Insight Spring 2021

Darwin’s Case for Legalizing Abortion Jasper Zhu ’21 On May 28th, 2019, the Supreme Court ruled to strike down a portion of the Indiana State legislature prohibiting the practice of abortions on the grounds of the race, sex, and mental status of the fetus in the case Box v.

Planned Parenthood. In response to the ruling, Justice Clarence Thomas filed an opinion detailing his disagreement with this ruling grounded in an explanation of the history of eugenics (Farley). Particularly, he characterized abortion as a tool to “achieve eugenic goals” (Supreme Court of the US). Regardless of the accuracy or validity of his analysis of eugenics, his argument took on a distinctively Darwinist tone; by critiquing Margaret Sanger, the pioneer of Planned Parenthood, and her view that the lack of birth control caused the “spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all,” Thomas grounds his argument in a discussion of diversity in the human species and abortion’s harm towards that diversity (Sanger). This view seems to suggest that the practice of abortions harms a species’s overall survivability under a Darwinist paradigm. However, Darwin’s nuanced interpretation of species invalidates the argument proposed by Thomas and actually constructs a defense for the legality of abortions from the perspective of the individual.

Darwin rejects the idea that the human species is one united front with common goals for the whole population and characterizes the use of taxonomical labels as a means of tracing the lineage of certain individual genes.

Darwin never provides an explicit definition for a species and instead admits to the inability to come to an agreement on the meaning of that term in the scientific community (Darwin 106). Regardless, he asserts that each species originates as a variety first and then at some arbitrary moment becomes a species. The vague delineation between these two classifications allowed Darwin to conclude that “no line of demarcation can be drawn between species” (116). Thus, in Darwin’s opinion, no matter what definition of species is used, it still is not a natural phenomenon; taxonomical labels are categorically artificially created. This rejection of the natural formation of species seems contradictory to the extensive usage of this term by Darwin in his writing. However, Kevin Padian from UC Berkeley explains that although the idea is artificial, it still serves a purpose in Darwin’s biological investigation. The latter uses genealogical groupings as a means of tracing 35