ABORTION – CALLOUS OR COMPASSIONATE?

Anti-abortion poster from the Irish referendum

In Ireland there has been only one issue on peoples’ minds recently – abortion.  The votes are bring counted in the referendum as I write in a short gap between jobs and it looks as though the Irish people have voted to change their constitution to allow the termination of pregnancies up to twelve weeks into a pregnancy.* This is half the time currently allowed under British law although, to complicate matters, abortions are not allowed in Northern Ireland and Theresa May’s decision to call an unnecessary election has handed power to the Democratic Unionists who oppose it, so reform there is unlikely any time soon. The strongly Catholic Southern Irish republic will, therefore, have a more liberal abortion law than British Northern Ireland ruled by Protestant Unionists.

The right to an abortion is one which those on the left normally support and those on the right usually oppose.  Yet most of the posters urging people to vote No in the referendum have pictures of a foetus which a change in the law would allow to be destroyed with the implication that it is the left-wingers who are being callous in killing a potentially healthy human being, while the right-wingers are being compassionate in trying to protect it.  I have long thought that one of the reasons pro-choice supporters get so angry with pro-life supporters is that they cannot stand the thought that someone else is outdoing them in idealism and compassion, the very qualities which they assumed they had a monopoly of.  If being left-wing means anything it is supporting the underdog and you cannot be more of an underdog than an unborn child.  Just try looking at one of those photos of foetuses which adorn almost every other lamp post in Ireland and say that it can be flushed away without any qualms at all.  I simply cannot do that.

Yet, if I had a vote, I would almost certainly have gone with those who want to allow abortion.  To use an Americanism I am conflicted on the issue.  In Britain you rarely see those pictures of a foetus which everyone in Ireland has been bombarded with recently. Although there is a vigorous pro-life movement the issue has been more or less settled and one in five pregnancies, the vast majority of healthy potential humans, are ended because the pregnant woman does not want to go through with it.  Many women feel huge relief at not being saddled with a child they do not want after an abortion and there is even some evidence that places with relatively liberal abortion laws suffer less from crime and social problems later on as the majority of children born are not unwanted and therefore less likely to go off the rails twenty years down the line.    

One of the jobs of politicians – and the people who vote for them – is to differentiate between a sin and a crime.  That word sin is not very fashionable these days as it has biblical connotations and sending people to prison surely has little role in the issue. However, the words are useful shorthand for distinguishing issues where the individual decides based on his – or, in this case, usually her – moral outlook and where the state should intervene to decide when to take action.  In fact, abortion is one of those issues where at a certain point in the journey from sex to birth the state has to draw a line and say that the foetus/unborn child/whateveryoucallit is now a potentially viable human being and deserves protection.  In other words, destroying it before that point might be considered a sin but should not (yet) be regarded as a crime. Then it becomes a crime to kill it.

No-one advocates criminalising contraception, although some do regard it as sinful, just as no-one can argue in favour of legalising infanticide, although it has been practiced - and tolerated - in the past).  At some point the potential human in the womb gains the right to life and the protection of the state. The British line is drawn at twenty four weeks and there are arguments in favour of reducing it to twenty weeks as medical advances make the survival of a child born early possible. I am fairly agnostic about where the line should be drawn but I do know that you have to draw it somewhere around the time that life changes from potential to possible.  Moreover these rights are surely absolute and are not withdrawn if the foetus is discovered to have a hare lip or some other defect which makes the future Justin or Justine less than perfect.  We do not withdraw the right to life for living disabled people and neither should we do so for those who are not yet born.

This is a practical rather than an idealistic approach. There is no future in criminalising sin: apart from anything else we do not have room in our prisons for all the sinners in our society.  The pro-life movement probably has a better chance of eliminating abortion if it concentrates on the personal morality involved in the issue rather than the role of the state.  I have a hunch that eventually they will win the argument as people turn away from terminating pregnancies.  There is already evidence that fewer doctors are willing to work in the prestige-free zone of providing them. 

In a recent post in my other blog (http://diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.ie/2018/05/that-was-then-this-is-now.html) I wrote that if we judge people in the past by the standards of today we will be judged by people in the future by the standards of tomorrow and will almost certainly be found wanting.  Maybe the pro-life movement will gain the upper hand in the moral war while it is losing ground in the political one. In a hundred years from now, as contraception improves and conception declines, abortion may be virtually unknown and our use of it might even be regarded as a genocide of the innocent unborn.   I will not be around to see that, however, and need to live in the present.  So, regard ending a pregnancy as a sin by all means but do not make it a crime. 

* That is what the Irish decided by a margin of two to one in the referendum.

Edwin Lerner 

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com