If you’re like most Canadians, you’ve probably never heard of George Parkin Grant, Canada’s greatest political philosopher. His banishment down the memory hole is no coincidence – after being a hero of the left during the 1960s, he expressed forceful arguments against abortion during the 1970s. In fact, he throttled the Roe v. Wade decision in public lectures and demonstrated how its reasoning posed a threat to the Western individual rights tradition..Recent events make his analysis more relevant than ever..Grant was a professor at both Dalhousie and McMaster universities. He is best known for his 1965 book Lament for a Nation where he expressed his fear that Canada was doomed to be absorbed by the United States. For a while, his opposition to Americanization made him a hero to Canada’s left-wing nationalists..Then came Roe v. Wade in 1973. The following year, Grant gave a series of lectures at Mount Allison University – including a lecture fiercely criticizing the American abortion decision – that were subsequently published in book form as English-Speaking Justice..His argument is well worth contemplating in the current political climate..In Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that fetuses of less than six months were not persons, and therefore do not have rights. To Grant, that line of reasoning “raises a cup of poison to the lips of liberalism.”.Liberalism, in this sense, refers to the philosophical tradition that every human being inherently has individual rights. Roe v. Wade undermines liberalism because it grants the state the power to arbitrarily remove “personhood” from a certain category of human beings, and therefore exclude them from rights protection..Both the mother and the fetus are human. By saying that fetuses are not “persons,” the U.S. Supreme Court determined that some human beings do not have rights. As Grant explains, “In negating the right to existence for fetuses of less than six months, the judge has to say what such fetuses are not. They are not persons. But whatever else may be said of mothers and fetuses, it cannot be denied that they are of the same species. Pregnant women do not give birth to cats.”.Thus, the reasoning underlying Roe v. Wade raises the fundamental question as to why any human being has rights at all. What are the criteria by which people qualify for rights? In other words, why do we even say that people have individual rights?.This leads to what Grant calls the fundamental questions: “What is it, if anything, about human beings that makes the rights of equal justice their due? What is it about human beings that makes it good that they should have such rights? What is it about any of us that makes our just due fuller than that of stones or flies or chickens or bears?”.If the fact that a particular being is human does not fulfill the criteria for deserving rights, then what criteria will the state use for determining who receives rights protection? As Grant explains, “If fetuses are not persons, why should not the state decide that a week old, a two year old, a seventy or eighty year old is not a person ‘in the whole sense’? On what basis do we draw the line? Why are the retarded, the criminal or the mentally ill persons? What is it which divides adults from fetuses when the latter have only to cross the bridge of time to catch up with the former?”.In this sense, the abortion debate is really about what it means to be a human being or a person. If we define “person” to exclude fetuses, the same definition will exclude other human beings as well. That is, a definition of “person” that excludes fetuses invariably involves arbitrary distinctions between human beings, and one set of arbitrary distinctions can be easily replaced by another set of arbitrary distinctions, endangering even more “non-person” human beings..In short, by permitting abortion our society has been opened up to all kinds of sinister possibilities. The “solution” for unwanted pregnancies today becomes the “solution” to unwanted grandparents tomorrow – this is already happening with medical assistance in dying – and the “solution” to other inconvenient people the following day. The rationale that justifies abortion justifies other potential hazards as well..The difficulty of dealing with this question has led to much disagreement among pro-choice supporters themselves. They have not been able to find a common line of reasoning to overcome the fact that unborn children are human beings. Instead, they fall back on a “woman’s right to choose” and other slogans to justify ignoring the central issue. Some even go so far as to claim that a right to self-defense justifies killing the invader – the unborn child – as if the child is a criminal..But ignoring the philosophical challenge issued by George Grant in 1974 will not make it go away. The so-called pro-choice movement faces insurmountable philosophical objections to their position. The fundamental questions Grant raised decades ago will continue to be asked by thoughtful people and ultimately expose abortion as a threat to the Western tradition of individual rights. That can’t come soon enough.
