Religions are free to develop their own views on the matter of abortion, and their members make their own decisions whether to follow or ignore their Church's teaching. (It being widely known that
many churchgoing women still opt for abortion.) And personally, I have long adopted what might be called a precautionary approach to the matter: this is a difficult topic, and I don't know where precise lines should be drawn in any objective sense, but I share most people's moral intuition that a late term abortion of a likely viable and healthy baby is a
very serious matter and should have some exceptional justification if it is to happen at all, but a newly conceived embryo warrants a different set of moral concerns. (As I will argue below, conservative anti-abortionists will say that they are above
any line drawing, but by their actions and advocacy, they really aren't.) My approach is that if there are moral ambiguities to taking an action, people should usually err on the side of not doing it. Hence, in a broad sense, I would say that I am more against abortion than for it.
But what about the question of how governments should view it, in light of the mixed views held by different voters? The abortion debate in the US is hotter than ever, with a renewed push for the overturning of the clear compromise position of Roe v Wade, despite it having maintained pretty popular survey support. In Australia, we have had, for no very clear reason, a burst of recent State legislative activity to decriminalise abortion, but which in effect is changing nothing of the practice of abortion which has been in place for many decades. (Conservatives who are in a rage about it seem to think legislators need to pointlessly keep prohibitions which everyone knows are virtually never used.)
Here's a pragmatic suggestion: if both extremes of an issue have a problem with maintaining consistency, doesn't that make it obvious that a compromise between the two is the more justifiable outcome if you're trying to work out a legal framework? And there are inconsistencies.
First: on the pro-Life side - as many have noted, if they serious about every embryo being treated with the same value as a fully formed human, they should be calling fertility clinics which routinely dispose of unwanted, viable embryos as detention and execution centres for human life.
They don't. Quite a few opinion pieces have made this point - here at
the New Republic for one.
And if you put it in a utilitarian context of the trolley problem, who seriously would argue that it is would be better to switch the track to save the potential lives of (say) a hundred frozen embryos (of which, treated properly, a large proportion could be brought to term in families that would welcome them), over that of even one elderly woman past the prime of her life?
This article about the new Alabama law with a specific exemption for IVF embryos notes that pro-Life politicians are simply pragmatic on this:
The fertility industry didn’t support the Alabama bill, nor did it lobby
for an exemption, says Sean Tipton, spokesman for the Birmingham-based American Society for Reproductive Medicine.
It didn’t need to, he says: Politicians recognized that the popularity
of fertility treatments was preventing anti-abortion laws from passing.
The pro-Choice side say, with justification, this:
Abortion-rights advocates call the exemption both outrageous and cynical. “When I heard Chambliss say it was for embryos in the woman’s uterus,
it really highlighted what this is really about,” says Barbara Ann
Luttrell, spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood Southeast. “It’s not about
the embryo.”
Most people intuit that an embryo, by virtue of its form, does not warrant the same legal status as a more fully formed foetus or new borne baby. While it has the potential to become a fully functioning human, and warrants a different ethical attitude towards it than other human tissue for that reason, it goes against most persons intuition to treat it the same as a fully fledged human.
The reluctance of the pro-Life movement to press for equal treatment for all embryos shows they recognise this sentiment and know they will not easily convince people they are wrong. Hence they will live with the inconsistency in their law making.
Second: on the pro-choice side, the reaction against the conservative attempts to ban abortion has lead to calls for women to be forthright in praising abortion as a normal and good thing. Rather than even conceding that they should be rare, as with the old Clinton-ian formulation, they argue that there should be no apologies for having one. They are usually "empowering". See the
Shout Your Abortion site for examples of this genre.
The inconsistency I have lately been thinking about is the comparison with the increasingly powerful animal rights lobby. Public concern about the treatment of farm animals, and the associated uptake of veganism, is taking off in a surprisingly sudden way. While climate change concern is part of the motivation, I would be pretty confident that social media promotion of scenes of animal suffering has also had a very large effect.
I am not immune from concerns about animal treatment, and nor are all empathetic humans, even if it doesn't stop us from eating meat or using animal products.
But the point here is that if a vegan won't eat eggs because the egg industry kills healthy young rooster chicks by putting them through a grinder, how could they not have concerns about a healthy, viable fetus being at risk of death because the mother made a late decision that she does not want the baby? A well developed and healthy fetus is undoubtedly living, as is a chick. Why is it a moral concern as to the premature death of one, at the will of humans who deem it unwanted, but not the other?
When you look at protesting young, pro-choice women, surely it would be a good bet that it would contain a disproportionate number of dedicated vegans motivated by wanting to reduce animal suffering, and not cause the premature death of any creature for human benefit. Surely there is an inconsistency if you think a woman's choice is unquestionable when it comes to late term abortion, but not if it is about whether she should eat an egg for breakfast?
To my mind, the inconsistencies show that neither extreme should be treated as having a fair take on the matter, and legislators should not follow either extreme.
This is what makes the compromise position argued in Roe V Wade such a popular approach. A reminder:
The Court resolved this balancing test by tying state regulation of abortion to the three trimesters of pregnancy:
during the first trimester, governments could not prohibit abortions at
all; during the second trimester, governments could require reasonable
health regulations; during the third trimester, abortions could be
prohibited entirely so long as the laws contained exceptions for cases
when they were necessary to save the life or health of the mother.[6
The matter of how Australia implement a sense of compromise is an interesting issue of itself: obviously, requiring more doctors to be involved in approving a late term abortion has an element of that. There was an argument appearing in
The Conversation today that there should be no gestational limits on abortion, and the argument was put more convincingly than I expected. As is often the case with abortion, it would seem the practice tends to override the letter of the law:
There is no evidence that legal restrictions on second and third
trimester abortions reduce the number of abortions that occur later in
pregnancy. In fact, based on the most recent statistics, the proportion
of abortions performed after 20 weeks in Canada, which has no gestational cut off, is half that in Queensland, which has a 22 week cut off (0.66% compared with 1.34%).
But overall, I am not convinced that it should be left unregulated.
I can see some conservative arguing that my whole position relies too much on moral intuition, which can be so flexible as to be unreliable. Indeed, death of unwanted new born babies by exposure was apparently a not uncommon practice in some places: it is a bit hard to know, though, how their moral intuitions felt about it at the time.
The problem for conservative reasoning about abortion is that it seems to not align with common women's intuition about at least early pregnancy - I know my Catholic mother was annoyed to have fallen pregnant (again - she had 7 children) with me, and said she took hot baths that she hoped might end it early. My eldest sister laughed at the story when it was told - and I was a bit taken aback at the time. (I still don't think it's the best idea to tell your kid that you had really hoped for miscarriage at first!) My sister in her life had fallen pregnant unexpectedly while single while living overseas - I know for a fact that she had the option for legal abortion but she didn't take it.
But I later reflected on how this showed that many (probably most) women, even from a Catholic background, do not automatically feel any maternal connection with an unexpected embyro attached to their uterus. Perhaps especially after having all the children they expected to have?
And I have to say, I find effort to argue against that common women's intuition feels like one of those cases where men (in particular) philosophise themselves into positions against common sense - Kant going on about masturbation being worse than suicide, for example.
So no, I think this is an area of human experience where human, particularly women's, intuition has to be given attention, and moral intuition is a reasonable approach. And as I say, this should lead to a compromise position in terms of public policy, regardless of how you would feel about your own decision.
