State should not intervene over abortion

Ten years ago, in a column in the Sunday Tribune, I wrote in opposition to the liberalisation of the laws on abortion. My argument was as follows: the taking of innocent human life is always wrong in all circumstances - this is one of the universal moral intuitions.

At the very least, there is the possibility that a three-month-old foetus is a human being with human life - certainty on when human life begins has proved unattainable, so that leaves the possibility that human life begins at the time of conception or some time very shortly thereafter. This means that abortion involves at least the possibility that what is being destroyed is a human life and this is always unjustifiable.

The protection of vulnerable life (in this instance that of the unborn baby) is, classically, an instance requiring the intervention of the State. Therefore, I concluded, the laws prohibiting abortion were appropriate, indeed obligatory in a civilised society. This applied even in the case of rape, for how could the circumstances of the conception affect the rights of the unborn child?

Ten years later, I have changed my mind.

Throughout the time that I held these emphatic views on abortion, I was unsettled that people, especially women relatives, women friends and women colleagues, with whose moral views I otherwise identified, were strongly of a different conviction on the abortion issue. I also read an article by a US woman philosopher that challenged a basic assumption I brought to the issue - that it is always wrong to take another innocent human life. The challenge was done by way of a fictional construction - a kind of reasoning device that many of us use in ordinary-day life to clarify our thoughts.

The fictional construction was as follows: you are in hospital for a minor surgical procedure, involving an anaesthetic. You wake up and find, unexpectedly, tubes coming from your side and trailing under the curtain around your bed. A nurse tells you that there had been an unexpected development, which the surgeon will explain in moment. You wonder have you been diagnosed to have a terminal disease and you are reassured initially when the surgeon arrives and tells you that it is nothing like that, you will be fine but there has been a slight complication.

The complication, she explains, is that while you were undergoing the surgical procedure, it was discovered that you had a very rare blood type and that you, alone of everybody to whom the hospital had access, could help save the life of a patient who had a rare life-threatening kidney disorder. It was also realised this could be cured only by being hooked up to someone with your blood type. The hook-up was not indefinite; it would take, say, only nine months and, while it would be inconvenient for you, it would not be disabling. You would be able to get on with most of your life.

While you might find this an encumbrance, the encumbrance had to be balanced against the life of the person to whom you were hooked up. The surgeon went on to say she was very sorry about all this, that ideally they would have liked to have had your consent, but the other patient would have died had they waited for you to wake up and they had to do what was best all round.

Now I know that there are lots of ridiculous assumptions built into this fictional construction and that it could not happen in reality, but it does illuminate a few moral issues involved in the abortion question.

The first of these is whether it would be morally wrong for you to say: "No, I am not willing to permit the use of my body for the period envisaged, or indeed any period, especially since I did not consent to this happening"

Even if you think that, given our duty to our neighbour, you should permit the hook-up to continue for nine months, would it be right for the State to intervene and insist that, under pain of criminal sanction, you will not remove these hooks and anyone who assists you to remove them will also suffer criminal sanction?

Perhaps some of us might agree that, morally, the hook-up should be allowed to continue for the nine months, but the vast majority of us would find the intervention of the State and the threat of criminal sanction outrageous. What right, we would ask, has the State to decide, without our consent, how our bodies should and should not be used, even when other human lives were involved?

Apply this reasoning to the abortion issue and take the case of rape. Is it clear that a woman who has been raped has a moral duty to have her body used for the sustenance of the unborn child, given that she gave no consent to the conception of the child? Take it a little further: would such a woman, who has been raped, have a moral duty to give her body to the sustenance of the child even though she had suffered terrible trauma as a result of the rape and the continuing pregnancy was greatly intensifying the trauma?

We might like to think that in such circumstances we would be prepared to permit our bodies to be used, even if it were terribly traumatic (it is easy for a man to write that). If this happened to one of my daughters, for instance, I might try to persuade her to go through with the pregnancy. But the intervention of the State into this would be a very different matter.

It would be one thing for me and others close to my daughter to attempt gently to persuade her to carry the baby to full term irrespective of the trauma to her (and, in truth, I very probably would not do that if the trauma was intense). It would be quite another thing for the State to intervene and tell her she had no option, but must carry the baby to full term and if she did not, she would be prosecuted and possibly jailed, along with everyone who assisted her.

It seems therefore to be the case that every unborn baby does not have a right to have demanded from the mother that she carry her/him to full term. And that issue is at the heart of the criminalisation of abortion.