Pro-Life and -Choice, Actually
surefish.co.uk
2005
“No,” says Vera, “that’s your word for it. I just help young girls in trouble.”
A perfect example of how much the debate over abortion is, rightly or wrongly, about the words we use. “Termination” or “killing”? 200,000 unborn children a year, or the individual woman? Pro-life or pro-choice? And why is no one ever anti-life, or anti-choice?
Abortion has surprisingly become a UK election issue, with the leader of the Conservative party speaking personally against it, the leader of the British Catholic church saying, “Vote Tory”, then backpedalling, the leader of the Church of England saying, “Let’s talk things through”, and the government saying, “Let’s not”. Call it cunning or clumsy, the Conservatives will certainly have won back a nice slice of its traditional voters this week, without any change of policy.
It would indeed be a good idea to look again at something that has become normal in our society, as widely accepted as rock music and swearing on television - but only if we can persuade both sides to put away their placards.
The issue is complex, and simplistic black-and-white slogans help nobody. Everyone is in favour of life, and everyone is in favour of choice. We need more than words of one syllable to think through this.
So let me get the ball rolling in our national debate by explaining where everyone else has gone wrong.
Where everyone has gone wrong:
1. Pro-choice
The journalist Polly Toynbee said on Radio 4’s Any Questions recently, “This is about nothing but a woman’s right to choose. No one should be able to make that choice for her.”
The fallacy of this is bafflingly obvious. A woman does not have the right to kill her 1-year-old child, because it is a human person. So before you decide whether she has the right to kill her unborn child, you have to decide whether it is also a human person. This means the abortion question is not only about a woman’s right to choose, but first of all about when a fetus becomes a person.
To decide whether abortion is right without establishing that, is like deciding whether to execute a criminal before they’ve been found guilty.
2. Pro-life
“Abortion is murder,” the placards often tell us. “Life is sacred” is another one you see – meaning human life presumably, as most anti-abortionists are not vegetarians and happily wear leather and take drugs to kill bacteria and viruses.
But both slogans only apply if the fetus is a human person. If it is not human, then why is its life more “sacred” than an ape’s? Why is abortion more murderous than eating bacon?
So here again, the fundamental question being skipped over, is when one becomes a person. Before we talk about “pro-life”, we have to decide where life begins.
Who’s human anyway?
So then, when did you become a human person? Anti-abortionists tend to argue that it happens at conception. This is certainly neat, but is it true? At conception the single cell has all the genetic information that will become you, but nothing else at all. No brain, no heart, no organs, no limbs, no mind, no feeling. It’s an invisible spherical blob. It may be human, but it’s hard to see how this can be described as a person.
Christians might answer that we have souls from conception, and that is what makes us people. But what precisely do we mean by ‘soul’ here, and how do we know it doesn’t come later?
The assumptions of those who support the current laws on abortion are even more dubious. At first glance, the assumption seems to be that we become people at around 24 weeks (which is arbitrary but there’s nothing wrong with that) as abortion is legal until then. But in fact that is the cut-off point only for abortion on demand, not for all abortion. Physically handicapped fetuses can be aborted up until birth.
So either you only become a person at birth - despite the fact that you have virtually all your physical, mental and emotional capacities well before then - or you are only a person in the womb if you are able-bodied. Or the British law on abortion is indefensibly negligent of the life of handicapped people.
And how did we come up with 24 weeks anyway? I’m sure politicians heard expert testimony from biologists and surgeons, of which I am neither (unless you count a 20-year-old O-level. Thought not.) But I have seen photographs of fetuses aborted at 22 weeks, horribly, beautifully human enough for me to think that 24 weeks is about double what it should be.
Some people call such pictures manipulative and emotionalistic. I call them information. Some I’m sure would say that my reaction is subjective and uneducated, which I’m sure it is (though I did get a B, you know). Still, I reckon I know a person when I see one.
First published on surefish.co.uk
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