On Abortion
Someone in a Facebook group Iâm a part of posted the question âhow do you feel about abortion?â So I wrote a comment reply. It ended up at 925 words because...I dunno just cause itâs a complex issue I suppose, so itâs too big to really post on twitter like I usually do when I write something decent these days, so I thought Iâd revive the dead tumblr to post it up. Itâs still rough, would probably need another 500-750 words to fully expand and make it slightly more academic, but I was writing this for a facebook post remember. I'm an evictionist. Theoretically, both the foetus and the mother, as living humans, have the natural right to life and bodily autonomy. This means that whilst the foetus has a right to be left alive when conceived, the mother has the right to refuse to incubate it within her body. Unfortunately, current medical technology does not allow us to protect both of these rights simultaneously, as the only way we can prevent a mother from incubating a foetus or fertilised egg is to destroy it by way of drugs or abortion. That means that we have a situation in which the constraints of reality do not allow us to enact the highest moral good, which would be the protection of all parties' rights, and forces us to choose a lesser of two evils - either we allow abortion, and thus say that the foetus' right to life can be abrogated in favour of the mother's right to bodily autonomy, or we do not allow abortion, and in doing so place the mother's right to bodily autonomy as subordinate to the foetus' right to life. Now, there are legitimate arguments for both of these approaches, and which you come down on is very dependent on your other moral perspectives. On the one hand, except in rare cases of children conceived via rape or coercion, the mother took a risk (as even sex with contraception carries some small risk of conception) which led to her right being in danger, whilst the foetus, not having asked to be born, is an innocent. This could mean that we consider the mother's right subordinate, as it is a right semi-voluntarily given up (not fully voluntarily, as in the case of a woman who refuses an abortion, but semi-voluntarily as it was a known risk of a consensual action, similar to how consenting to a skydive isn't consenting to die, but it is consenting to taking a risk which may lead to death). However, equally notable is the fact that the mother is the only of the two involved parties that has the capacity to understand or be aware of her right being infringed. The foetus, whilst it does die, is not conscious or aware of its life in the first place, and does not experience any cognitive or emotional trauma as a result of the action, much as a cow does not realise it is going to be slaughtered eventually. The mother lives, but lives knowing full well that she will have her right abrogated, and knowing that she will bear the physical, emotional and cognitive consequences (which can even amount to death, or serious conditions such as post-natal depression or other complications of the pregnancy and birthing process), and then is forced to bear such consequences whilst fully aware of them. As a result, it could be argued that the harm done to the mother by forcing her to carry and birth the child is greater than the harm done to the foetus by killing it before it's had a chance to actually live. You can also consider that it is a comparison of bodily autonomy to life, and could suggest that being forced to carry and birth a child, whilst not good, is less harmful than being killed. Ultimately, I find that on a purely moral basis, I cannot judge one of these sides to be clearly superior. I haven't covered all the arguments for the various sides as it would take far more words than I am willing to commit to this comment thread, but even with the full argument base I am aware of, I can't decide. So, in order to avoid being a fence-sitter, I look outside the moral realm to the practical. From a wide, societal perspective, what will cause greater harm - unwanted children born to non-consenting mothers, or abortions? The book Freakonomics does a very good job of advancing the case that abortion provides a benefit to society in terms of crime, education, poverty and other such factors. This is because unwanted children tend to be born to poor, single mothers in low income areas, and do not generally have very good life prospects even if the mother does raise them as effectively as she can. Further, if the child is put into state care or private adoption, it will still have higher rates of criminal behaviour, learning difficulties, drug abuse and other harmful habits than a child born to a willing mother at a time of her choosing. Further, not only does the mother suffer if an unwanted child must be brought to term, the child themselves suffers. The instant suffering of a death you cannot comprehend or have any awareness of must, from a utilitarian perspective, unless one subscribes to the superlative container theory (that life itself is infinitely valuable even if the contents of a given life are utterly horrible and constantly painful) be lesser than the compounded suffering brought on the child, mother, and wider society, of another poor, low life chances, statistically more likely to be criminal or addicted or simply unproductive child being born. Thus, as long as abortion is a necessarily fatal process, I am pro-choice. As soon as it becomes possible to remove the foetus from a mother and place it in another womb (natural or artificial) to continue to grow and be born without any physical harm, I will oppose death causing abortion, whilst supporting such a practice as the only moral way for a mother to get rid of an unwanted child.
