I used to set philosophy exam questions, so here is one. Imagine there has been a small, but still significant, increase in illegal late-term abortions at home, thanks to a new pills-by-post scheme introduced during a pandemic. This means there has also been a small rise in criminal prosecutions of women. Which of the following is the most urgent ethical task: a) try to reduce the number of at-home abortions involving third-trimester babies; or b) stop the prosecutions of women who have them?
On Monday, in another stunning PR victory for that ever-darkening project popularly known as feminism, MPs went for option b, voting to decriminalise at-home abortion for women for any reason and at any stage of pregnancy. Thanks to an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill backed by several Labour ministers, providers will still face sanction for falling foul of existing rules, but women carrying out their own abortions will not.
As is now traditional with major social engineering enterprises, this arrived in Parliament with barely any warning, leaving onlookers blindsided as MPs sewed the thing up in a two-hour debate. Also as usual, the ability to think more than one chess move ahead was missing in action. Late-term abortions are dangerous for the mother as well as intentionally lethal for the baby. Without the deterrent of prosecution acting as a brake on misuse of the pills-by-post scheme — which parliament separately declined to withdraw, and which is easy for people to game — there will now be more deaths. As Jim Shannon MP pointed out, bravely attempting to inject a note of reality into parliamentary debate, after decriminalisation was introduced in New Zealand, late-term abortions increased by 43% in the first year.
But such facts are of little interest to radical pro-choicers, who simply start with the principle that a woman should have total control of her reproductive capacity no matter what the costs to others, and take argumentative matters from there. One way to stop rises in both prosecutions and third-trimester baby deaths would be to modify the pills-by-post scheme, to make it harder to get them; but this too would pit you against the almighty cause of reproductive freedom, allegedly deterring women from having early abortions because they don’t want a face-to-face consultation with a GP.
Unsurprisingly, this sudden glimpse of the cold libertarian priorities lurking behind a fluffy feminist curtain has produced some pushback. For a few plain-speaking and unabashed freedom-lovers, backing decriminalisation means admitting that the painful deaths of other human beings will be a regrettable but necessary cost. But for abortion absolutists within mainstream feminism, intent on continuing to see themselves as caring people, an elaborate rhetorical game of hide-the-dead-baby has now begun.
And the task is trickier than usual. You can’t rely for cover, when it comes to late-term abortions, on the metaphysical ambiguity of personhood; not when the topic is someone who can recognise her mother’s voice, suck her own thumb, and have dreams. A narrative our activists have imported from American identity politics, about the pressing political threat of frothing evangelistic pro-lifers, is hard to make convincing — especially since the parliamentary vote wasn’t even a close-run thing.
So the preferred strategy is emotional misdirection. We are, then, decriminalising all abortions for the benefit of the women wrongly prosecuted, who didn’t know they were pregnant, or who were suffering miscarriages at the time. (Any thoughts on the use of this general tactic for getting rid of, say, rape laws go unrecorded.) Or — if we really must think about the perpetrators the law was actually designed to target — can we please realise that they only ever get rid of their perfectly viable babies because they are “desperate” and otherwise faultless in intention, perhaps even positively altruistic? The fact there is already clear evidence of other psychological possibilities is ignored. In this moral universe, killing a full-term baby — rather than, say, putting her up for adoption — not only never makes you a monster, it quite possibly also qualifies you as a saint.
“The state of the abortion discourse is also reminiscent of campaigns for assisted suicide.”
When disseminating this overheated stuff, you have to ignore other things you’d normally be keen to point out as a conscientious feminist: for instance, that new reproductive technologies, promoted in the name of freedom, can change social norms unexpectedly in ways that eventually harm both women and children. A lot is being made of the fact that only “a few” late-term abortions take place under current conditions; but since the status quo has criminalisation already in place as a deterrent, current figures say nothing about what might happen later as the permissive environment beds in.
The growing acceptance of surrogacy is a case in point: the more acceptable it becomes, the more surrogates there are out there. And in fact, that gives rise to a further question: what happens when surrogate and abortion pill cultures collide? Transactions between strangers can go wrong; you need to do something with the goods if your buyer refuses. Or what about sex selection? That’s normally something feminists care about, but in this case, they are apparently too busy magicking up a vision of essentially benevolent female nature to notice.
It is hard to say how exactly well-intentioned people ended up here, but the phrase “bodily autonomy” getting madly out of control is one part of the story. At this point, it seems to be operating more like a hypnotic mantra than an important value to be weighed up against other ethical values. Within feminism, it turns otherwise inquiring minds into mush and makes their owners look like cult members. Indeed, from one angle, this new decriminalisation initiative looks like the equally foolish historic venture of self-ID: supposedly about advancing personal freedom, pretending other people’s vital interests don’t matter, fond of histrionic cherrypicked examples, and bound to result in a loss of public support for the overall cause.
The state of the abortion discourse is also reminiscent of campaigns for assisted suicide — a matter on which MPs are also voting this week, as the Terminally Ill Adults Bill returns to the Commons for its third reading. Here, too, the fairly mindless invocation of freedom, autonomy, choice, control, rights, and other such happy-sounding phrases are cutting off attempts to build careful and responsible legislation at the pass.
There is no better demonstration of this than the bizarre shape of Kim Leadbeater’s bill itself, based on one from Oregon. Despite all the surrounding stuff about freedom, at base this is a law motivated by compassion, whether or not it achieves it in practice. Thankfully, she does not propose to offer the much mythologised “freedom to die” to absolutely anyone who has suicidal thinking, but only to those who are terminally ill. The implied rationale for this selection is clearly that terminally ill people suffer terribly, in a way that justifies the compassionate offer of assisted suicide to them, and only to them (at least, at this stage).
With this background compassionate intention, you might assume it would be important for those in charge of the assessment process to probe the nature of an applicant’s suffering, in case it could be alleviated by less drastic means than an early death via the ingestion of poison. Could this person be helped with better medication, social support, or just talking his worries through with a friendly face? Is death really the best solution here? Yet according to the terms of Leadbeater’s bill, the applicant can go through the entire assessment process and reach his final destination with no professional ever asking him why he wants to die. The assumption of terrible suffering gets him in the room, as it were — entirely predicated on the terminal diagnosis — and after that, nobody should check its source. Conscientious amendments mounted at committee stage, insisting that the applicant at least be asked about his suicidal thinking, or even have to meet with a palliative care specialist first, were rejected.
This weird sabotaging of the implicit rationale behind the bill comes from the influence of legislators who can only see the good in something if it superficially appears to enhance personal freedom. In effect, after the initial terms of eligibility for assisted suicide were set, suddenly there was an incoherent reversion to the idea that a terminally ill person can get a death from a doctor for any reason, and authorities should stay out of it. As Rachel Hopkins MP said approvingly during the bill scrutiny phase, imagining herself as an applicant: “It is none of your business why I want to pursue this legal course of action.” A host of useful and responsible amendments were rejected on a similar basis.
Here too, then, as with abortion, excessive deference to the causes of autonomy and rights have hollowed out the original impetus to offer genuinely compassionate help, ensuring the opposite would be true for many. The result is an assisted suicide bill utterly unfit for purpose, that will simply kill off those who might have been compassionately helped in other ways. At some point, MPs will surely have to ask themselves who or what all this freedom is actually good for.
