Abortion

I have entered a competition run by SPUC to write an abortion essay titled, "Discuss whether you think that an abortion is an acceptable option in an unplanned pregnancy". Because it's actually a competition, it has a bit of a different style to my other few posts on here (less ranting, more reading over after writing). Anyway:

Abortion is perhaps one of the most hotly debated moral topics of the last few decades. The debate has moved back and forth since 1967 when the Abortion Act was passed in the UK. Since then, just over 6.7 million legal abortions have been carried out. The argument centres around, or at least should centre around, whether the foetus should be attributed the rights of a human being. If it should, then abortion is the largest massacre of our time, claiming over 40 million lives worldwide each year – a number equal to all civilian and military deaths in the First World War. However, the subject of whether the foetus is a human life or not is largely avoided by the pro-choice lobby, who advocate various arguments including the idea that it is wrong to enforce morality, that it is the ‘woman’s choice’ and that abortion must be an option to stop so-called ‘back-street’ abortions. These are the arguments that I will be addressing.

The first point that we must consider is that of whether the foetus possesses human life; or more importantly, whether the foetus should be prescribed the rights of a human being - commonly called ‘personhood’. In my opinion, a foetus is just as human, and just as alive as you or me, and thus is a person.

A common argument against the idea that the foetus is a person is that it is “just a tiny bunch of cells”. However, I do not believe that we can use the size of an organism to justify its right – or absence of a right - to life. If we are going to use size as the determinant, then where do we draw the line? At 10 days? At 15 weeks? At 9 months? The current UK law is that a foetus can be aborted at 24 weeks of pregnancy. The question is therefore, to those who believe that size of the organism is a good measure of right to life – why is it that the size of a foetus at 23 weeks, 6 days and 23 hours is not large enough to deserve rights, but one just an hour later is? It seems illogical to allow mere physical size, or number of cells, to tell us as to whether the organism is a person.

Another frequent argument to suggest that a foetus should not be attributed the right to life is that the foetus is not ‘sentient’ until a certain point in the pregnancy. Similarly, I see little logic here. If sentience is a good measure for deciding if a human should be prescribed human rights, then should we give no rights to someone in a coma? It would appear that the pro-choice lobby decided what answer they were looking for in regard to whether the foetus had personhood and then decided what measure they would use.
One can determine that the foetus is a person because of three factors. Firstly, the foetus possesses human DNA, and so is part of the human race. Secondly, the foetus is a separate organism from his or her mother; they have different DNA. In this way, a foetus is its own organism, and not simply a part of the mother, like skin cells are. Thirdly, the foetus has at least the potential to life. Whether the foetus is ‘alive’ or not is difficult to ascertain, as there is no single definition in medical science of what makes an organism alive. What can be said with absolute certainty is that the foetus has the potential for life. This potential grants them the personhood just like any other human being. They have the potential to grow into a newly born baby, and who are we to remove that potential? Furthermore, if we are unsure as to whether the foetus truly is ‘alive’, it would seem more logical not to kill the foetus – as that is running the risk of the possibility that the foetus does have life. Essentially, we can discern that the foetus deserves personhood because they a discrete human organism, and has, at the very least, the potential to life.
One point often argued by the pro-choice lobby is that to remove the option for abortion in normal circumstances is to enforce morality. They argue that removing a woman’s right to undergo an abortion is equal to removing someone’s right to make a moral decision, such as which religion to follow. They argue that allowing abortion does not force anyone into making any decisions. However, the reality is very different. The fact is that we have hundreds of laws which exist to protect the rights of a human being. The individual human is, in the eyes of the law, seen as an end in himself, and therefore legislation which protects the individual’s rights is legitimate. Exactly the same situation exists with abortion. Banning abortion is no more enforcing morality than banning theft enforces morality. We ban theft because it is infringing upon another person’s right to property. Similarly, we ban murder because it infringes another person’s right to life. No-one would dream of suggesting that banning murder was enforcing morality – so we must apply this to abortion as well. If a foetus deserves the right to life (as illustrated in the paragraph above), then we can treat it just as we treat any other human being – and protect its rights. To claim that banning abortion is paramount to pushing a set of moral values on someone is a misguided understanding of the situation, and fails to acknowledge the true centre of the debate – whether the foetus is a person.
Another argument used by those in favour of abortion is that it should be the “woman’s choice”. This argument suggests that by removing the woman’s right to have an abortion, we are removing some sort of fundamental right from the woman. I remember watching a pro-choice rally where the activists shouted, “Women’s rights are human rights! Women’s rights are human rights!” The implication was that taking away the right to abortion was a gross, sexist injustice against women, in the same way as removing a women’s right to vote would be seen as hugely unfair. However, this is attributing a right to women that is simply unjustifiable. The idea of “my body, my choice” means that one has already decided that the foetus has no rights whatsoever. We must also remember that this ‘fundamental’ right to abortion has only been present in the UK for just over 50 years! It is in no way comparable to other fundamental rights such as the right to appeal (Habeas Corpus), which has been enshrined in the Magna Carta in the UK since 1215. Similarly, even if a woman did theoretically have a ‘right’ to abortion, that would mean that that right was greater than the foetus’s right to life. Once again, this argument deliberately avoids the point of whether the foetus should be granted personhood, and instead tries to blind the debate with an abstract notion of “women’s rights”.
A third argument brought up by proponents of abortion is the idea that to ban abortion is to condemn thousands of women to death through so called ‘back-street abortions’. These are illegal abortions which are said to be unsafe because they are often carried out in an unsafe manner, when compared to legal abortion clinics. Undoubtedly, banning abortion would not prevent the return of this situation and therefore would increase the number of illegal back-street procedures. However, this is not the full story. Prior to abortion being made illegal in the USA, the number of women dying in back-street abortion clinics was around 120 per year. Of course, 120 deaths is a tragedy. But if the foetus is a person, then the death of him or her must be seen as equal to his or her mother. The number of abortions in the USA is currently around 1.4 million per year. This shows that whilst 120 deaths is far from ideal, banning abortion will not result in the number of women’s deaths skyrocketing as the pro-choice lobby might like us to think. We must make a comparison – 1.4 million deaths, or 120 deaths. Neither is perfect, but the figures speak for themselves.
In conclusion, I do not believe that abortion is ever an acceptable option in an unplanned pregnancy. The fact of the matter is that the foetus is alive, is a human, and deserves human rights. All arguments of ‘enforcing morality’, ‘the woman’s choice’, or back-street abortions are simply a smokescreen to obscure the real issue. That real issue is that abortion is the quiet holocaust of the 21st Century.