SomethingSuitablySharp alliteration, neuroscience and sea otters.

Abortion

I originally wrote about my thoughts on abortion after coming across a Youtube video which showed Christian fundamentalists in the US protesting against abortion. Some sneaky guy was exposing issues with their views by asking them "what do you think should happen to the woman that still have abortions when it is illegal? Jail?"

All the woman (which he edited to include in the video) had not thought this far ahead, stumbled and had no good answers. This does make a tidy point but also isn't too surprising - these people were going on gut ideology not exactly rational legal thought (it was a protest after all).

Anyway, this spurred me on to finish solidifying my own thoughts on the topic. My original attempt was a bit of a mess - internally contradictory and unfocused. In this second attempt I've hopefully got my ideas clearer and cleaner...

For liberals in the western world, the legality of abortion seems fairly certain - almost a knee-jerk reaction to issues such as woman's rights and the bleak outlook of bringing a baby into an impoverished world.

Steven Novella makes the claim that all arguments of abortion ultimately come down to a personal moral choice: which should have greater value, the mother's right to make choices regarding her own body, or the unborn foetus' right not to be killed.

My view is that the mother's right to make choices regarding her own body is greater. I support this view with the idea that abortion is justifiable killing. In this post I'll outline my thoughts further.

To explain my view at length, first I need to define what I think killing is. Putting aside the academic issues around defining life from a biological sciences point of view, I see everything that isn’t inanimate (e.g. rocks) as having life. Therefore, ‘killing’ for me is taking/removing/stopping the life of a plant, cows, human, etc. We kill all the time – for warmth, for shelter, for food. While I follow the path of self-interested speciesism and agree that human life has the highest value, I don’t believe it’s beyond justification for killing.

Therefore, I believe that using this definition, abortion can only be seen as killing. Stopping the organism at any point from fertilisation onwards is killing as it will continue to develop into a human without this critical intervention. The view here is that the foetus = the baby = the person. The progression is evident and is programmed to occur, and will occur without significant external impact or internal destruction (e.g. genetic disorders).

I see a continuum of killing existing in terms of the implications. This is necessary given my broad definition of the word. So killing bacteria is different from killing plants which is different from killing mice, which again is different from killing humans. This continuum is relative to our species of course.

Consistent with this continuum it's necessary to make a distinction between the killing of an adult human and the killing of a foetus. These clearly exist in different places on the continuum of killing and are markedly different in their implications. The killing of an adult human with all its memories, relationships and experiences has far wider and deeper implications than the killing of a foetus in the womb. Hence I believe these differences in implications alter the significance of the word usage and therefore it is not possible to compare such diverse instantiations of killing.

The "justified" of my original term refers to at which point on the continuum killing is justified and for what justifications. This point is necessarily at large determined by one's position on the fundamental moral question raised at the start. As I already stated, my position is that the mother's right of choice over her own body is greater than the rights of the unborn foetus.

So now that the moral position is covered how does one move to the actual decision to abort or not? I don't see this moral position as being able to justify an abortion in and of itself. There are other factors which require consideration prior to making a decision on abortion.

The first additional factor is the input of those close to the woman, for example the father. Clearly the decision to abort or not can impact greatly on the father and hence he must, if possible, be considered in the decision. Other family members might also be impacted.

Another additional factor are the medical and support services. The doctor and/or psychologist/psychiatrist must cover the medical ethics component and ensure that the woman is medically suitable and in a sufficiently stable state of mind to have an abortion. Additionally, support services should be available to guide woman through this decision, giving them all the information to make informed decisions.

Although, ultimately, and especially from a moral argument point of view, the woman is the most significant person in an abortion decision. They have to make the final call, they have to go through with the abortion procedure, or if deciding to carry the baby to term, they have to go through the pregnancy and the potentially life-threatening birth.

Abortion is a complex issue, an issue where black and white dogma ignores the obvious human realities. Moreover, any view held always comes down to the personal moral choice: are a mother's rights over her own body greater than the unborn foetus' right to live. All objective arguments come down to this eventually. It is for this reason that abortion arguments between people who disagree are essentially unresolvable.

Perhaps the most important point is something that can easily get lost in the rhetoric of abortion debate. It is something that both sides can generally agree on. That is, that numbers of abortions need to be reduced. No one argues that high numbers are a "good thing" for society.