kill them. That conclusion is clearly unacceptable. While a fetus is unconscious due to ongoing development and a comatose person’s brain is merely inactive, the moral question is the same: both are human beings deserving of life and dignity, regardless of their conscious awareness.
- OK But Past Sentience Is What Really Matters: Some pro-choice advocates argue that past sentience protects their rights. But if past sentience is what grounds present moral worth, then a pre-term infant delivered at, say, 22 weeks (well before the 24- to 25-week threshold at which thalamo-cortical circuits can support conscious awareness) would, on that view, still lack a right to life even after birth.
- Many Animals Would Have the Same Right to Life: If we use sentience as the correct marker for personhood, then many animals would have an equivalent right to life as human beings. Animals such as mice and squirrels. It has been scientifically shown that mice have a low level of sentience. One well-known study showed that mice actually modulate their own pain when they see a cage-mate suffering, a classic marker of empathy (Langford KD et al., Science 2006).
- But Born Humans Have A Higher Level of Sentience: If we say that the level of sentience matters, it’s a slippery slope because people have different levels of sentience. Newborns clearly feel pain and basic emotions, yet full reflective self-awareness emerges only months or years later; tying worth to a ‘degree of sentience’ would still rank many infants below some adult animals. Can we therefore kill younger humans? And if levels of sentience determine value, then newborns or cognitively disabled individuals would be worth less than healthy adults. Furthermore, sleeping people have conscious awareness that is almost nil, can we legally kill them? That logic collapses. Human rights must be grounded in being human, not in how much sentience someone currently displays. And ultimately, who determines what the living level of sentience is?
Ultimately, sentience falls short just like every other pro-choice personhood argument. When we separate personhood from human nature, we open the door to injustice. But if every human being has intrinsic dignity from the moment of conception, then the unborn are not problems to be solved. They are people to be protected.
Read More – How Should We Define Personhood?
The Bottom Line
- The sentience and the personhood arguments are desperate attempts from the pro-choice activist to define their own set of parameters around what a person is or should be considered as without any moral justification. Even if the pro-choice activist is allowed to make the moral and logical leap to define personhood by his or her standards, the sentience argument still does not hold up.
- There are many people whose sentience diminishes or is absent for a time, such as those in a deep sleep, but we cannot legally kill them.
- If past sentience matters, then a 22-week preterm infant (who may not have experienced sentience yet), would have no right to life, even after birth.
- Many animals are sentient, but do we not hold them to have an equal right to life as born humans.
- Levels of sentience is a terrible argument, as different people have different levels of sentience.