Talk amongst yourselves, we couldn’t possibly comment

One word absolutely not on the lips of political hacks, not even Tory political hacks, is… Abortion. Not this week, not any week. It’s impolite conversation inside the beltway.

But a post here last year (picked apart here) attracted over 250 comments. Just publishing the word is pure Google-juice. Everyone in the real world has an opinion, so why does nobody in political Britain want to discuss abortion in public? It can’t be that 186,274 (2001 data; pdf) annual terminations don’t warrant justification or inquiry.

My own theory on the silence is this: nobody talks in public because it’s too easy to get drawn into dark places, or to find yourself with idiotic allies. You could play the God card; but there’s no debating with faith, and polite society considers the faithful ever so slightly simple.

Religion aside, “pro-lifers” (who isn’t?) offer other weak arguments. One claims the foetus has rights because of its potential for humanity (fully realised in a way that an egg isn’t). This is nonsense: nobody has the rights of what they might become, only for what they are. Neither I, nor the inhabitants of Guatemala City, have the rights of a US citizen, though we have the potential to become one. (I suspect that some Americans making arguments based in potential wouldn’t fancy us having those rights, either. Not the Guatemalans, anyway.)

A second argument claims a right to life for the foetus as soon as it’s “viable” – able to survive outside the body. Owen replies:

Whether or not a foetus has moral worth cannot possibly depend on whether scientists have yet developed an effective artificial incubator. Whether or not a foetus is a bearer of rights does not change over time with scientific progress, nor does it vary between countries according to the state of the health care system.

Quite. It’s often a dishonest, spineless line of reasoning, rightly skewered.

But “pro-choicers” aren’t short of poor arguments themselves. One goes a bit like this: “Male control over birth rights, over women’s bodies, has been a tool of patriarchal oppression for centuries.” True, but any reasonable ethics only allows remedial action against the oppressor. Most of them are long dead, none of them are foetal – so what’s the relevance to an abortion in 2006? Even if the medicalization of terminations in America involved (male) doctors claiming power over (female) midwives, this is irrelevant. History should only carefully be a guide to justice – and only if it suggests a just remedy. Thin-end-of-the-wedge arguments are usually weak, and this is no exception.

There’s an instrumental pro-choice argument, too: “I couldn’t give the child a good life. Why bring it into the world if it will never be fulfilled?” It’s a version of the Freakonomics guide to abortion. For this to be valid, two things need to be true: that there is a shortage of couples willing to adopt newborns, and that death is preferable to a sub-optimal life. The first is demonstrably false; the second is repellent to (most of) the living, just a short hop from eugenics.

Another solution was proposed by a commenter:

…you don’t have to be an out-and-out libertarian to think that there should be some boundaries to the state, and the cervix seems like as good a start as any.

Which is fine, and perfectly consistent if you permit abortions right up to birth. This might appear a “liberal” position, but only if you assign no rights at all to a fully developed foetus, only physically distinguishable from a “baby” by its home address. This is a position most people would reject as tyrannical (which doesn’t mean it’s wrong).

So, what’s left? It’s messy. Both a foetus and the mother must have rights. The mother has the right to bodily autonomy, and the foetus, from some point in pregnancy, a right to life. If we’re going to have time restrictions on abortion, then a foetal right to life somehow trumps a woman’s right to autonomy. (But this argument has its own dark place: we’re allowing the right to use another’s organs against their will. So, could we force someone to give up a kidney against their will, if they were the only person able to help? Perhaps, if kidney donation was as safe as normal pregnancy, which it isn’t. Giving blood is, though: see this great book for more.)

The question is: when does this right to foetal life trump a human being’s right to autonomy? Not from when it can survive outside the womb (“viability”). Not surely at the point of “independence”: that would permit post-birth, involuntary euthanasia. Not either at full self-awareness; some children never get there. Perhaps when it can feel pain? When it becomes conscious? When it develops the capacity for abstract thought or experience, and therefore humanity? All these are coherent positions, intuitively ethical, based in science, subject to change as knowledge progresses, explicit in limiting female abortion rights. None seems to suggest moving the current 24-week limit very far in either direction, as far as I can tell.

The corollary to a policy of forced childbirth (for that’s what abortion time limits are) is that legal terminations should never be interrogated. If we base our laws on the undeveloped foetus lacking (before acquiring) rights, then the only medical concern is the woman’s physical and mental health. Access to early abortion should be free and easy. Pragmatism also suggests that sex education (like maths and English) should be compulsory, and contraception (through schemes like the c:card) accessible. Prevention is better than cure, sure; it’s also cheaper.

None of this is simple for politicians to discuss. Arguments have to be clear and careful. None readily tabloidize. But if party hacks are wondering about electoral disaffection, they could start by interrogating their own eagerness to abdicate. While they’re happy to confine health debates to PCTs and the small print of dentistry contracts, the politics of abortion is happening without them.

First published at The Sharpener and in an edited form in this book.