Do Infants Have Minds?

If they did, how could you prove it?

I wrote my first post on abortion several years ago now. Back then my blog had basically no readers, so anyone reading this now probably hasn’t seen that post. I think it’s a good writeup for the purpose of sweeping away the immense amount of noise surrounding the topic of abortion. The vast majority of “discourse” I see on this topic, especially from the anti-life position, is physically painful in how stupid and off-course it is. I don’t think any of that needs to really be revisited here.

The purpose of this post is to address something I’ve come across in the few years since writing that initial post. One of the key points I made in that post was that the abortion issue obviously depends on who is a person, when, and why. You have to be able to define what a person is or isn’t in order to determine whether an unborn child is one or not. As a secondary concern, you would probably also want to define what an unborn child actually is if you’re saying they are somehow not a person, but anti-lifers never seem to bother with that. All they are concerned with is deflecting the accusation that they’re taking the lives of innocents, and other than that, well, no need to think about it too much.

Some of the more intelligent anti-life people also recognize this fact and have constructed their defense of abortion accordingly. I term their position (and this is probably not original to me, but I’m using it now) the “you are your mind” (or YAYM for short) stance. This is laid out succinctly in this article by someone who is at least aware of how this issue actually works:

On another view, the embodied mind view, we are our minds. We are embodied within organisms, but we are not ourselves the organisms. (Perhaps your mind is an immaterial soul, or perhaps it is an object composed of the parts of your brain responsible for your mental life.) On this view, we will not begin to exist until our minds begin to exist. Presumably, this is when our brains develop the capacity for consciousness and a mental life. Scientists are not totally sure when this is: most seem to think it’s during the mid-to-late second trimester, but others suggest earlier points, such as twelve weeks into pregnancy.

This guy uses the term “embodied mind,” so there’s another thing you could call it I guess. In any case, you get the idea. Unborn children don’t have minds, so they aren’t people, so killing them is okay. That last point doesn’t necessarily follow from the ones preceding it, but let’s start with point number one: Unborn children don’t have minds. Well, what is a “mind?” The Cambridge Dictionary gives us this:

“the part of a person that makes it possible for him or her to think, feel emotions, and understand things”

Going by this definition, I think it’s quite apparent why someone might say an unborn child does not have a mind, but there is an obvious follow-up implication: Does a newborn possess what is described here, either? Can a newborn think, or understand things, any more than they could when they were still in the womb? Totally unclear. If they can—if there is some measurable difference there—trying to actually prove it as such seems like an impossible task. You might be able to say a newborn can “feel emotions,” although I think that’s arguable as well, but again—if they can, what is to say that the unborn can’t? How would you go about proving it?

Anti-lifers typically understand that killing babies post-birth is off limits, but I’ve never seen one provide a good account of how the YAYM view doesn’t justify it yet also still somehow justifies abortion at whatever arbitrary number of weeks that they personally prefer. An excellent example of this is demonstrated in this exchange I had with Bentham’s Bulldog in his comments:

This is how the discussion usually goes—once the implication dawns on the anti-life person, they simply nope out, at least if they’re smart about it. Less intelligent anti-lifers might devolve into non-sequiturs, begin contradicting themselves, try to change the subject over to religion, etc. Bentham’s Bully Buddy here asserts that it is “obvious” that I am “the same person as my infant self,” but that can only be obvious if you accept the so-called “animalist” view that my physical existence as a human being is an essential feature of my personhood. If you believe that I am only my intangible mind, and assign zero moral relevance to my continuity of existence as a single physical organism, then it isn’t obvious at all that I am “the same person as my infant self,” or in fact, that my “infant self” was a person at all.

After all, can you remember being an infant? I certainly can’t! How, then, can we be so certain that we were “people?” As I indicated to triple B, animals can do all of the same things infants can, and usually more. It is not in any way apparent that a newborn infant can “think, feel emotions, and understand things” in any real way that a chicken cannot, and if there is any evidence that you could possibly collect in order to demonstrate otherwise, I’ve yet to hear about it. At the same time, we all agree that a chicken isn’t a person, and an infant is. If YAYM, how can that be?

The honest answers are that the infant gains the moral weight of a person either because of their potential future, or because they are a human being, or maybe both. If you’ve ever actually had an infant, like I have, then you know the correct answer is the second one. I don’t view my infant daughter as a “potential person” and never have. She is a person, full stop, and has been since before I even got my first glimpse of her on an ultrasound.

Even if she were to die tomorrow, never having developed a fully mature human “mind” like the one that I have, I would grieve her as a person. Not as a “potential person,” not as merely a human organism of ambiguous and unidentified moral status. The idea that I would have aborted her at 8 weeks out of fear that caring for her might impact my “career” (this is the most common type of reason given for abortion) is utterly depraved. If you would do that, I likewise judge you as utterly depraved.

Does this mean I think that the YAYM view is wholly incorrect, though? Not wholly. What the above facts imply is that both physical continuity of existence and the presence of a human mind are essential components of what we call “personhood,” and that our understanding of the concept isn’t strictly limited to just one or the other. Limiting yourself strictly to only one or the other will lead to untenable implications regardless of which one you pick. If you do try to commit fully to YAYM, and you are being intellectually honest, you need to account for this somehow.

Otherwise, the obvious implication is that you started from the premise that abortion must be allowable, then your mind worked backwards to identify the most plausible defense of that assumption. Look, I get it: You don’t want to face the “what about rape?” question. That question sucks. But if you’re just making shit up to try and avoid uncomfortable questions, you aren’t being intellectually honest, and you have no business really speaking on the subject beyond “I don’t like to talk about it.” If you actually believe that YAYM is true full stop, as opposed to only adopting it selectively and instrumentally, you wouldn’t just silently duck out when someone points out the unfortunate implications to you.