Berger, Carol A.

Berger, Patrick F.

English

epublications@Marquette

The Linacre QuarterlyVolume 43 | Number 2 Article 105-1-1976[Book Review of ] Abortion and the Sanctity ofHuman Life: A Philosophical View, by Baruch BrodyPatrick F. BergerCarol A. BergerFollow this and additional works at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/lnqPart of the Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, and the Medicine and Health SciencesCommonsRecommended CitationBerger, Patrick F. and Berger, Carol A. (1976) "[Book Review of] Abortion and the Sanctity of Human Life: A Philosophical View, byBaruch Brody," The Linacre Quarterly: Vol. 43: No. 2, Article 10.Available at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/lnq/vol43/iss2/10Book Reviews Abortion and the Sanctity of Human Life: A Philosophical View Ba ruch Brody The MIT Press, 28 Carleton St., Cambridge, Mass. 02142. 1975, 162 p., $8.95 Baruch Brody's book on abor-tion is not just another handbook on the subject. If Philosophy has any contribution to make to the abortion debate, it is to undercut the psychological, social, and re-ligious rhetoric and to allow peo-ple to investigate the question on a rational, ethical level. Filled with sensitivity towards the mother and her rights in the abor-tion dilemma, Brody nonetheless faces the difficult questions in a concise manner: when may we take a life, when does human life begin, what are the rights of the fetus. The author surveys thoroughly but succinctly the arguments for ana against abortion. In his chap-ter on "The Morality of Abor-tion," he handles the arguments about the mother's right to her body, abortion for the sake of the unwanted child, and the analogi-cal argument that abortion is an-other form of self-defense. To counter these points, he notes, "It is surely true that one way in which women have been op-pressed is by their being denied authority over their own bodies. But it seems to be that, as the struggle is carried on for mean-ingful amelioration of such op-pression, it ought not to be car-ried so far that it violates the May, 1976 steady responsibilities all people have to one another. Parents may not desert their children, one class may not oppress another, one race or nation may not ex-ploit another. For parents, power-ful groups in society, races or na-tions in ascendancy, there are penalties for refraining from these wrong actions, but those penal-ties can in no way be taken as the justitfication for such wrong ac-tions. Similarly, if the fetus is a human being, the penalty for car-rying it cannot, I believe, be used as the justification for destroying it." This last point is the author's most outstanding contribution to the abortion question. For pro-abortionist have argued, as has the Supreme Court, that there is no way that we can decide wheth-er or not the fetus is human. They claim that such idle speculation is akin to the Scholastic Philoso-phers arguing over the question of how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. But Brody meets the difficulty squarely with a theory of essentialism. Basical-ly, Brody asks, what is the dis-tinction between the properties that an object has essentially and the properties that it has acci-dentally? If there are properties that an object must have to exist 115 and without them it would cease to exist as that object, then these are the properties that an object has essentially. With this basis established, Brody sets out to de-termine what properties are es-sential for being human and at. what point does a fetus have these properties. He rejects the theory that the fetus is human at the moment of conception; for al-though the biological character-istics of the fetus have by then been determined, it does not fol-low that the fetus already has all these properties. "What the fetus has is the chromosomal mecha-nism by which the properties are finally produced. Therefore, it does not follow that the fetus out of which "A" will develop is iden-tical with "A" and, like "A," is a human being." Brody takes his stand concern-ing the beginning of human life from the opposite spectrum, through an analysis of death. Arguing from recent studies about the time of death, Brody says, "The traditional definition of death, we could all agree, needs to be modified one more time to read: a person is dead only if there has been an irreparable ces-sation of spontaneous and natural cardiac and respiratory functions and there has been an irreparable cessation of brain function. But suppose we have the latter condi-tion without the former one, wherein t he brain has ceased to function but the heart and lungs have not ... is the person dead if his brain has suffered irrepar-able and massive damage what-ever the state of his heart and lungs?" To this question, Brody would say yes, and so he con-cludes that there is only one prop-erty which is essential to humani-ty and that is the possession of a brain that has not suffered an ir-reparable cessation of function. He then maintains that the fetus acquires the potential of es-sential humanity when the fetus actuates the structures of a func-tioning brain, which comes at about six weeks. While tradition-al Catholic thought would push back the time of personhood even further, Brody's position is cer-tainly more plausible than the Supreme Court's which has evad-ed the issue or put humanity at the time of viability; and Brody's chapter on "Abortion and the Su-preme Court" is a lucid and logi-cal critique on the Court's shoddy thinking in this area. Patrick F. and Carol A. Berger, Ph.D.'s St. Louis University Prenatal Diagnosis and Selective Abortion Harry Harris 101 pages. Harvard University Press, 1975. $6.00 In a very few pages, Harry Harris, Galton Professor of Hu-man Genetics, University of Lon-116 don at University College at the time the book was published, has compiled technical information Linacre Quarterly 

[Book Review of] \u3cem\u3eAbortion and the Sanctity of Human Life: A Philosophical View\u3c/em\u3e, by Baruch Brody

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[Book Review of] \u3cem\u3eAbortion and the Sanctity of Human Life: A Philosophical View\u3c/em\u3e, by Baruch Brody

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