Abortion

The abortion debate asks whether it can be morally right to terminate a pregnancy before normal childbirth.
Some people think that abortion is always wrong. Some think that abortion is right when the mother's life is at risk. Others think that there is a range of circumstances in which abortion is morally acceptable.

Legal Position

A polarising issue

The abortion debate deals with the rights and wrongs of deliberately ending a pregnancy before normal childbirth, killing the foetus in the process.

Abortion is a very painful topic for women and men who find themselves facing the moral dilemma of whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. It's one of the most polarising moral issues - most people are on one side or the other, very few are undecided.

The primary questions

The moral debate about abortion deals with two separate questions:

Is abortion morally wrong?
Should abortion be legal or illegal?
The secondary questions
But those two questions don't end the debate.

If we conclude that abortion is not morally wrong, that doesn't mean that it's right to have an abortion; we need to ask whether having an abortion is the best thing (or least bad thing) to do in each particular case.

If we conclude that abortion is morally wrong, that doesn't mean that it's always impermissible to have an abortion; we need to ask whether having an abortion is less wrong than the alternatives.

The two sides

On one side are those who call themselves 'pro-life'. They say that intentionally caused abortion is always wrong (although it may on very rare occasions be the best thing to do).

On the other side are those who call themselves 'pro-choice' or 'supporters of abortion rights', and who regard intentional abortion as acceptable in some circumstances.

The silent 'victim'

People feel particularly strongly about abortion because there is no way of getting any opinion from the foetus - the potential 'victim' - about the issue (as there is when considering euthanasia), and because the foetus can easily be portrayed as an entirely innocent and defenceless being.

The issues

The non-religious argument about abortion covers several issues, such as:

what gives a being the right to life?
is a foetus a human being?
is a foetus the sort of being that has a right to life?
is a foetus a separate being from its mother?
if the foetus has a right to life, does that right take priority over the mother's right to control her own body?
The problems can be restated in terms of the sort of decisions that pregnant women and their doctors have to face:

Does the foetus have a right to be carried in the woman's womb until it's ready to be born?
Under what circumstances, if ever, can we take an 'innocent' human life?
Is any other right more important than the right to life - for example, a woman's right to decide what to do with her own body?
If the woman's life is in danger because of the pregnancy, how do we decide whose rights should prevail?
The case against abortion
The most common form of the case for banning abortion goes like this:

deliberately killing innocent human beings is wrong
a foetus is an innocent human being
abortion is the deliberate killing of a foetus
therefore abortion is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being therefore, abortion is wrong
If we follow this argument and accept that a foetus has a right to live, then we face part two of the problem:

abortion is wrong unless it serves some right of the mother that is as morally important as the foetus' right to life
the right to life outweighs another person's right to control her own body
therefore abortion is wrong unless it serves some greater right of the mother than the right to control her own body
the only such right is the mother's right to live
therefore abortion is wrong unless it is to save the life of the mother
Beware of the hidden issues
Wrapped up in the ideas above are some issues that need to be dealt with separately...

it's only wrong to kill if death is a bad thing...but is death a bad thing?
what do we mean by a 'human being'?
when, if ever, does a human foetus become a 'human being'?

When is abortion legal?

Reasons for abortion

Some societies ban abortion almost completely while others permit it in certain cases.

Such societies usually lay down a maximum age after which the foetus must not be aborted, regardless of the circumstances.

At various times some of the following have been allowed in some societies:

abortion for the sake of the mother's health
including her mental health
abortion where a pregnancy is the result of a crime
such as crimes like rape, incest, or child abuse
abortion where the child of the pregnancy would have an ' unacceptable quality of life' such as cases where the child would have
serious physical handicaps,
serious genetic problems,
serious mental defects
abortion for social reasons, including:
poverty,
mother unable to cope with a child (or another child),
mother being too young to cope with a child
abortion as a matter of government policy
as a way of regulating population size
as a way of regulating groups within a population
as a way of improving the population
Most opponents of abortion agree that abortion for the sake of the mother's health can be morally acceptable if there is a real risk of serious damage to the mother.

Abortion for social reasons is usually least acceptable to opponents.

A substitute for contraception

Some methods of contraception in fact amount to abortion during the very earliest stage of a pregnancy. The section below only deals with abortion after the first week of pregnancy.

Some societies have used abortion as a substitute for adequate provision of contraception, or quite deliberately to regulate population size.

In 1965, a United Nations Conference on World Population in Belgrade said that abortion was the chief method of birth control in the world at that time.

Most western supporters of abortion rights do not support abortions carried out for such reasons - or at least not as explicit public policy.

However some doctors do argue that abortion should be part of a country's contraception policy.

They say that a society that believes that people should plan their families must allow women to end unwanted pregnancies, in order to deal with failures of birth control.

Abortion and disability

Some ethicists dislike the argument that abortion should be allowed where the baby, if born, would suffer from physical or mental handicaps.

They say that allowing this as a reason for abortion is offensive to disabled people; because it implies that they, and their lives, are less worthwhile than the lives of 'normal' people.

And some people with disabilities that could be put forward as grounds for abortion argue that they would much rather be alive than have been killed in the womb.

Section 1(1)d of the UK's 1967 Abortion Act allowed termination of a pregnancy at any time if there was a significant risk of the baby being born seriously disabled. Under other circumstances abortion has to take place during the first 6 months of the pregnancy.

The Disability Rights Commission criticised this section in the following words:

The Section is offensive to many people; it reinforces negative stereotypes of disability and there is substantial support for the view that to permit terminations at any point during a pregnancy on the ground of risk of disability, while time limits apply to other grounds set out in the Abortion Act, is incompatible with valuing disability and non-disability equally.
In common with a wide range of disability and other organisations, the DRC believes the context in which parents choose whether to have a child should be one in which disability and non-disability are valued equally.
Other ethicists argue that whether or not people with disabilities are upset by this argument is irrelevant.

They say that the argument is wrong because it attacks the principle that all human beings are equally valuable in their own ways. They say that it is just plain wrong to say that one life is less valuable than another.

Other, pro-life, campaigners have objected to this argument on the grounds that it permits eugenic abortion - abortion to eliminate disabling genes from the human race.

Abortion and eugenics

Abortion has been used in the past to stop the growth of population groups, or racial groups regarded as genetically 'inferior'. This is now regarded as a most serious breach of human rights and a criminal act.

Abortion has been used in the past to stop people with various genetic defects from having children. When this is done as a matter of public policy it is now regarded as a most serious breach of human rights and a criminal act.

Abortion and gender selection

In some countries, particularly India there is a major problem with 'female foeticide' - deliberately aborting foetuses that would be born as girls.

For sociological and economic reasons parents in some cultures prefer to have boy babies. When parents can discover the gender of the foetus in advance, they sometimes request the termination of a pregnancy solely because the foetus is female.

While selective abortion for gender preference is illegal in India, the low proportion of female births relative to male births, together with other evidence, makes it certain that female foeticide is practised on a large scale.

Abortion and privacy

One secular argument is not concerned with the rights of the foetus but with whether law and morality have any business interfering in the matter at all.

Some people argue that certain decisions should be reserved for the private lives of individual members of society. They say that moral theorists and lawmakers should not interfere.

This argument is often applied to abortion, and says that the decision should be left to the woman who is considering an abortion.

But the argument is seriously flawed. The reason some activities are said to fall into the private category is that they don't harm anyone. And one of the biggest questions about abortion is just that: is the foetus a 'person'?

So although the privacy argument may sound attractive, it merely distances us from the ethical argument but eventually brings us back to the problem of the rights of the foetus.

Fathers' rights

Abortion and the father

The abortion issue is largely devoted to dealing with the rights of the foetus and the mother. The rights and concerns of the father are rarely discussed.

A woman can legally deprive a man of his right to become a parent or force him to become one against his will.
Armin A. Brott
The most common case concerning fathers and abortion is when the father wants the mother to have an abortion and she doesn't.

But sometimes the mother wants an abortion and the father wants her to have the baby. Is an abortion ever morally wrong because it transgresses the father's rights?

Fathers and the courts
in 2002 a new Chinese law put a man's right to have a child on an equal footing with the right of his wife, and a man has sued his wife for infringing that right by having an abortion
American courts have consistently decided that a woman's right to an abortion can't be vetoed by a husband, partner or ex-boyfriend, and also that a woman doesn't have to notify the father that she intends to have an abortion
In 1987 and 2001 men attempted in the UK courts to prevent their former partners having abortions; they failed
Harm to the father
Fathers' rights have not been much discussed.

However, the philosopher George W. Harris has put forward the idea that there are circumstances under which a woman's decision to have an abortion would be morally wrong because it would do harm to the father.

The argument goes like this:

If the father has a morally legitimate interest in having a child, and the mother misleads the father into believing that she will give him a child if he does certain things, and the father does those things for the specific purpose of having a family, then it is wrong for the mother deliberately to prevent the father from having that child.

These cases involve deliberate deception by the woman:

he wants children but she doesn't
she deceives him by failing to tell him that she doesn't want a family
he devotes himself to her and the much wanted family
she accidentally becomes pregnant
he is delighted but she aborts the unborn child
or

the mother has a relationship as part of a strategy to hurt men
she pretends to love him, and pretends to want a child
he devotes himself to her and the much wanted family
she becomes pregnant
she aborts the unborn child deliberately to hurt the father
Some people object to this by saying that the wrong comes from the deliberate misconduct of the mother, rather than from any moral right of the father.

Harris replies by arguing that abortion itself causes a further harm to the father in addition to the deception - the wrong caused by the deceit is a separate wrong (although necessary for the abortion to be wrong).

When the father doesn't want the child
In most countries men have no right to insist that a woman abort an embryo that they have fathered.

Most legal systems don't allow a father to escape responsibility for his child and for paying to support that child; this applies even if the father had wanted the mother to have an abortion.

Abortion in ancient history

Ancient Greece and Rome

Abortion was accepted in both ancient Rome and Greece.

The Romans and Greeks weren't much concerned with protecting the unborn, and when they did object to abortion it was often because the father didn't want to be deprived of a child that he felt entitled to.

The early philosophers also argued that a foetus did not become formed and begin to live until at least 40 days after conception for a male, and around 80 days for a female. The philosopher Aristotle wrote:

...when couples have children in excess, let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun; what may or may not be lawfully done in these cases depends on the question of life and sensation.
Aristotle, Politics 7.16
Aristotle thought that female embryos developed more slowly than male embryos, but made up for lost time by developing more quickly after birth. He appears to have arrived at this idea by seeing the relative development of male and female foetuses that had been miscarried.

Bible times

The Old Testament has several legal passages that refer to abortion, but they deal with it in terms of loss of property and not sanctity of life.

The status of the foetus as property in the Bible is shown by the law that if a person causes a miscarriage they must pay a fine to the husband of the woman, but if they also cause the woman to die then they are liable to be killed.

The New Testament doesn't explicitly deal with abortion.

Western history

Through much of Western history abortion was not criminal if it was carried out before 'quickening'; that is before the foetus moved in the womb at between 18 and 20 weeks into the pregnancy. Until that time people tended to regard the foetus as part of the mother and so its destruction posed no greater ethical problem than other forms of surgery.

England

English Common Law agreed that abortion was a crime after 'quickening' - but the seriousness of that crime was different at different times in history.

In 1803 English Statute Law made abortion after quickening a crime that earned the death penalty, but a less serious crime before that.

In 1837 English law abolished the significance of quickening, and also abandoned the death penalty for abortion.

In the 1920s English law added a get-out clause that stopped abortion being a crime if it was "done in good faith for the purpose only of preserving the life of the mother."

This change officially recognised a little-stressed feature of anti-abortion laws; they were often intended to protect women from a dangerous medical procedure, and not to protect the life of the foetus.

In 1938 the important case of R v Bourne decided in favour of an abortion performed on a 14 year old girl who had been raped - the court felt that the girl's mental health would have suffered had she given birth - and this established that the mother's mental suffering could be sufficient reason for an abortion.

The judge (Mr. Justice Macnaghten) put it like this:

...if the doctor is of the opinion, on reasonable grounds and with adequate knowledge, that the probable consequence of the continuance of the pregnancy will be to make the woman a physical or mental wreck, the jury are entitled to take the view that the doctor ... is operating for the purpose of preserving the life of the mother.
And the principle the judge set down in that case governed British thinking about abortion for nearly 30 years.

America

Abortion was common in most of colonial America, but it was kept secret because of strict laws against unmarried sexual activity.

Laws specifically against abortion became widespread in America in the second half of the 1800s, and by 1900 abortion was illegal everywhere in the USA, except in order to save the life of the mother.

Some writers have suggested that the pressure to ban abortion was not entirely ethical or religious, but was partially motivated by the medical profession as a way of attacking the non-medical practitioners who carried out most abortions.

Abortions were made legal in the United States in a landmark and controversial 1973 Supreme Court judgement, often referred to as the Roe v Wade case. (Read the BBC News page about Roe v Wade.)

In 2003 the plaintiff in Roe v Wade asked for the decision to be reversed and put forward evidence that abortion is harmful to women.

Abortion rights faced restriction in 2003 after the US House of Representatives and the US Senate voted to ban late-term 'partial birth' abortions.

What the Act actually stated

The Abortion Act of 1967 revolutionised the situation in England by allowing doctors to perform an abortion where two other doctors agree:

that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk to the life of the pregnant woman, or of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman or any existing children of her family, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated,
or

that there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped.
Sufficient grounds
It's easier to understand what the act allowed if you list the possible situations. Any one of the reasons below gives sufficient grounds for an abortion:

the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk to the life of the pregnant woman greater than if the pregnancy were terminated
the termination is necessary to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman
the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman
the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of any existing child(ren) of the family of the pregnant woman;
there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped
Two grounds apply in an emergency:

to save the life of the pregnant woman
to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman
Although it is often said that the 1967 Abortion Act gave women in Britain the right to have an abortion, it actually didn't do that - abortion remained a crime under the earlier law, and the 1967 Act provided a defence for those who had carried out an abortion under certain conditions.

The argument

Why abortion is considered wrong:

People who believe abortion is morally wrong use arguments like this:

Killing people is wrong
killing innocent human beings is wrong
human life begins at conception
therefore the foetus is an innocent human being
therefore killing the foetus is wrong
therefore abortion is always wrong
A foetus is a person
A foetus has a unique genetic code
A foetus is a unique individual
Killing potential people is wrong
it is wrong to destroy potential human life
from conception onwards the foetus is a potential human being
therefore it is wrong to destroy the foetus
therefore abortion is always wrong
Killing beings with 'a future like ours' is wrong
it is wrong to kill beings that would have a future like ours if they lived
in most cases the foetus, if not aborted, would have a future like ours
it is wrong to kill such a foetus
therefore abortion is usually wrong
Causing pain is wrong
it is wrong to cause pain and suffering
a foetus is sufficiently developed to feel pain by 18 weeks
therefore it is wrong to carry out an abortion after 18 weeks of pregnancy
Increasing tolerance of killing is wrong
allowing abortion is legalising killing
legalising killing reduces people's respect for life
reducing society's respect for life is a bad thing - it may lead to euthanasia, genocide and increased murder rates
therefore abortion is always wrong

Why abortion is not always considered wrong:

Most of these arguments are to be read in the context of the first two arguments above. People who don't believe abortion is always morally wrong use arguments like this:

The foetus is not necessarily a 'person' with the right to live
a collection of human cells does not have the right to live just because it is of the human species
otherwise amputating a limb would be murder
a collection of human cells only has the right to live by virtue of certain facts
these are either:
it has reached a particular stage of development that makes it a moral 'person'
it possesses certain properties that make it a moral 'person'
It is not always wrong to end the life of an innocent person
there are many cases where we have to choose which of two innocent people will live and which will die:
conjoined twins, where the operation to separate them may cause one twin to die
mountaineering, when one person can only save their own life by cutting the rope supporting a fallen colleague
the case of a woman who had to abandon one of her children to save the other
'Potential human beings' don't have rights
only 'actual' human beings have rights
The pregnant woman has moral rights too
under some circumstances these may override the foetus's right to live
these rights include:
the right to ownership of her own body
the right to decide her own future
the right to take decisions without moral or legal intervention by others
the pregnant woman has the right to life - where not aborting the foetus would put the mother's life or health in danger, she has the moral right to abort the foetus.

Moral personhood and the nature of human beings

One of the first issues that need clarifying when thinking about abortion is the idea of what we mean when we talk about 'human life.'

When people talk about 'human life' they may mean:

a member of the biological human species - having the human genetic code
But they may mean something very different:

a being that possesses certain human characteristics in addition to the human genetic code
characteristics often suggested might be the ability to think, to imagine, to communicate
but the lists of characteristics put forward may be designed to limit the definition of human in the way the speaker wants
a being that is a 'moral person', i.e. one that has rights, and probably duties too

And the time at which a foetus gets the right to life because it's achieved the relevant list of characteristics can vary from the moment of conception to the time the baby is born.

(In fact for some philosophers, very young babies don't really qualify as having earned the right to life by possessing the right characteristics. Fortunately for young children, these philosophers concede that young babies do have the right to life as a result of tradition and law instead.)

Does it matter?

Yes of course it does, because without getting the point sorted out people can find themselves arguing about completely different things, even though they're both using words like 'human being'.

But it may not matter in terms of pure moral philosophy, since there are cases when most people agree that even if the foetus is a person, abortion may be morally justified.

And some philosophers have argued that abortion can be morally justified even where there is no risk to the physical or mental health of the mother.


Difficult cases

Most people start their consideration of abortion from the standpoint that it would be better not to abort a foetus than to abort it.

Note: one of the Religion and Ethics team suggests that this is no longer true, and that as a result of increased consciousness of women's rights most people are neutral in their thinking about abortion.

However there are many cases in which people who think it would be better not to abort give serious consideration to an abortion. Some of these are listed below:

Cases where there is a serious medical problem:

the pregnancy endangers the life or health of the mother
there are too many foetuses in the womb for them all to survive
the foetus is so defective that it will die later in the pregnancy
the foetus is so defective that it will not live after the birth

Cases where the child will not be 'normal':

the child will suffer from some mental or physical abnormality that the parents (correctly?) think will very seriously damage its quality of life
Cases where the pregnancy is entirely unintentional

pregnancy caused by rape
pregnancy caused by failure of contraception where the potential parents are not to blame
pregnancy caused by a badly done vasectomy
pregnancy caused by the parties not knowing that sexual intercourse causes pregnancy
such cases would include persons who are not mentally capable of understanding this
Cases where the pregnancy is unintentional but where a risk was taken:

pregnancy caused by failure of contraception within the known risk that contraceptive method
pregnancy caused by carelessness in the use of contraception
pregnancy caused by failure to use contraception
Cases where the pregnancy has lifestyle consequences:

having a child would prevent the mother achieving some life objective
the mother is incapable of looking after a child
the mother is incapable of looking after another child
another child would lower the family's standard of living
there is not enough food to support the child
having another child would result in criminal proceedings against the parent
the child is not of the preferred sex
coping with the child's disability would damage the family's lifestyle
coping with the child's disability would disadvantage existing family children

Responsibility of the mother

Most people think that human beings should take responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

And so they say that abortion is wrong where the mother willingly had sex, not because of the moral status of the foetus but because of the responsibilities of the mother.

To put it more formally:

If you voluntarily act in a way that brings about the existence of a person or a foetus, then you have a responsibility to maintain the life of that person or foetus.
So abortion is wrong where the mother had sex of her own free will.

Sure a woman has the right to choose whether or not to become pregnant. She makes that choice before engaging in sex. To make that 'choice' after a pregnancy is underway, merely as a matter of birth control, is an immoral act.
Mona Charen
The argument in steps
a person should accept the consequences of risks that she knowingly and willingly takes
a woman who willingly has sexual intercourse knows that she takes the risk of bringing a foetus/moral person into existence
therefore a woman who becomes pregnant should accept the pregnancy as the consequence of taking the risk involved in sexual intercourse
therefore the woman has a duty of care to the foetus/moral person
therefore she should allow the resulting foetus/moral person to be born
therefore she should not abort the foetus/moral person
This argument works well even if you don't accept that a foetus is a moral person, which is why both words have been used.

Unwilling sex invalidates this argument

But suppose that a woman has not willingly taken the risk of getting pregnant and so did not have any choice in the conception (perhaps she has been raped, for example).

In this case the woman does not have any responsibility for the foetus and so it seems that abortion is not wrong.

This makes it clear that the vital plank of the argument is not the rights of the foetus, but the duties of the mother.

Contraception and responsibility

It might get trickier where the woman has been using a reliable contraceptive method. She could argue that it would not be wrong to abort the foetus because she did not willingly take the risk of getting pregnant: she took every possible precaution to avoid pregnancy.

The strict logic of the argument is that sometimes very remote possibilities do happen, they do have consequences, and people should take responsibility for them. The result in this case is that the mother is responsible for the foetus and should not abort it.

Diminished responsibility

The waters become even more muddied when the woman does not understand, or is incapable of understanding, that sexual intercourse leads to pregnancy. She may live in an area where sex education is inadequate, for example.

In such cases, the woman has not knowingly risked pregnancy and could be considered less responsible for the consequences of her actions.

Application to men

The power of the responsibility argument can be seen by changing genders. Most people would apply the argument that sex has consequences to men without any worries at all.

Once a man has parted with his sperm he is considered totally responsible for any pregnancy that results, and for the child thereafter. Few people would think it morally right for the man to demand an abortion in order to escape his responsibilities.


Disability in the foetus

Some ethicists don't like the argument that abortion should be allowed where the baby, if born, would suffer from physical or mental handicaps.

One argument goes like this:

allowing disability as a reason for abortion implies that disabled people, or the lives of disabled people, are less worthwhile than the lives of "normal" people
this is untrue
this is offensive to disabled people
this will make disabled people feel less valued
Another argument goes like this:

most people with disabilities say that they would much rather be alive than have been killed in the womb
allowing abortion on the grounds of disability therefore pre-empts the choice of the individual concerned

A third argument is that allowing abortion of a foetus with a disability permits eugenic abortion - abortion to eliminate disabling genes from the human race.

The Disability Rights Commission and the Abortion Act

Section 1(1)d of the UK's 1967 Abortion Act allowed termination of a pregnancy at any time if there was a significant risk of the baby being born seriously disabled. Under other circumstances abortion has to take place during the first 6 months of the pregnancy.

The Disability Rights Commission criticised this section in the following words:

The Section is offensive to many people; it reinforces negative stereotypes of disability and there is substantial support for the view that to permit terminations at any point during a pregnancy on the ground of risk of disability, while time limits apply to other grounds set out in the Abortion Act, is incompatible with valuing disability and non-disability equally.
In common with a wide range of disability and other organisations, the DRC believes the context in which parents choose whether to have a child should be one in which disability and non-disability are valued equally.

Equality and disability

Modern society believes certain things about people with disability:

people with disabilities should not be discriminated against in any way
society should do everything reasonable to remove anything that gets in the way of disabled people playing a full part in ordinary life
prejudice against disabled people is not acceptable
stereotypes about disability should be eliminated
However, accepting these things does not change the fact that, other things being equal, to have a disability is to be worse off than not to have that disability.

It is possible to accept that and still to think:

people with disabilities should not be discriminated against in any way
society should do everything reasonable to remove anything that gets in the way of disabled people playing a full part in ordinary life
prejudice against disabled people is not acceptable
stereotypes about disability should be eliminated