Abortion

References

Cite

Share

Abstract

The defense of the practice of abortion taxes our moral sensibilities primarily because of the complexity of the ways in which our view of it is affected by other relatively independent social themes. For instance, if the world's population threatened to multiply dangerously within, say, a generation, then routinized abortion might well be required in the interest of racial survival; and that consideration might well be thought to take precedence over the saving of any random fetus-in any rationally defensible policy. Also, if women could practice abortion easily and effectively by themselves, say, by the use of a preparation available in the supermarket-possibly by a hair spray discovered to have abortive powers-then the very privacy and ease of commission of the act, the difficulty of effective legal constraints, and widespread practice typically without shame or a sense of guilt would probably conspire to make the issue a matter of a woman's right over her own body or a matter of conscience to be decided between herself and her family or loved ones. Or, if fetuses were produced by artificial insemination or even entirely outside the body of a woman, then the recognized planning entailed would probably persuade us both of the ease with which alternative fetuses could be provided and of the general irrelevance of the usual claims of the rights of the fetus in assessing whether the developing embryo is or is not intrinsically acceptable on any given scale; of course, abortion under such circumstances would not at all be open to discussion in terms of women's rights as currently construed by women's lib, that is, in terms of the use of a woman's body. Again, if abortion is seen as a problem because, on some religious view, the unborn fetus cannot be baptized and yet, at some critical point in its development (whether at conception, quickening, birth, or when it is viable), it is said to have an immortal soul and therefore to require baptism, then there is an end to the debate-in the double sense that the faithful have no recourse without a change in theology and those outside the faith can find no common ground for dispute. These considerations show that the currently heated debate about abortion is peculiarly affected by some comparatively temporary and highly change-