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Apparently, the UKGBNI is set to completely decriminalize abortion in England and Wales when performed by the woman (not when performed by a doctor). According to Reuters and BBC, under existing law abortion by a doctor is legal up to 24 weeks and a woman can perform an abortion on herself with prescribed pills up to 10 weeks. In contrast, the new law—approved by 73 percent of the House of Commons—appears to permit abortion right up to the point of birth when it is performed by the woman.
Text of the law (on pages 108–109 of the PDF; part of a much larger bill):
I read about a case of a woman who got a late-term abortion because her husband committed suicide. Do pro-lifers have any sympathy for her?
Sympathy is just another word for bad public policy. People who are sympathetic are mostly just weights to be borne by the people. The less sympathetic a state is, the more functional it will be, holding all other things equal.
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A good rule of thumb to predict a pro-life person's opinion on something is to mentally replace the fetus with a 1 week old (post birth) baby. Or, if you don't think babies should have rights either, maybe a two or three year old. That is the logical implication of believing fetuses are people.
Would you have sympathy for a mother who killed her 1 week old baby because her husband committed suicide? Would that sympathy extend far enough to excuse the act?
Yes, if she really believed that the fetus wasn't really a person yet and no harm would occur by aborting it.
What does 'person' mean here?
I am using person to mean the general fuzzy concept of personhood and the rights associated with it. Most of us would agree that a single cell fertilized egg is not a person yet. The concept is fuzzy so you can't really draw a line on at what point the fertilized egg becomes a person.
What is the point of even introducing this personhood concept in the first place? The concept of "personhood" here has no applications other than justifying abortion (or maybe killing people like Terri Schiavo) and is completely independent of the rest of most pro-choicers' moral system. Why introduce an ad-hoc moral concept just for this one purpose? And why should pro-lifers like me find this convincing?
Well whether a life is or is not a person is an important moral factor in deciding how immoral it is to kill that life. Everyone has a concept of personhood. I wouldn't consider it an ad-hoc moral concept. For example, people generally don't consider taking animal lives equally immoral as taking human lives. In the case of a fetus, the concept is fuzzy, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I think many people (and pro-lifers) consider late-term unborn fetuses to be people, which is why they find killing them horrifying, so I wouldn't say that it's not a convincing argument. I can see why others may believe otherwise, just like how people wouldn't consider a single-cell fertilized egg to be a person (although they may believe it still has enough moral worth that it should not be killed because it may eventually become a person, which is also valid).
Thanks for the response! I disagree with you that this makes a case for personhood (as a distinct concept from "being a human organism").
I don't agree. in my moral system the only relevant factor is whether it's a human being or not. I can't think of any non-abortion/consistent life ethic issues in which not making this distinction would lead to a conclusion that you'd disagree with.
This issue can be resolved by just deciding axiomatically that human lives are important and animal lives are not. This is what I do in my moral system. There's no need to introduce a concept of personhood separate from being a human organism to resolve this issue normally. Moreover, I think even among animal rights people, the unironic belief that "animals are people too" is pretty fringe.
I'm aware that lots of people use the concept of "personhood" to talk about abortion, including some pro-lifers. I'm just not sure what it gets you outside of the context of the abortion debate, which is what I mean when I say it's an ad-hoc concept. I think you can recover the entirety of most pro-choicers' morality, aside from abortion/consistent life ethic stuff, by just defining "person" to mean the same thing as human organism. I don't even think this runs afoul of what most people who believe in animal rights think. But pro-choicers introduce this extra "personhood" concept that doesn't play any role in their other beliefs to resolve this one issue, rather than taking the simpler route of just defining everything in terms of being a human organism.
I'm not saying the pro-choice position is inconsistent. I'm saying that it requires introducing extra complexity to your moral system that isn't used for anything else. Is there any issue, aside from consistent life ethic/abortion stuff, in which you must appeal to personhood as distinct from being a human being in order to arrive at the normal position?
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I think 'personhood' in this context is mostly nonsense and everything gets circular fast.
Comes down to something like "It's okay to kill him because he's not a person, and he's not a person because it's okay to kill him."
Yeah, I can understand that. It's very subjective as people mostly go off of their moral instincts.
Do you believe that it's actually truly subjective? As in, it's okay for someone to kill someone else as long as they don't consider the victim to be a person? There's absolutely nothing wrong with people slaughtering "non-persons" as long as the non-person is sincerely believed by the slaughterers, and if people go around doing that you will have no complaints?
Or do you perhaps have a more nuanced and less genocidal belief about personhood grounded by something beyond mere subjectivity?
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A "late term" abortion is "aborting" a fetus that would otherwise survive outside the womb. That's a premie baby and this is baby murder. Accepting that it is baby murder, there'd better be a damned good reason such as the kid was going to die anyways and also kill the mom. Something better than the dad committed suicide.
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Sympathy for her terrible situation, sure, and it suggests there's more to the story if the husband doesn't want to live long enough to see his baby. But that doesn't mean that she should have done it. Was she suddenly worried the baby was going to inherit whatever its father was committing suicide over or something?
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That she personally made sure to kill off the last remnant of her late husband? No, I don't.
From a game-theoretic standpoint it probably increases her reproductive potential. She's much more likely to find a new mate (and get more kids in better conditions) than if she were a single mother.
Putting the kid up for adoption would also prevent single-motherhood, and my understanding is that the child would have an excellent chance of being adopted more or less immediately.
I was coming from more of a subconscious, evo-psych angle rather than anything rational, but yes what you say is true.
It seems fairly clear to me that the psych construct underlying the median abortion is closure. The psychic goal of abortion appears to be to avoid not only being a mother, but also having been a mother.
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With regard to the willful destruction of a viable human infant, no, I don't. Why should I? Do you have sympathy for mothers spurred by tragedy to murder their birthed children in other contexts? Do you endorse "accompaniment" killings like Sati?
The voluntary form is something I can appreciate, if not endorse. Reactionary on deep love, and all.
The involuntary form can fuck off. Murder is bad, news at 11.
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