The above information should give you a better background understanding on consciousness — but if it all sounds pretty complicated at the same time, understand that’s because it is. Many people can’t even agree on where our consciousness comes from. Remember that as you go into your discussions. For now, we can get into how abortion supporters use the lack of consciousness to defend taking innocent preborn life.

Nathan Apodaca from the Life Training Institute wrote an excellent article on this topic, entitled “Responding to Arguments from Consciousness” (9). In his piece, he recounted an experience with a college student who claimed that since preborn children lack consciousness, their rights shouldn’t override the “rights” of “actual people” who do possess consciousness.

(A quick aside: There is no natural right to abortion while there is the God-given right to life, and children in the womb are actual people just as much as someone in Asia and someone in South America are. They are just in different locations.

This is a paraphrase of how their conversation went…

Apodaca: Why does consciousness matter and what degree of consciousness does one need to be worthy of life? [Think about our chart above which shows differing levels of consciousness.]

Abortion Supporter: Consciousness matters because it means one is aware of themselves being harmed.

Apodaca: So what? Why do I need to be aware of being harmed in order for it to be wrong to harm me? Identity theft, even if I go unaware of it for my whole life, is wrong. When it comes to killing especially, being consciously aware of being harmed doesn’t give us a reason to reject killing as wrong. Consider people sleeping, people in drug-induced comas, people with temporary lack of consciousness due to an injury — it would be wrong to kill them even though they wouldn’t know it.

Apodaca adds in his article, “Some critics will shift their claim to say that these cases clearly don’t count against their view because all of the individuals in these cases have already been conscious and deserve human rights as a result. Well, so what? Why does that matter? Additionally, how long does one have to be conscious at a previous time in order to count now? Francis Beckwith raises an example of a pair of twins who are born. The first twin, who we will call Tommy, is immediately comatose upon being born, while his twin sister, Sally, gains consciousness for a brief period (say, a half hour) before slipping into a coma just like her brother. If previously having consciousness matters, then Sally probably cannot be killed but Tommy could be. This doesn’t make sense. Now, suppose Tommy did gain consciousness, but only for five minutes, while Sally was Conscious for several days. Does that change things?”

Apodaca: What if, due to advances in gene-editing technology, a doctor can modify a developing embryonic human so that they never attain consciousness, even after birth — and then a few years pass, and we harvest their organs. Is there anything wrong with this?

Abortion Supporter: Of course! You killed them.

Apodaca: Isn’t it interesting that if we just killed them instead of preventing them from becoming conscious, you didn’t see an issue with that?

His article continues in another great aside, reading (9):

“If we root human value in our ability to exercise consciousness, then we are stuck with the result that some humans are innately superior to others. The reason is that consciousness is not a trait that all humans share equally. Humans tend to gain consciousness as they age, starting in the womb and gradually increasing through the course of brain development, before consciousness may begin to decline due to the onset of aging or diseases (such as Alzheimer’s). Consciousness can also vary due to other factors such as drug use or mental health. A drug user who gets put into a psychotic state due to using crystal meth still possesses a right to not be unjustly killed even if they lack all conscious awareness during their high, as does a person in a temporary coma that is due to a head-injury.

“While conscious states may vary, human nature doesn’t. Someone is either human or they are not. Humans have a human nature, meaning an immaterial self that is naturally oriented towards human attributes as opposed to, say, a dog nature. A dog that doesn’t learn how to bark is still a dog even if it has failed to achieve a characteristic we associate with dogs, whereas we don’t express concern at a human who doesn’t learn to bark, as we recognize it is not within human nature to do so… It is also helpful to point out that while consciousness is a human characteristic, it is not what makes us human. We aren’t human because we are conscious. We become conscious because we are human; because we possess a human nature that is geared towards producing consciousness. And because we possess this nature from the time we begin to exist within the womb, it is our nature to be human before we are born. This also means that human nature is a better source to ground our convictions that humans should be treated equally.”

Apodaca’s article encases more angles to this discussion. To read more about how killing can be wrong for multiple reasons; how some people who raise the consciousness issue are not making an observation about human value but about human existence; and further absurdities surrounding this argument, see his article in full (9).

The bottom line? Consciousness as a measure for personhood falls dangerously short.

Students for Life of America (SFLA) team members rebut this argument every day on campus, but if you don’t have the chance to see them in action, you can watch SFLA President Kristan Hawkins take it head on in the clip above.

If you’re interested in seeing more of this discussion on consciousness, you can check out the full podcast episode that Hawkins appeared on here. Relevant time stamps for the conversation on consciousness include 16:00, 20:00, 37:00, 46:00, 2:17:30, and 2:30:00.

Another worthwhile read, Equal Rights Institute’s Nick Ramirez wrote a reactionary blog to this interview, entitled “What is a Human Conscious Experience and Do All Conscious Humans Have It? A Reply to Destiny’s View of Personhood” (10). His piece summarizes the consciousness argument made by Destiny, the abortion supporter Hawkins was debating, and further dissects the discussion. To sum it up, Ramirez neatly divides the issues of the consciousness argument into three major problems:

“First, there is the seesaw problem. If “consciousness” does the heavy lifting in the definition for personhood, it will either be too strict and exclude newborn infants or too broad and include animals. If “human” does the heavy lifting, then this seems to justify the pro-life position and/or fall prey to charges of speciesism or being ad hoc. Second, Destiny has not shown that just because a human has a conscious experience that he therefore has a human conscious experience. This is due to a failure to define what is meant by a “human conscious experience.” Third, even if Destiny can define what a human conscious experience is, it seems likely that such a definition would exclude the kind of consciousness newborn infants have, which would then permit infanticide.”

In the above clip, Matt Walsh also talks about how consciousness isn’t something we really understand or agree upon as a culture, as well as the implications of what he calls “temporary unconsciousness” or “future consciousness.”

For a more scholarly discussion, a 1995 article from the Journal of Applied Philosophy is just as relevant and helpful today (11). Entitled “Abortion, Personhood and the Potential for Consciousness,” this 11-page article gets further into the misconceptions of the consciousness argument.

Sources: 

1. The Scientific American, “What is Consciousness?” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-consciousness/.  
2. New York University, “Are Newborns Conscious?” https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2024/june/are-newborns-conscious.html#:~:text=There%20is%20still%20an%20open,is%20present%20before%20that%20time. 
3. Charlotte Lozier Institute, “Brain Activity in the Unborn.” https://lozierinstitute.org/dive-deeper/brain-activity-in-the-unborn/.  
4. Baby Center, “When Do Babies Start Remembering Faces and Things?” https://www.babycenter.com/baby/baby-development/when-can-my-baby-start-remembering-people-like-grandparents_1368481  
5. BBC, “How Do Children Develop Memory and How Can You Help Them?” https://www.bbc.co.uk/tiny-happy-people/articles/zmttxyc#:~:text=What%20are%20explicit%20and%20implicit,memories%20from%20our%20earliest%20childhood.  
6. Scholastic, “Creative Development in 3-5 Year-Olds.” https://www.scholastic.com/parents/family-life/creativity-and-critical-thinking/development-milestones/creative-development-3-5-year-olds.html#:~:text=By%20the%20age%20of%20three,intellectual%20development%20across%20all%20subjects.  
7. National Institute of Mental Health, “The Teen Brain: 7 Things to Know.” https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-teen-brain-7-things-to-know#:~:text=Although%20the%20brain%20stops%20growing,prioritizing%2C%20and%20making%20good%20decisions.  
8. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, “The Effects Of Aging In The Hippocampus And Cognitive Decline.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0149763416307667#:~:text=In%20a%20different%20longitudinal%20study,et%20al.%2C%202010).  
9. Life Training Institute, “Responding to Arguments from Consciousness.” https://prolifetraining.com/responding-to-arguments-from-consciousness/.   
10. Equal Rights Institute, “What is a Human Conscious Experience and Do All Conscious Humans Have It?: A Reply to Destiny’s View of Personhood.” https://blog.equalrightsinstitute.com/human-conscious-experience/.  
11. Journal of Applied Philosophy, “Abortion, Personhood and the Potential for Consciousness.” https://www.jstor.org/stable/24354127.