The Pro-Life Movement: Rational Ethics or Faith?

In the Introduction to my section on Liturgical poems, I made the comment that arguments from faith are inadmissible in rational ethics. The reason I made that statement is because arguments from faith cannot be deconstructed. They are based on absolute moral laws and ‘rights’, whereas rational ethics are rarely that straightforward and attempt to weigh competing ‘goods’, needs and values. The religious mind is rooted in absolute certainty, and that certainty disappears when real-world ethical debate begins.

On 24 June 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Roe v. Wade which had governed abortion law since 1972. This had much to do with the Republican Party ‘packing’ the court with ideologically conservative nominees. Similarly, Republicans have packed state court houses with conservative justices. But just what are the motivations behind the anti-abortion movement and is it backed by arguments from rational ethics or religious morality?

Roe v. Wade was grounded in the legal precept that only an independent entity has legal rights. The Pro-Life movement challenges that assumption by arguing that a foetus that cannot survive independently (i.e. is still growing the mother) has rights as a ‘person’. Let’s clarify this. The ethical debate over abortion centres on the concept of ‘viability’ (the developmental point where a foetus can survive outside the womb which is set at around 24 weeks) vs. ‘personhood’ (the essential humanity of a foetus even before it can survive outside the womb, the point at which an embryo becomes a developing baby occurring at around the eighth week). The Pro-Life movement leans toward the ‘personhood’ argument. However, its ideology is heavily inflected by the Christian concept of the ‘sanctity of life’ and the ‘right to life’, and the Pro-Life movement is predominantly Christian, as reflected in the demographics of states passing strict abortion laws. They regard the foetus as a living human being irrespective of viability; although many would not accept a mere cluster of embryonic cells prior to eight weeks as a person, more extreme opponents of abortion argue that even an embryo is human life and termination represents a loss of that life’s potential. Sanctity of life is, therefore, an argument from faith rather than rational ethics. Rational ethics recognises the ‘value’ of human life rather than its ‘sanctity’ and that value increases the more ‘human’ a foetus becomes. Sanctity of life is an all or nothing position: if you are carrying a cluster of human cells inside you, then it is a human life regardless of its state of development. Rational ethics doesn’t deal in moral absolutes but attempts to balance competing rights, values and interests. It will, for example, balance the life of a foetus against the life of a mother in the event of a danger in giving birth. Clearly this was lost on lawmakers in the state of Missouri in March this year when they introduced a measure making it a felony to perform an abortion on an ectopic pregnancy where the fertilised egg implants outside the uterus. Why did they do this (and without medical advice)? They did it because, behind the argument of sanctity of life, there is a hidden agenda based on religious and public morality in which the right to abortion is said to encourage promiscuity: the family is the basis of society, and any threat to the family (such as women having abortions) is a threat to the social order. It was this that was very much behind the Catholic-influenced total abortion ban in Ireland prior to 2013.

Courtesy: news.trust.org

The problem for the Pro-Life movement is, as with any ideology, that when taken to its extreme it results in absurdity and injustice. What happens if a woman doesn’t realise she is pregnant until after the six weeks allowed by many anti-abortion laws? What happens when she is a victim of rape or the pregnancy threatens her life?  If a woman has a miscarriage, is she responsible for it? Does every miscarriage have to be investigated as a potential crime? Is a glass of wine at night equivalent to child abuse? But it gets worse. Even abortion laws which allow termination if the mother’s life is threatened effectively compel doctors to wait until the mother really does have a life-threatening emergency, instead of pre-empting it, by which time it can be too late. Then there is the issue of incomplete miscarriages where a foetal heartbeat is detectable. Does the doctor keep the foetus alive knowing the mother may haemorrhage to death? And where does a woman go to have surgery for an incomplete miscarriage? What if the foetus has an abnormality that means it will never have quality of life: is it ethical to force it to be born? Thus, the desire of a religious minority with its hand on the levers of power to protect public morality results in the persecution of pregnant women tantamount to the witch hunts of the Middle Ages, requiring an infrastructure of law enforcement.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in overturning Roe v. Wade, would have done well to have studied the experiences of other nations such as Eire (Southern Ireland) which eventually voted down their strict anti-abortion laws. Those laws, enacted under the influence of the Catholic Church, in 1992 forced a 14 year old girl to carry her rapist’s baby to term (although she eventually miscarried), but the turning point came with the death of  Savita Halappanavar in 2012 who was admitted to a hospital in Galway with a miscarriage and clear signs of infection but whose doctors refused to terminate the pregnancy because the foetus still had a detectable heartbeat. Clearly in fear of being prosecuted, the doctors allowed the uterine infection to develop until she contracted sepsis and died. Her death provoked massive outrage and a change in the law, first in 2013 allowing abortions to protect the mother’s life, and in 2018 repealing the Eighth Amendment and allowing abortion during the first trimester. In the United States, a small minority of fundamentalist Christians have infiltrated the Republican party to impose their own religious agenda on state legislatures, vindicated by Supreme Court justices appointed for their conservative ideological credentials, but if they had studied the Irish experience, they might have been more circumspect.

As it is, I am appalled by the tactics of intimidation used by Pro-Lifers to target and vilify pregnant women seeking health care, and by the unregulated data that is collected by fake pregnancy centres which could potentially be used against them. Worse, is the climate of fear created by offering financial rewards to informers. This is not to say that I favour freely available abortion at any stage of pregnancy but neither do I support a total abortion ban. I have always felt that ‘viability’ is an unreliable argument. The mere fact that a foetus at, for example, 20 weeks cannot exist outside the womb does not diminish its humanity; it is in all other respects a baby with a heart, brain internal organs and lungs. Equally, however, total bans are bad for society, breeding a climate of fear and paranoia, and sending desperate women to more liberal countries or back-street abortionists. The answer, as always, lies somewhere in the middle ground, and I believe the Irish model of allowing termination during the first trimester (around 12 weeks) offers the best balance, with exceptions for rape and pregnancy complications (or simply a woman not realising she is pregnant), but I do think we need to be clear about the arguments we are using and where they are coming from. Unfortunately, it is an American thing to take extreme positions in politics and I fear that innocent women will die or be criminalised before state anti-abortion laws are challenged again.