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Notes -
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):
Is there an actual justification for this anywhere or is this just "women can do no wrong" crystallizing into law?
I preface this by saying it is entirely devil’s advocacy, but it seems like this sort of legislation would be logically coherent under the ‘libertarian violinist’ pro-abortion argument. It’s the woman who is inconvenienced by having another person strapped to her circulatory system, so she has an excuse to get away with murder. No-one violated the NAP on the doctor, so he doesn’t have an excuse.
You mean after she (in 99.5% of cases) voluntarily did the one specific thing that creates people?
I think the take is usually "even if someone gives fully informed consent to have a violinist attached to their circulatory system, they have the right to remove him at any time, even if it causes his death and they agreed not to initially." There are people willing to bite the bullet on this.
Notably, this was not part of the original violinist argument. It was pretty clear from the original violinist argument that they were positing a cabal of music fans kidnapping someone in the middle of the night and attaching them without consent. This version is getting close to my preferred analogy - rock climbing.
More generally, the idea of prospective consent exists elsewhere in the consent literature. The classic example is Odysseus asking to be tied to the mast. It would normally be objectionable for his men to tie him to the mast (or to keep him tied) against his objection. He had reason to believe that his future self would protest profusely, demanding to be untied, but we respect his original consent to overcome his later objections. A related example is the skydiver example. A new skydiver might know that they have a fear reaction to actually jumping out of a plane. It is normally not allowed for someone to just strap their bodies together and throw them out of the plane. But the new skydiver can prospectively consent, saying, "I know that I'm going to protest when we're standing on the edge, but I still want you to pull me off the plane with you."
Nearly all of contract law is an attempt to enforce prospective consent to things that you might not want to do at a future time. Even the most basic, "You give me stuff now, and I'll pay you money later," when at a later time, after having received the stuff, one might protest and want to withdraw their consent to paying the money. But there are clear responsibility laws/rules/norms in gobs of different situations. Commercial passenger pilots, for example, are known to have taken on a responsibility to stay in their airplane and try to save it and the lives of their passengers, even when they might want to just grab a parachute and leave the passengers to somehow save themselves. I think many people would also consider that to be literal murder.
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