Lauren Bialystok: No definitions needed

Last month, Joseph Gray was charged with killing a person who had never technically been born.

Gray -- then a New York City police officer -- went out to drink with his buddies at the end of a night shift back in August. Twelve hours later, barelling down the street in a van, he ran over 24-year-old Maria Herrera, her sister and her small son. And -- argues the woman's husband -- her unborn baby.

Since Herrera was eight months pregnant at the time of the accident, ambulance crews tried to perform an emergency Caesarean section to save the fetus' life. The fetus didn't survive. Now the unborn child has been added to list of Gray's victims of manslaughter.

If the prosecutors are successful, the case will have enormous implications. Gray's sentence will include the crime of hurting an unborn victim, and groups on all sides of the reproductive rights debate will likely erupt into a re-ignited controversy about when life starts.

Many people who feel strongly about reproductive rights engage in arguments about the beginning of life. Their rationale is simple: If we can determine when life starts, then we can determine whether embryos and fetuses should have protection under the law.

That's why anti-choice crusaders have tended to focus on the sanctity of the unborn child's life (hence their ubiquitous misnomer, "pro-life"). If conception signals the beginning of life, they reason, then unborn children deserve legal protection. In order to refute them, pro-choice activists have often had to deny the status of unborn babies as living humans.

The question is intensely compelling. It conjures up topics from biology and philosophy, and it appeals to our most basic curiosity about humanity. But it should not be the crux of a legal dispute over reproductive rights.

Focusing on when life starts is misleading because it's too general. There is a danger in relying on blanket definitions to solve intricate sociological questions, because the issues are by their very nature dependent on myriad factors.

Defining "when life starts" may be an interesting philosophical exercise. But it certainly confounds matters when applied to difficult concrete cases, such as the car crash caused by Joseph Gray.

In order to recognize this, let's try working backward for a moment. If pro-choicers depend on the definition of "when life starts" to defend the choice to abort, then a fetus cannot be considered a "life" until the first moment when abortion is no longer possible -- perhaps not until the third trimester.

However, if a fetus were not a "life," there could be no penalty for interfering with a woman's pregnancy against her will. Someone like Gray could accidentally hit a pregnant woman, killing the fetus but leaving the mother virtually unscathed, and get away scot-free.

This is a chilling prospect. Bearing a child is probably the most personal process a woman can undergo. Parenting is the most meaningful job most people ever undertake. In light of that, should a foreign party be allowed to intervene in a pregnancy against a woman's wishes?

Absolutely not.

Now apply this reasoning to a different scenario. A woman has just discovered she is pregnant against her will. Perhaps she was raped. Perhaps contraceptives failed her. Perhaps she is a drug addict, or a single mother on welfare, or a 12-year old child.

Some say the life-form growing inside her is a person who deserves the same protection afforded to grown adults. She probably perceives the tiny collection of cells as a biological trick that will radically change her life, possibly with no effect on the father. Should the woman be allowed the choice of terminating the pregnancy?

The pro-choice movement says yes.

I would gladly get into a detailed debate about when "life" actually starts, or whether that's possible to determine at all. But not when the goal is to set laws. The question of "when life starts" is just a small portion of the theory behind the reproductive rights debate, albeit one over-emphasized by anti-choicers who want quick answers. A single definition can't cover every scenario.

The advantage of the label "pro-choice" for those who champion reproductive freedom is that it avoids such reductive explanations.

"Choice" suggests the importance of a multitude of factors, rather than just an ultimate decision about how much of a person an unborn child is. We can therefore differentiate between the fetus in the Joseph Gray case -- which was enough of a person that Gray should be held responsible for its death -- and the one in a garden-variety abortion case, which is not enough of a person to override the interests of its mother.

So sometimes an unborn baby is a person, and sometimes it isn't?

Yes, if you insist on reducing it to that.

On the other hand, we could stop looking for a definitive account of when life starts -- and start looking to the person who should be making the decision for herself.

Lauren Bialystok is a senior Philosophy major from Toronto, Ontario.

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