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Ethics of abortion handoutDr Calum Millerc.miller@Last updated: 7/12/2018Bracketed numbers refer to references given at the end of the document. Please do get in contact if you would like a citation for any unreferenced claim made here. This is by no means a comprehensive list of considerations in the debate, nor is the list of references anywhere near comprehensive. Please also check the website from time to time for an updated version and get in touch with any objections. Not all the references appear in the text so do read the reference list separately for further information.Christianity and abortionContext: Canaanites used to sacrifice infants to the gods, widespread archaeological evidence confirming this. Widespread infanticide in Graeco-Roman world, particularly for disabled and female babies. Pagans would leave their unwanted babies at the doors of Christians because Christians were so well-known for looking after the youngest human beings. This is the heart of Christian social justice. So we cannot ridicule those who oppose abortion on religious grounds only – the Christian pro-life tradition is a tradition to be proud of, having prohibited child sacrifice in Canaan and infanticide in the Roman Empire!Moreover, many of our moral principles, including a belief in human rights, human equality and the sanctity of human life, stem from Christianity – see Singer and Spencer quotes:‘If we go back to the origins of Western civilisation, to Greek or Roman times, we find that membership of Homo sapiens was not sufficient to guarantee that one's life would be protected. There was no respect for the lives of slaves or other 'barbarians'; and even among the Greeks and Romans themselves, infants had no automatic right to life. Greeks and Romans killed deformed or weak infants by exposing them to the elements on a hilltop. Plato and Aristotle thought that the state should enforce the killing of deformed infants… Our present attitudes date from the coming of Christianity… During the centuries of Christian domination of European thought the ethical attitudes based on these doctrines became part of the unquestioned moral orthodoxy of European civilisation. Today the doctrines are no longer generally accepted, but the ethical attitudes to which they gave rise fit in with the deep-seated Western belief in the uniqueness and special privileges of our species, and have survived. Now that we are reassessing our speciesist view of nature, however, it is also time to reassess our belief in the sanctity of the lives of members of our species.’ Peter Singer, foremost ethicist in the world today‘What I’m saying basically is the abortion issue is just a much more complicated issue than this kind of “good or evil” binary that the pro-life movement and the Christian movement want to use. We need to be more adult than they are. We should recognize that the pro-life movement—this is not the alt-right, this has nothing in common with identitarians, and I think we should be genuinely suspicious of people who think in terms of human rights and who are interested in adopting African children and bringing them to this country and who get caught up on this issue. We want to be a movement about families, about life in a deep sense, not just “rights” but truly great life, and greatness, and beautiful, flourishing, productive families. We want to be eugenic in the deepest sense of the word. Pro-lifers want to be radically dysgenic, egalitarian, multi-racial human rights thumpers—and they’re not us.’ Richard Spencer, foremost white supremacist in the US todayBiblical points: lots of talk of life in the womb; lots of talk about how ‘personhood’ analyses don’t give us our value. Our value is not dependent on mental ability, physical ability or economic independence – on the contrary, we are called to look out for the least of these! We are not valuable because of what we can do but because of what we are – God’s beloved, made in his image. See [3, 4, 8, 23, 24] for work on Christianity and abortion; [23, 24] are the most concise online summaries.Church tradition: unanimous from 1st century until the 20th century. And it was the Church’s pro-life ethic which helped put an end to infanticide in the Roman Empire. So it is a tradition to be proud of. Many quotes from Church Fathers on the gravity of abortion: see [23] for a summary of Jewish and Christian tradition and where Jesus likely would have been positioned on it.How to approach abortion1) Compassion: why does abortion happen?~200,000 in the UK annually. 1 in 3 women in the West will have one in their lifetime. Up to 100% (Iceland) of children with Down Syndrome aborted (slightly lower in UK) – about 3,000 abortion take place because foetuses have been diagnosed with disabilities each year in the UK, including about 700-800 for Down’s Syndrome. 90% of these take place after 13 weeks. Legal to abort up to term for certain conditions (including cleft palate): in some countries (Canada, North Korea, Vietnam, China, and parts of the US) abortion up to term (and beyond: see partial birth abortion below) on demand is available. So a large number of women affected.Health: life-saving abortions are exceptionally rare: fewer than 1 a year in emergency cases in the UK, and fewer than 100 in non-emergency cases (life-saving and grave injury-preventing abortions are grouped together, so it’s not clear how many are life-endangering). This accounts for fewer than 0.05% of abortions (1 in 2,000). Abortions to save the mother’s life are almost always legal around the world, even in the most conservative countries (e.g. Northern Ireland, Iran, pre-referendum Ireland, etc.). Very few abortions are performed for physical health reasons (about 0.2% of ground C abortions in the UK, so about 300-400 a year), and most abortions (98%) in the UK are justified on mental health grounds (classified as F99, which is ‘mental disorder, not otherwise specified’ – so not even an attempt at diagnosis!). But the evidence suggests that women who have abortions do not benefit in their mental health, and in fact every major professional body recognises that those having abortions show no improvement in mental health compared to those continuing pregnancies (e.g. the RCOG abortion guidelines[13]). In fact, there is some more recent evidence that mental health is made worse by abortion (this claim needs to be handled carefully; while it is pretty much uncontroversial that abortion is not associated with improved mental health, which is significant in itself, many doubt that abortion is associated with poorer mental health. It is a valid point and my considered judgment is that abortion is associated with poorer mental health (as the most recent survey, by pro-choice psychologist David Fergusson suggests), and it is undeniable that abortion can lead to very severe mental health difficulties (suicidality is one of the risks most clearly linked with abortion). So if you want to use this point it is worth being aware of some of the points of contention and evidence. But the evidence is good. See [13]). And women are not properly informed of the outcomes and possibilities: that these risks exist, that there is no shortage in the UK of parents willing to adopt newborns, and that there is no evidence – uncontroversially – that abortion improves mental health.Pressure: it is common for women to be pressured or forced into having abortions, whether the soft pressure of having few options (or, more commonly, simply not having the options made known to them: there is enormous support available for pregnant women and new mothers from pro-life organisations, and adoption is always an option for newborns in the West) or the hard pressure of being specifically encouraged to have an abortion. This can be from the partner or from abortion providers. Up to 64% of women feel pressured to have abortions and up to 52% say they need more time to make the decision[17]. In a study by a pro-choice group, 23% of women said one of their reasons for abortion was that their partner didn’t want the child. There are many stories of Planned Parenthood (foremost US abortion provider) workers claiming that they were given targets for numbers of abortions performed, and a non-partisan government investigation in the UK found that Marie Stopes (one of 2 major abortion providers in UK) staff likewise felt pressure from above to encourage abortion, and that they had a company-wide policy of calling up women who had decided not to have an abortion to perhaps reconsider. Pressure to have abortion is also common globally, where women in developing countries are pressured by foreign abortion providers (often acting illegally) to have abortions.Adoption: as mentioned, women are frequently not told of the available options. One of these options is adoption, which many people claim is not an option because there aren’t enough willing adoptive parents. The opposite is the case: adoption agencies are so inundated with calls for people willing to adopt newborns that they are forced to take their phone numbers out of phone books! The adoption crisis is because a) older children are less likely to be adopted, b) the adoption system is bureaucratic and takes a long time to process adoptions, and c) adoption agencies judge that most children in care aren’t suitable for adoption because they aim to re-integrate them with their original families. There is no shortage of willing parents for newborns.Miscellaneous but stats related: it is commonly claimed that pro-life laws don’t lower the abortion rate and just lead to backstreet abortions. It is very rare for people who claim this to cite any evidence, and in fact there is no evidence for this claim. There are lots of studies by economists and statisticians on the impact of pro-life laws and generally pro-life laws of all kinds (whether banning certain abortions, reducing state funding for them, parental involvement laws, etc.) seem to reduce the abortion rate[15, 35]. The usual response is to either cite no evidence at all, or at best to point to a paper or two in The Lancet or by the Guttmacher Institute, which basically show no difference between abortion rates between countries with various abortion laws. This is a basic correlation-causation fallacy, and there are well-known confounding factors explaining the lack of discrepancy: principally, poorer countries have more abortions for various reasons, and also happen to have relatively pro-life laws. When confounding factors are checked and when proper economic and statistical analysis is done, the evidence that pro-life laws reduce abortion rates is clear. And we even have direct evidence that many women denied abortions continue their pregnancies. A paper by Biggs et al. in JAMA Psychiatry (2017) shows that the large majority of women who sought and were denied abortions on legal grounds went on to carry the child to term.We now know that statistics about backstreet abortions were fabricated by pro-choice proponents. Bernard Nathanson, who founded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, confessed later that they invented statistics about maternal deaths from illegal abortions and exaggerated them by orders of magnitude. Moreover, illegal abortions were (and likely would be) relatively safe if laws were crafted well. Complications from medical abortions could be followed up with hesitation if women were given amnesty, for example. And many abortion providers are already wanting to have abortions at home without medical supervision (this has been introduced in Scotland). The former medical director of Planned Parenthood, Mary Calderone, wrote back in 1960: “Abortion is no longer a dangerous procedure. This applies not just to therapeutic abortions as performed in hospitals but also to so-called illegal abortions as done by physicians.” How much more so now.I say ‘relatively’ because abortion is not safe even when legal. There are well-known complications and a very strong link between abortion and suicide; legal abortion is therefore plausibly responsible for a significant number of suicides each year, suicide being one of the top causes of death among women of childbearing age. See [17a] where I go through the evidence on abortion and mortality, citing other papers (e.g. [17b]) which show that continuing a pregnancy is considerably safer than abortion, mortality-wise. And of course, most abortions result in the death of a human being. So reducing the number of abortions can drastically reduce the number of human lives lost. To deny that this is important is to deny egalitarianism: it is to deny that human lives are equal.If the pro-life view really is right, then justice and protection of the vulnerable require that we uphold the rights of the unborn even if it means that it has some bad consequences. “The fact that restricting access to abortion has tragic side effects does not, in itself, show that the restrictions are unjustified, since murder is wrong regardless of the consequences of prohibiting it”, wrote Mary Anne Warren, one of the foremost pro-choice philosophers of the 20th century. Abortion almost always kills an unborn child, and can kill women too, even when legal. That is why it is important to love both by protecting both woman and child from abortion, presenting women in crisis pregnancies with other options and support (which is, of course, what most pro-life organisations do, despite common claims that pro-lifers don’t look after born children).2) TruthAbortion is heavily euphemised with frequent dehumanising language. This is common for human rights violations: the same language was used of Jews, African Americans, disabled people, and so on. Hence talk of ‘terminating pregnancy’ or even ‘evacuating the pregnancy’. But reading and listening to otherwise pro-choice organisations and activists often elicits slips of the tongue revealing the humanity of the unborn. Doctors and other health professionals have no reservations whatsoever about calling unborn babies ‘babies’ when the pregnancy is wanted: the insistence on using technical language is purely ideological rather than driven by science.It is important to know the details of unborn life. The NHS website[31] actually has quite a good section on how the baby develops at each week, if you click on the particular weeks. Also see [29] for videos illustrating the embryological process. Likewise, although the use of abortion images and videos requires sensitivity, care and judiciousness, an important part of the history of social reform (including almost every human rights movement) involves exposing injustice through images. [30] has images of aborted foetuses which graphically depict their human nature, and I really urge you to view them. I highly, highly recommend (less graphically, but still very disturbing) watching the videos at [28] where a former abortion doctor describes (using cartoons) each of the common abortion procedures.As some examples, babies are recognisably babies within a few weeks. The heart begins to beat 3 weeks after conception, with brain activity beginning perhaps a week later. Unborn babies move and kick and swallow not long after. Almost all abortions occur on a recognisable baby whose heart is beating and brain has started to work, even if the baby is usually very small (as babies usually are!). As a brief summary, medical abortion typically involves taking two drugs, one to stop the uterus being hospitable to life, and the latter inducing miscarriage. Surgical abortion involves either vacuuming the baby out of the womb, dismembering it in the process, or, if the baby is too developed, dismembering the baby piece by piece, and crushing the skull if it is too big to be removed from the womb without doing so. After viability (now 21-22 weeks gestation), killing the baby first by a lethal injection is normally recommended but not always carried out. There are a few other, much rarer, methods of abortion (see also partial-birth abortion below).3) LifeThe pro-life ethic is really an ethic of life: not of oppression or control or sexism. We should be offering life to both the unborn and women. And the evidence is on our side: we can offer life to both, which is why so many pro-life groups (like ‘Love Both’ and ‘Both Lives Matter’) offer material and emotional support to mothers, and which is why the evidence suggests abortion does not help women.Remember: You are not the extremists77% of women in the UK – a liberal country with some of the most liberal abortion laws in the world – think doctors should have a legal obligation to check that a woman is not being pressured to have an abortion, and that there should be a mandatory waiting period. 93% of women think doctors should have a legal right to independent counselling. 70% of women think the abortion limit should be lowered (41% think to 12 weeks or lower, compared with only 17% who think it should remain as it is, and only 1% who think it should extend to birth). And women are more pro-life than men. Other polling data show considerable ambivalence towards abortion on a variety of measures. See [20] for all these.And yet pro-choice groups have been advocating – with only 1% of the population[20] – abortion up to birth. And partial birth abortion restrictions only narrowly won 5-4 in SCOTUS, having also been opposed by a large proportion of Congress and vetoed by Bill Clinton as President. Partial birth abortion involves delivering a baby almost entirely so that only the head remains inside the mother, then cutting into its skull and sucking its brain out. This was claimed to be only done in very rare emergency situations where it was required. But those performing the procedure have now admitted it was done very commonly, on healthy women and healthy babies, at late stages of pregnancy, and with the baby alive until the end of the procedure. Compare with attitudes towards the death of an infant during or just prior to birth – if the doctor is responsible, there is widespread outcry for them to be jailed.Likewise, pro-choice groups have been arguing for the legality of sex-selective abortion (opposed by 90% of the population), and have long supported abortion up to birth for disability (as does English law, despite the pro-choice UN claiming that this law is discriminatory. And note that this includes entirely correctable conditions like cleft palate). English law already allows sex-selective abortion as long as having a female baby is seen as a threat to the mother’s mental health (which, we have established, is a trivially easy condition to fulfil in practice). And current moves in Parliament are aiming to make it even more clearly legal, with complete decriminalisation of abortion for any reason up to (and perhaps during) birth.By contrast, the same pro-life ethic Christianity offers was responsible for eliminating infanticide in the Roman Empire. Christianity is responsible for the ideas of human rights and human equality – these are completely alien concepts to most cultures throughout history. The Christian Church has been overwhelmingly pro-life for the large majority of its history, and Judaism and Islam are at least relatively pro-life – that is over half the world’s population! And social justice reformers have always been immensely unpopular – the reactions to William Wilberforce and Martin Luther King are telling, and are no indication that they were in the wrong. History judged them more kindly. And Christian ethics has a lot to be proud of.Pro-life arguments5 arguments – some of which overlap and might use the same principles at heart – but are still different helpful ways of approaching the issue. In summary, the main problems for most pro-choice positions end up being that they fail to account for human equality, and they fail to account for the wrongness of infanticide, or of killing severely disabled people. So helpful starting points for discussion include: a) human equality and the basis for it, b) the wrongness of killing infants or severely disabled people, or c) the fact that almost everyone thinks that late-term abortion is wrong and should be illegal.It is especially helpful to start discussions by establishing this common ground: that we believe in human equality and the wrongness of infanticide, for example. Almost everyone agrees with these, though it is in fact quite well recognised in the literature that pro-choicers have to reject egalitarianism. Establishing human equality is therefore a major step in establishing a pro-life position.But it is also helpful at the start to establish that almost everyone thinks that there should be some limits on abortion. There are some exceptions: some people really do think it should be legal to perform a partial-birth abortion for fun, or because the baby is the wrong gender, when the baby could survive independently outside of the womb, at full term. But those people are few and far between. Even in the UK, only 1% of people think that abortion should be legal up to birth. So almost everyone thinks that abortion should be restricted in some cases. And this is hugely important: it means that we almost all agree that bodily autonomy is not paramount, that the rights of the baby can outweigh the rights of the mother, that we should restrict women’s choice, and so on. So when people accuse pro-lifers of stopping women from choosing, remind them that at least 99% of the population supports some abortion restrictions. So then the question is not about who supports women’s rights or who values bodily autonomy; the question is just exactly which restrictions on abortion there should be. Given that virtually everyone thinks there should be some, it makes no sense at all to think that someone who simply supports more restrictions than other people suddenly hates women or wants to control them, and so on.So much more could be said about all this. I am currently working on a number of papers and a book, so if you do have objections, please e-mail me or look elsewhere for responses.1 Human inclusivenessP1) All human beings are of equal value/have equal rightsIn general we agree that human beings are of equal value and that none of them should be killed except in extraordinary circumstances. And indeed we think that humans are equal even though they differ in certain respects: they differ according to their developmental level, their cognitive capacities, their economic or physical independence (or lack of it), and so on. And indeed, some of the greatest moral movements in history (the civil rights movement, disability activism, welfarist movements) are specifically predicated on recognising our common humanity and the fact that humans are equal even though they differ in these respects. Conversely, movements which have denied human equality have typically caused the worst moral atrocities in human history (slavery, the Holocaust, patriarchy).There are two problems here for those who want to deny that all human beings are equal. They have to explain a) how human value varies: does it vary up to a point/threshold (e.g. being self-aware) above which all humans are equal? Or does it just increase insofar as the purported grounds of human value increase (for example, those who have more developed intellectual capacities being more valuable and having more rights than those with less developed capacities)?The problem with the former type (threshold views) is that they are extremely ad hoc and don’t explain why our value/rights depends on a certain capacity or ability up to a point, but why any increase in those capacities above that point do not increase value or rights further. This seems like a very ad hoc move simply made to preserve human equality with no theoretical grounding (“This is all neat and tidy, but does it have any plausibility? If certain psychological capacities are the basis of a person’s worth, it seems that the possession of those capacities to a markedly higher degree ought to give a person a higher degree of worth. The idea that there is a threshold beyond which worth ceases to vary with the capacities that are its basis may seem an arbitrary, ad hoc stipulation motivated entirely by a desire to salvage our egalitarian intuitions” Jeff McMahan, the foremost and most sophisticated defender of abortion in academic ethics).The problem with the latter type (no humans are equal) is that it is grossly counter-intuitive and in tension with some of our deepest moral commitments regarding human equality. We would plausibly have to give up most of our moral developments, most of our thinking about human rights, and about human equality, and so on, if we were to abandon this view (again, see McMahan: “All this leaves me profoundly uncomfortable. It seems virtually unthinkable to abandon our egalitarian commitments, or even to accept that they might be justified only in some indirect way – for example, because it is for the best, all things considered, to treat all people as equals and to inculcate the belief that all are indeed one another’s moral equals, even though in reality they are not. Yet… It is hard to avoid the sense that our egalitarian commitments rest on distressingly insecure foundations”)The second problem for those who deny this premise is to explain b) what are the grounds of value/rights. Several possibilities are suggested: sentience/consciousness, degree of dependence, desires, the capacity to have the mental life of a normal human adult, and so on. The problem with these – other than the problem described in a), is that they appear to exclude cases of humans who obviously have human rights – sleeping people, disabled people, people on welfare, depressed people, infants, and so on. This is a very implausible consequence.P2) Foetuses are individual human beingsThis is not in fact very uncontroversial from a scientific perspective. The standard view in embryology is that fertilisation makes the beginning of a new human organism[38]. No one in biology or medicine denies that foetuses are living human beings. They may sometimes say they deny it, but they are usually talking about personhood rather than life or being human. Hence why stopping the foetus’ heart is known technically as ‘feticide’. On the accompanying PowerPoint slide I have given a few more reasons for thinking this.Conclusion: Therefore, foetuses have equal value and rights to the rest of us – including the right to life2 Infants and foetusesP1) If there are no morally relevant differences between newborns and foetuses, then foetuses have the same rights as newbornsThis appears obvious. How could one have different rights if there are no morally significant differences between them? The only way one could deny this is to say that newborns and foetuses could have the same intrinsic moral status but have a different extrinsic moral status – perhaps because one is dependent on the mother, for example. The most famous example of this argument is Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist argument. This will be discussed later.P2) There are no morally relevant differences between newborns and foetusesAt least if one is talking about intrinsic moral differences, this is obvious. For they are just the same thing either side of the birth canal. Indeed, some newborns born early (e.g. around 21 weeks gestation) are much less developed than many foetuses (in the womb until 9 months gestation)! But yet we still think that newborns have a right to life – or at least a right not to be killed. Think of the difference between (most) newborns and (most) foetuses: size, level of development, environment and dependency (help acronym: SLED). None of these are typically thought to undermine one’s basic human rights – nor should they in this case. Infants simply do not have the level of cognitive capacities or ‘personhood’ that most people suggest is the basis of the right to life. But then if such capacities really are the basis for the right to life, then newborns do not have it either.Conclusion: Therefore, foetuses have the same rights as newborns. (Even the foremost pro-choice academics accept this, or something close to it!)Implication: Since most of us believe that newborns have human rights, so do foetuses. But some deny this: they think infanticide should be permissible too. This is wildly implausible to most people. But for people who think infanticide is permissible, one can extend the implications: if newborns are not persons, it is far from clear why we should not be able to do much worse things to them: use them for live invasive experimentation, farm them for organs, use them for gratification, and so on. These are all obviously repulsive (and I regret that I have to even discuss such examples in academic work), but they seem to be natural implications of the view that foetuses are not persons. For more on this, see [12].3 Failure of other accounts/other anglesIt looks (from above) like most of these accounts of personhood and rights fail – suggesting a more binary category like ‘being a human organism’ might be a more obvious basis for human rights. But there are also problems with other accounts of various related questions: why is killing wrong? What grounds personal identity?There are various accounts of the wrongness of killing. But it is difficult to come up with a plausible account that doesn’t also rule out abortion. It can’t be that killing is painful, because sometimes it is not. If it is that killing reduces pleasure or deprives of future goods, then so does abortion. If killing is wrong because it frustrated desires that a person has at that particular moment, then it seems that killing people with no desire to live is OK (it is obviously not!). If killing is wrong because it frustrates future desires to live, then so does abortion. If killing is wrong because life is sacred or because it violates human dignity in some way, then plausibly abortion does too. And so on. A helpful paper by a non-religious ethicist on this is [11].4 Prudential argumentP1) If there is significant doubt over whether a human being has a right to life, we should err on the side of cautionConsider an analogy: suppose you are detonating a building and someone tells you that they think, on balance, there is no one in it. But they’re not really that sure because they didn’t check that thoroughly. Is it permissible for you to detonate the building? It seems not. Why? Because when we are unsure about such cases, it is better to err on the side of caution.P2) There is significant doubt in the case of abortionSee the rest of the handout!P3) Therefore, we should err on the side of caution5 Religious argumentsConsider the Biblical and Church tradition evidence discussed in the lecture. And remember that this is not necessarily a bad reason: a) the Christian pro-life movement is what outlawed infanticide, b) Christian principles have been responsible for much of our moral development – abolishing the slave trade, Martin Luther King’s work in the civil rights movement, Desmond Tutu’s work in apartheid South Africa, and so on. c) Even many of our contemporary moral attitudes came from Christianity – see Singer quote at the start of the lecture. d) This is only unreasonable if there is not good evidence for Christianity. But there is! So someone who objects to religious reasoning has to show that there is no good reason to believe in any religion – and this is a very difficult taskBalancing rightsUnfortunately I have not been able to devote much time in this lecture to this issue, despite it being at the forefront of many abortion debates. The issue is whether the foetus’ right to life is outweighed by the mother’s right to autonomy. Most of the foremost pro-choice academics think that this is not plausible, except perhaps in cases where the woman’s life is at risk. That is, even most pro-choice academics think that the question of whether the foetus is a person is central: if the foetus is a person, it is largely agreed that the foetus’ rights are paramount. And we can see this most easily by considering when it is ordinarily legally permissible to kill a human person: almost never. And certainly never for the reasons abortions are ordinarily carried out: for financial reasons, career reasons, family planning, and so on. Killing in UK law is ordinarily only permissible in self-defence, or if the culprit is insane. But on self-defence, a) the foetus is not an aggressor, so it is difficult to see that self-defence would apply. So, for example, it is wrong to kill someone else to take their organs even if doing so is necessary to save one’s life; and b) killing in self-defence is normally permissible only if there is a threat to the life of grave injury to the life of the victim. But in the overwhelming majority of abortions this is not the case. There is a further unique defence to killing based on ‘necessity’. In the UK this defence to murder has only been used once, for a highly unique case where both lives were in danger (it is a case concerning Siamese twins). Again, the overwhelming majority of abortions are not of this nature. For more on this, see the book by the pro-choice legal scholar Kate Greasley[5], “Arguments About Abortion”, where she argues that these legal defences do not work and that the rights of the foetus – if it has them (she thinks it does not, really) – are of utmost important to establish.But not only is killing ordinarily impermissible in all but the most extreme of cases: we normally think we have a duty to give significant protection to the vulnerable and marginalised. So not only is it wrong and illegal to kill those people who are dependent on others in society (e.g. those on welfare benefits, those in hospital), it is illegal even to withhold certain support from them (by not paying taxes, etc.). And certainly a significant portion of the feminist movement has been focussed on our obligations to those who are marginalised. This has recently been developed in a paper ‘Fetuses, Orphans, and a Famous Violinist’ by the feminist philosopher Gina Schouten[10], where she argues that feminist perspectives themselves lend some support to the pro-life movement if the foetus has the same rights as the rest of us.There is one famous thought experiment denying that the foetus has a right to life in the case of abortion even if it has the same rights as the rest of us, however. This is the famous ‘violinist’ thought experiment by Judith Jarvis Thomson: she says to imagine you have been kidnapped by a musical society and hooked up to a famous violinist for 9 months. If you disconnect yourself from them before then, the violinist will die. And she argues that it would be permissible to unhook yourself from the violinist, even though the violinist will die. And likewise in the case of abortion, one might permissibly disconnect oneself.As I said earlier, even the foremost pro-choice academics now reject this argument (McMahan, Tooley, Greasley, among others). It has a number of problems and disanalogies from the case of abortion. Firstly, it is not even clear that one could permissibly unhook oneself. Is it really obvious that this would be permissible? Thomson herself concedes that it would be morally better to stay hooked up – an implicit concession that continuing a pregnancy is morally superior to abortion? In any case, this seems far more powerful for a legal argument than a moral one: even if this establishes that abortion should be legal, it is far from obvious that it establishes that it is moral. And so there might still be good reason to advocate for pro-life reforms or initiatives short of banning abortion.What seems similarly clear is that the analogy is not a good one. There are multiple disanalogies which are plausibly morally significant. For example, the parental relationship is plausibly relevant. If the violinist were one’s daughter, would it be obvious that it should be permissible to disconnect them? And if one were responsible for the violinist’s ailment (perhaps by drink driving), would it be permissible to disconnect them? If not, then it seems that the analogy only works in the minority of cases where the woman has been sexually assaulted.There are further problems: it seems that the analogy would only justify abortion before the point of viability. If one could unhook the violinist in a way that allowed them to live, then surely it would be wrong to unhook them in a way that kills them. Moreover, it seems that this general principle has worrying implications for other dependents. It is generally false that if someone is dependent, we have a right to kill them. Indeed, we do not even have a right not to help them in many cases. We are legally obliged to pay taxes and use our bodies to earn money to do so. And as a society we have a collective duty to look after those in hospitals or needing financial assistance. And even if we had no obligation to help them, it would still be obviously impermissible to kill them.This leads to the final difficulty (for now): killing is very different from failing to save. Although both duties often co-exist, the duty not to kill is much stronger than the duty not to save. We would be much less convinced of the permissibility of unplugging the violinist if it involved typical methods of abortion, for example. The details of abortion are given above: suffice to say that the overwhelming majority of abortions are evidently cases of killing. And the prohibition on killing in English law is, as described above, very strict: only in the most extreme cases is it permissible, and certainly not for the same reasons as most abortions. Again, Kate Greasley’s book is best on this.Tips on communication“But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.” Ephesians 2:4-5We think this is obvious – that we care about women, that we consider ourselves as sinners with no moral authority, and that there is grace that is deeper than any sin – but to most people in the UK it isn’t obvious that we think this. So it is extra important to stress this.Recognise women, the pressures on them, how fragile their position in society is and why they would be scared or threatened by the pro-life position. Make completely clear that we want to love both.Show grace and humility - recognise our own sin and complicity. Be creative about the more subtle ways everyone is involved in abortion culture (whether misogyny, sexual sin, etc.) so that we can make it clear it’s not picking out a particular population group and blaming them. The Christian story gives powerful resources for addressing radical and sensitive injustice, because it says we are all part of it, and says that we have no platform from which to judge.We are neither saviour nor judge – we are “mere beggars telling other beggars where to get bread”. We are freed convicts!Keep in mind at all times who the enemy is: “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Ephesians 6:12Remember that people can support awful things while still being ‘decent’, conscientious people: “Do all you can to reconcile the hearts of men, especially of good men, to each other, however they may differ in their opinions about matters which it is impossible for good men to dispute” William Wilberforce, on disagreeing with othersBe calm and gentle: one of the most powerful things I have been told about some of my work is the ability to speak about things calmly and gently. It takes some practice, but asking questions, keeping tone and voice measured, is immensely important.Being right isn’t enough: if we have the right views and win the argument, we’ve only done 10% of the job (or less).Be honest; say that we don’t want to have to speak about it, and be clear that we realise how hurtful discussing the topic can be. Make clear that you’d rather avoid the topic if you could (if that’s true for you) but that you feel like you have to be involved because you see it as a justice issue.It’s not a religious debate, but the gospel is powerful: use secular arguments and don’t rely on religious concepts. But also don’t feel that you can’t bring in the gospel: the gospel has unique power to humble pro-lifers and heal those wounded by abortion.Use the language of the culture: to some extent pro-lifers already do this with talk of ‘human rights’ rather than ‘sanctity of life’ but the human rights language has also become somewhat tainted over a long period of the pro-life movement using it. But ‘justice’ is a helpful and newer concept that most people in our generation are open to, and because justice is so relational and relies so much on us people depending on each other and supporting the vulnerable, it gives a helpful perspective on abortion.Ask simple, probing questions like, ‘why do you believe that?’ This is a general tip for evangelistic conversations, but particularly in the context of abortion, listening carefully and probing views that usually prove not to be well-founded is especially helpful.Tips on men speaking about it: bear in mind everything above. Keep in mind arguments showing that this reasoning in general doesn’t work: we don’t think only people in government are in a position to speak about or criticise the actions of government, because we think justice requires speaking up for people who can’t speak for themselves. We don’t think only women should speak about FGM, for example. But don’t make the logical arguments at the expense of winding the other person up. If true, say that you have been specifically asked by women to share their stories and to speak up for what they think justice involves. Use the language of modern social justice movements: we are called to speak up for the vulnerable, we are told again and again that to be a passive bystander isn’t enough and that where we see injustice, then we are complicit in it unless we speak up. This was true in the civil rights movement, for example, when Martin Luther King Jr’s main grievance with most white people was simply that they stayed silent. Likewise, the language of ‘allies’ is helpful: being a male ally of feminism or a straight ally of the LGBT movement is seen as important. People who have privilege are normally supposed to use their privilege to speak up in defence of those who have less of a voice. And that is what we are doing in the case of abortion. And feel free to use personal stories: no one can ever deny the validity of a personal experience in our culture.As mentioned above, remember that we already agree that abortion should have some restrictions. So the question is just about which: not about whether we can ever have restrictions on it. This defuses a lot of the accusations of extremism.I recently had a 30 minute discussion with evangelist Glen Scrivener about evangelism and abortion, and how to communicate about the issue. It received positive feedback even from non-Christians so might be worth viewing for tips on communication. See [32]. See also [39] for a sermon I have given on abortion which might also help.Ways to get involvedThis is area-dependent so please do investigate organisations in your own country and area. Volunteer with crisis pregnancy groups, work in medicine and policy-making, address the issue in your church, contact politicians and pray.Please do send me your e-mail address if you would like to be on my mailing list. I will use it sparingly and only send out occasional e-mails with all the updates, so it will be little commitment. But it will contain lots of helpful information.Other important referencesBooks:[1] Christopher Kaczor – The Ethics of Abortion – book covering general philosophical arguments for the pro-life position[2] Francis Beckwith – Defending Life – similar but with a few more legal considerations etc.[3] David Albert Jones – The Soul of the Embryo – really helpful book on the history of attitudes towards abortion in the Judeo-Christian tradition[4] John Wyatt – Matters of Life and Death – general book on Christian bioethics[5] Kate Greasley – Arguments About Abortion – one of the better books from a pro-choice perspective, arguing that foetuses aren’t persons. However, gives a very comprehensive takedown of certain pro-choice arguments, especially Thomson’s violinist argument[6] Stephen Napier (ed.) – Persons, Moral Worth, and Embryos – an edited volume with some of the most up-to-date technical articles from a pro-life perspective. Mostly an array of interesting topics rather than anything systematic, but helpful for those particularly interested to see recent sophisticated work[7] William Hague – William Wilberforce – a biography of William Wilberforce, who was an evangelical at the forefront of the campaign to end the transatlantic slave trade. The campaigns are in many ways parallel, and it is helpful to see how Wilberforce was opposed and how Africans were dehumanised in many of the same ways as the unborn now are.[8] Scott Klusendorf – The Case for Life – helpful introductory book particularly for church leaders and Christians, with a US focusAcademic articles:[9] Alexander Pruss – I Was Once a Fetus: That Is Why Abortion Is Wrong – there are two versions of this. The basic version is available online and worth reading; the more comprehensive version is in the Stephen Napier book above[10] Gina Schouten – Fetuses, Orphans and Violinists: On the Ethics and Politics of Abortion – a paper by a feminist philosopher arguing that even if the foetus is relevantly like the violinist in Thomson’s thought experiment, we might have a duty to save its life by not aborting. A very good paper from a feminist perspective.[11] Don Marquis – Why Abortion Is Immoral – a seminal article from a non-religious philosopher arguing against abortion on the grounds that it deprives the foetus of a future[12] Daniel Rodger, Bruce Blackshaw and Calum Miller – Beyond Infanticide: How Psychological Accounts of Persons Can Justify Harming Infants – a paper arguing that if someone is willing to ‘bite the bullet’ and accept that infanticide is permissible (as many philosophers, but few non-philosophers, are willing to do), then they are actually committed to thinking that many other obviously immoral actions performed on infants are permissible.[13] David Fergusson – Does abortion reduce the mental health risks of unwanted or unintended pregnancy? A re-appraisal of the evidence (Australia and NZ Journal of Psychiatry) – a recent (2013) review in a top peer-reviewed journal, written by a pro-choice psychologist, arguing that abortion is associated with poorer mental health. His primary research articles, highly rated by other authorities and published in top journals, show this trend. Note that the RCOG guidelines (‘The Care of Women Requesting Induced Abortion’) concede that there is no evidence that abortion is associated with improved mental health. NB these guidelines also make it somewhat clear that at least some abortion does involve killing an organism – hence calling it ‘feticide’.[14] Helen Alvaré – Abortion, Sexual Markets and the Law – an article by a feminist philosopher arguing that the current sexual climate/market, along with abortion, is detrimental to women’s wellbeing and that feminists should oppose it. Also helpful in general for Christian sexual ethics and showing the wisdom of the Christian view of sex[15] Michael New – Analyzing the Effect of Anti-Abortion US State Legislation in the Post-Casey era – a paper showing how pro-life laws do reduce abortion rates. See similar papers by Phillip Levine, including ‘Abortion Policy and Fertility Outcomes: The Eastern European Experience’ and ‘Parental Involvement Laws and Fertility Behaviour’[16] Brian Skotko, Susan Levine and Richard Goldstein – Self-perceptions from People with Down Syndrome – just an example paper contradicting common stereotypes about the reasonableness of aborting because disabled people don’t have lives ‘worth it’[17] Vincent Rue et al. – Induced abortion and traumatic stress: A preliminary comparison of American and Russian women – a study looking at some of the mental health problems associated with abortion, as well as survey evidence on pressure to have abortions etc.[17a] Calum Miller – Is Abortion Healthcare? – a currently unpublished paper I have written going through the evidence on abortion, health, mortality, and so on, arguing that there is no plausible sense in which abortion is healthcare[17b] Mika Gissler et al. – Pregnancy-associated mortality after birth, spontaneous abortion, or induced abortion in Finland, 1987-2000 – a paper in a top obstetrics and gynaecology journal showing that abortion is associated with significantly higher mortality than pregnancy, and that pregnancy is associated with reduced mortality compared to no pregnancy at allOther resources (easy to find on Google):[18] Trevor Stammers – Abortion // Unbelievable? Conference 2013 – a good talk covering some of these thoughts at an apologetics conference in London. Available on Youtube[19] John Wyatt – Responding to a diagnosis of a life-limiting foetal condition – brilliant talk by a Professor of Neonatology and clinical neonatologist on a pro-life perspective on foetuses born with fatal conditions. Available on Youtube[20] ComRes – Where Do They Stand? Abortion Survey – example survey of UK population from 2017 showing British attitudes towards abortion. Considerably more pro-life than one might expect and in general showing women more pro-life than men[21] UK govt – Abortion Statistics, England and Wales: 2016 (or other years) – official statistics from UK government showing the distribution of reasons for abortion and other data, including abortions for cleft palate, 98% of abortions being for ‘mental health’, and so on[22] Calum Miller – The scientific evidence on abortion – a quick handy picture with references which can be used on Facebook, with a list of little-known facts about abortion. Available on [23] Calum Miller – Jesus and the early church on abortion – a short summary of early church teaching on abortion, as well as the Jewish position on abortion and why Jesus appeared to be silent on it. Available on [24] Calum Miller – Christianity and abortion – a short summary, needing an update(!) of some of the Biblical theology grounding the Christian pro-life position. Available on [25] Calum Miller – Why Savita Halappanavar’s death has little or nothing to do with Irish abortion law – article on the famous death of a woman in Ireland who died because evacuation of the foetus was offered too late, partly due to medical misjudgment and partly due to a poor interpretation of the law. But what is clear is that the law – as in virtually every Western country which bans abortion – allows abortion if the life of the woman is at risk. This contradicts a common claim that women are dying because abortion laws are too strict (even if it were true, a tiny, tiny minority of abortions occur on these grounds – around 0.05% at most). Available on [26] Life Site News – Website with all the latest pro-life news[27] The Charlotte Lozier Institute – Website with a lot of useful pro-life academic research[28] Abortion Procedures – has simple videos using cartoon images (so no real images) where a former abortion doctor describes the process of various kinds of abortions[29] The Endowment for Human Development – has an enormous number of photos and videos showing the reality of human development at each stage. They are neutral on bioethical issues and purely educational but very informative. See particularly [30] Abort67 – has a video and images of real abortions and aborted babies. I highly recommend viewing them if you feel able to (and encourage you to be bold in viewing them even if you don’t)[31] NHS website – gives an overview of the facts of human development in the womb, frequently calling it a ‘baby’ from a very early stage (though of course it does not do so in the sections on abortion). Well worth reading through.[32] Protecting Life in the Womb – Speaking Life in the World (Dr Calum Miller) – video with Glen Scrivener and Calum Miller having a discussion on abortion and evangelism, helpful for tips on communication. Available at [33] Brephos – ministry in the UK aimed at getting the UK church engaged on abortion. Has lots of helpful resources for church contexts in particular[34] SPUC Youth Conference 2018 videos – particularly useful videos with psychiatrist Patricia Casey and psychologist Priscilla Coleman giving very good talks on the latest evidence on mental health and abortion. Also a very good talk from economist David Paton on the impact of pro-life laws. Available at [35] Secular Pro-Life Perspectives – useful blog for non-religious pro-lifers, with helpful articles particularly on the evidence for pro-life laws, such as at and [36] Dank Pro-Life Memes – a meme page on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter with helpful pithy thoughts on the pro-life movement[37] Live Action – worth following on Facebook, Twitter, etc.; an activist group based in the USA which is pro-woman and pro-baby and has lots of helpful news.[38] Life Begins at Fertilization – just a useful selection of medical texts on the standard scientific view that human beings (organisms of the species Homo sapiens) begin to exist at fertilisation: [39] The God of the Unborn Child – a sermon I gave on abortion which may be helpful for communication tips and for addressing the issues in churches. Available at e-mail if any questions or any further resources needed: c.miller@.uk or c.miller@ ................
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