Speaking up for abortion

Cross posted at The Hand Mirror.

I don’t write about abortion often, mostly because it upsets my beloved mother, from whom I learned my feminism, but this is one thing that we disagree on. Mum, you should stop reading about now….

However, part of my reasons for not writing about abortion is that the working compromise reached in New Zealand has in effect allowed most women to access abortion when they need it. It has not quite been abortion on demand, but close enough. For people unfamiliar with New Zealand law, the Contraception Sterilisation and Abortion Act 1977 allows women access to abortion on a variety of grounds, including injury to a woman’s mental health. Women have to get two abortion consultants (doctors) to certify that an abortion is needed, but by-and-large, most women have been able to do so. The “two consultants” and “mental health” provisions have provided sufficient barriers to abortion to keep the right-to-lifers if not satisfied, at least at bay, and the practical effect has been to allow women to have abortions.

I have written before about why I find this compromise unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, until now, it has been a compromise that has worked. However, now it seems that the compromise should be reviewed, because a High Court judge has found that:

there is reason to doubt the lawfulness of many abortions authorised by certifying consultants. Indeed, the [Abortion Supervisory] Committee itself has stated that the law is being used more liberally than Parliament intended.

(A PDF of the judgement can be downloaded here – hat tip: No Right Turn.)

So it may well be back to the barricades on abortion. If many of the abortions carried out in New Zealand are legally questionable, then either access to abortion will be curtailed in order to comply with the law, or the law must be changed.

Julie has put together a summary of the various reactions to the judgement from feminist and progressive bloggers, and she’s written a guest post at The Standard as well (kudos for the money and mouth approach, Standardistas). Rather than going over the same ground, I want to tackle the basic moral issue of abortion, and whether or not it is morally permissible. For what it’s worth, I think it should be legal, no matter what. The alternative is ghastly. But even so, is abortion moral?

First up, I decline to engage in ‘rights’ talk. I find the concept of rights unilluminating, especially when someone slams a right down on the table like a trump card, and claims that’s all there is to it. If you say that a fetus has a right to life, then I will ask you why. Why dos a fetus have a right to life? I will happily accept a second order account of the value of rights, to the effect that our societies function better if we assume some rights, such as a right not to be killed (for full human beings), or a right to freedom of speech, or a right to freedom of movement, or whatever. But that’s a ‘rule we live by’, not a fundamental moral claim. If you make a rights claim, I will want to know the reasoning behind your claim.

That said, my answer is YES. Yes, abortion is morally permissible, because a fetus is not a full human being, and it does not have the same moral standing as full human beings. A full human being, even quite a small one, has hopes and dreams, thoughts for the future and the past, it can conceive of itself as existing in relation to itself, in relation to other people. Killing a full human being is morally impermissible, because it ends that being’s future, it ends its connections with other people, it ends the existence that it values. Note the direction of connection moves from the full human being to the other people.

Fetuses demonstrably do not have these capacities (their brains aren’t sufficiently developed) so ending a fetus’s life is not morally impermissible. I don’t know for sure when the capacities to think, to foresee, to dream, to value existence over non-existence develop, so in practice, to be on the safe side, I’m inclined to push the barrier for the moral permissibility of abortion back quite a long way, possibly even as far as the start of the third trimester of pregnancy. But that’s an issue about drawing a line, and I’m inclined to draw it on the side of caution. But it’s the side of caution, not impossibility.

So there’s an important distinction I’m making here. A human being is not the same thing as a full human being, although in practice, most of the time, the two are indistinguishable. Just having human DNA does not make a full human being, although it is necessary. That is, the DNA content is necessary, but not sufficient, to make a full human being. What matters for being a human being is that connection to other beings, the valuing of continued existence, the hopes and dreams for the future. Once those are in place, then ending that being’s existence is impermissible. Otherwise, ending the being’s existence per se is not impermissible, although you might have other reasons for not ending the being’s existence (such as causing pain in the process of doing so).

This may all seem incredibly hard headed and hard hearted. But if we are to do more than engage in frantic hand waving appeals to emotion, then we need to think hard about the moral status of the fetus, and think about why we think it is morally impermissible to kill human beings. If it turns out that we think that killing is wrong because it ends a human life, any human life, all we are saying is that it is wrong to kill human beings because it is wrong to kill human beings. It’s meaningless. We need to dig deeper, to think about why we regard killing human beings as wrong. I’m arguing that the wrongness lies in ending the being’s own sense of itself, its own future, its connections to other people that it values. However a fetus has none of this, so ending its life is not morally impermissible.

That’s all that really needs to be said. If abortion is morally permissible, then the issue is how to make it safe. And that’s clearly not by making it illegal, driving it underground, and exposing women to danger.

I do think there are circumstances in which abortion can be morally regrettable, but it’s not so much the abortion per se, but the circumstances surrounding it. I think there is a problem if people neglect to take care with contraception, and then choose abortions, repeatedly. I can understand this happening once or twice in a person’s life, but not repeatedly. At that stage, the proper question to ask is why the person has not had a vasectomy or a contraceptive implant or had their tubes tied, if they are not prepared to control their sexual behaviour. This reason I think this is important is that the beginnings of life do matter to us, children matter, families and connections with other people matter. Being careless in the matter of connections with other people is something that is properly open to moral condemnation. But you will notice here that it isn’t the actual abortion that is the problem; it is being flippant and casual about the beginnings and endings of life that matters.

Beyond thinking that abortion is morally permissible, I also think that access to abortion is morally desirable. It enables women to have autonomy over their bodies, to be in control of their own destinies, instead of being subject to the capricious whims of well, fate, in this one respect at least. And that’s the reason that I will be watching this closely, preparing to lobby parliamentarians of all parties, to ensure that at the very least, the current practice with respect to abortion is allowed to continue, or that even better, the law is changed so that women are able to choose abortion without having to bow down before the medical gods first.

Some other points:

I think it is at best disingenuous, and more realistically utterly deceptive, to describe a fertilised egg or an embryo as a baby. You are helping yourself to all the positive emotions in favour of babies, which we have for good evolutionary reasons, when the being that is at stake is not a baby, yet. “Fetus” is a compromise term; I will happily use “product of conception” and help myself to all the negative emotion around that term if you are going to use the term “baby”.

Spare me the arguments from potential. Every five year old child who was born in this country is a potential voter, but that doesn’t mean we allow them to vote. They don’t get to vote until they reach the age of 18, and become actual voters. Potential X’s do not have the same moral standing as actual X’s, whatever those X’s are.

If you really think that abortion shouldn’t be allowed, then of course you will be taking steps to ensure you do not start any pregnancies yourself, so you will either be rushing out to get a vasectomy or to get other contraceptives, or if you are not prepared to do that, keeping your penis out of other people’s vaginas, or not allowing a man to put his penis inside your vagina, just in case. In fact, you had better not have sex at all, given the fact that contraceptives can fail, if you aren’t willing to risk pregnancy and you won’t countenance abortion either.

And for FSM’s sake, why is it that we never, ever, pay attention to what professional ethicists (a.k.a. philosophers) say about this topic. We spend millions of dollars paying some highly skilled people to think through knotty ethical issues, and then just sideline them when it comes to debates like this, and turn to people who hold hierarchically sanctioned positions in institutions devoted to sky fairies instead.