ABORTION: FROM ETHICS TO POLITICS
by Christian Munthe

Introduction

This article is not about abortion, but rather about how one can reflect on abortion - in particular its moral and political status. My aim, however, is not to defend any particular position regarding such status, rather, I will try to say something comprehensible about how one can (and cannot) reason one's way from a stand regarding the morality of abortion to a stand on the issue of abortion policy.

Moral views regarding abortion repeatedly show up as arguments in debates regarding abortion policies, in particular the issue of whether or not abortion should be restricted or even prohibited. For example, by far the most common argument for abortion prohibition is that abortion is morally wrong. But supporters of so-called pro-choice often argue in a structurally similar way when they put forward the fetus' alleged lack of moral personhood as a reason for a liberal abortion policy.

To what extent are such arguments warranted? Is the road from the ethics of abortion to the politics of abortion really as straight as these lines of thought suggest? I will claim that it is not.

I shall start by examining more closely the differences between the morality of abortion on the one hand, and the policy regarding abortion on the other. After a brief sketch of the main structure of the debate regarding the former, I will move on to the question of how a position regarding the morality of abortion can function as a basis for supporting a position on policy issues. In short, I will sketch two competing views of the relation between morality and law; between the ethics of individual behaviour and the ethics of society's attempts at regulating behaviour. I will argue in favour of one of these two views, which I call pragmatism, and describe the significance of that stance for the abortion debate.

Two abortion issues

Public debate regarding abortion typically focuses on whether or not - and to what extent - abortion should be legal. This is the issue of public policy, which concerns how abortion should be handled politically by governments, parliaments and state officials.

Different countries have different abortion legislations. In today's Europe, Ireland and Poland are among the most restrictive, with no right at all for a legal abortion unless the life of the pregnant woman is threatened. At the other end of the scale we find in Sweden, my own country, a pregnant woman has a right to have an abortion performed in a public hospital up to the end of the 18th week without having to disclose her reasons. After 18 weeks, special permission may be granted by the health authorities in exceptional cases up to the gestation when the fetus becomes viable (in practice, the end of the 22nd week). Between these two extremes, a common compromise solution is to have abortion legally available up to the end of the 12th week, in some cases on the condition that some kind of permission has been issued by the authorities. After that limit, legal abortion is only available on a restricted list of indications, such as a severe threat to the health of the pregnant woman or abnormality of the fetus.

All countries experience public criticism of their existing abortion policies. In such debates it is common to find concern regarding the conditions (if any) under which particular abortions are morally permissible.

These concerns are about the morality of the behaviour of individuals who perform abortion or have abortion performed. Therefore, they primarily consider the issue of individual morality with respect to abortion, rather than public policy. The focus is on the morality of pregnant women who choose to have an abortion and on the physicians who perform them, rather than upon the politicians who decide the content of the abortion laws.

Most people find the issue of public policy and the issue of individual morality regarding abortion interconnected. But what does this mean precisely? What is the nature of this alleged connection between these two issues? For example, does the view that the vast majority of abortions are morally wrong force supporters to accept the view that abortion should be highly restricted by society?

The two issues are different in certain respects and I want to examine two of these differences to illustrate the fact that, although the issues both concern abortion, they are in part about very different things.

First, the two issues address different acting parties. The issue of individual morality addresses pregnant women and physicians. The issue of public policy, however, in no way addresses these as acting parties, but rather turns its attention to public policy makers.

Second, the issues differ with respect to the options that the acting parties have to face. In the case of individual morality, the pregnant woman is faced with the options of having or not having an abortion performed. The issue of public policy, however, in no way involves policy makers in facing such a choice. No matter how objectionable one may find the decision of a parliament to adopt a liberal abortion policy, this adoption does not involve the performance of any abortion.

The issue of individual morality

Traditionally, the issue of the individual morality of abortion has produced three kinds of competing positions. In the debate among professional ethicists, these positions have been given the following names:

Moderate positions may be very different from each other. They range from conservative positions modified to permit abortion in cases where the pregnancy is a result of rape, to slightly restricted liberal positions, as, for example, when the fetus is granted a right to life in the later stages of pregnancy.

Techniques for prenatal diagnosis have added the demand of possible obligation to the issue of permissibility. Different stands are taken regarding whether or not it may be morally impermissible for a pregnant woman to abstain from having an abortion performed when the fetus has been shown to have an abnormality or some severe, genetically determined, incurable disease.

The argument strategies used for defending and criticising these different positions may, very crudely, be divided into two kinds:

This does not mean, of course, that what happens to each affected party will be ascribed exactly the same moral weight. On the contrary, competing arguments within the strategy generate different ideas regarding the relative moral importance of how all involved parties fare. Different positions will develop regarding the individual morality of the abortion depending on how, for example, the loss of a future child, with a certain expected level of well-being, is weighed against a young single woman's need to mature and meet a more suitable father for her children, and the children she could have in the future, were she to have an abortion performed now.

To argue within the framework of this strategy is difficult, since it requires so much information in any specific case. Nevertheless, most proponents of the strategy tend to end up with a rather "generous" moderate position which leaves room for abortion for the sake of the future child, the woman and other children which the woman might have later.

There is much more to be said, of course, about these different positions and strategies (1). In this essay, however, we will have to rest content with this brief sketch. The question now, is this: regardless of which position one adopts on the issue of individual morality, how is one to argue one's way to a position on a public abortion policy?

From ethics to politics?

From now on, I will use as an illustrating example the case of a supporter of the conservative position. The question, then, is to what extent such a person has support for the view that abortion should be generally prohibited.

Logic alone does not suffice:

The simplest way for a supporter of the conservative position to support an abortion prohibition would be to claim that the latter follows logically from the former. This amounts to saying that a person who adopts the conservative position but rejects the idea of a general prohibition of abortion would be logically contradicting himself. I do not believe this to be the case.

One preliminary reason for being sceptical about such a claim is the fact that there exist so-called "liberal Catholics" who strongly support the traditional conservative position of their church but who nevertheless claim that abortion should be legally available. Also, it is my personal experience, somewhat supported by scientific studies (2), that Swedish women in general see abortion as morally problematic but nevertheless claim that it is the pregnant woman who should be given the right (within generous time-limits) to decide whether or not to have an abortion performed. There does not appear to be any fault of logic involved in this or the reasoning of liberal Catholics.

To see why no fault in logic is involved, it is instructive to consider again what the issues of individual morality and public policy respectively are about. Since they address wholly different parties facing wholly different options, no position regarding the individual morality of abortion will ever address the same matter as any position on the issue of public policy. But in order for two claims to logically contradict each other, it is a minimal requirement that they are about the same thing. Thus, since a position regarding individual morality can never logically contradict a position regarding public policy, a position of the former kind cannot logically imply a position of the latter kind.

Additional moral claims are needed:

This does not mean, of course, that the road from a conservative position to a highly restrictive abortion policy is blocked altogether. Rather, the road is not as straight, smooth and free from obstacles as a freeway on an early Sunday morning. The situation is rather that of a road leading up to a river and continuing on the other side of it with no bridge in between. In order to get from the conservative position to the allegedly desired support of a general abortion prohibition, it is necessary to make additional claims to bridge the gap in logic.

The function of such an additional claim is to secure the validity of a move from a position regarding the individual morality of abortion to a position regarding public policy. An additional claim of this kind, therefore, has to be a general view of the connection between the morality of individual behaviour and the morality of regulating such behaviour from society's point of view. It must say something of the nature: "if behaviour X is morally permissible/impermissible, it should be regulated by society in way Y".

Morality as a mirror or basis of the law?

There seemed to be two principal views of the connection between morality and law to choose from. I will call these fundamentalism and pragmatism. As will become obvious, my sympathies are with the latter.

Fundamentalism

According to fundamentalism, the law and public policy in general should be a mirror of individual morality. Laws should express the same permissions and prohibitions as individual morality does. If, for example, a behaviour is morally wrong it should, according to fundamentalism, be automatically prohibited, or at least highly restricted, by law.

Unfortunately, the word "fundamentalism" suffers from highly religious overtones. As I use the word here, however, religious fundamentalism is just one particular brand of fundamentalism, namely a fundamentalism that wants the law to mirror some religiously grounded morality. Also, the term tends to be rather value laden in the Western world. Nevertheless, it is the best term for this kind of position that I have come upon. I might add that it was originally proposed to me by a Jesuit, that is by a representative of an organisation whose official position is fundamentalist according to the same terminology.

If a fundamentalist view is adopted, as an additional claim besides a conservative position, obviously it becomes rather easy to support an abortion prohibition. If abortion is more or less always morally wrong, and if wrongful behaviour should be prohibited by society, it follows that abortion should be prohibited by society. This kind of reasoning is the most commonly employed among supporters of abortion prohibition throughout the world.

Pragmatism

Pragmatism does not involve demand for the law to mirror morality, but rather for the law to be based on morality. Decisions regarding public policy should, according to this view, be evaluated by the same morality that determines the rightness and wrongness of individual behaviour. The very same body of moral rules that forms the basis for judging acts of individuals should also form the basis for judging political decisions, for example regarding the content of the law. Thus, the moral wrongness of some behaviour is, according to pragmatism, no reason of itself to prohibit that kind of behaviour. Such a reason is present only if the same body of moral rules that supports the wrongness of the behaviour in question also supports that it would be wrong for policy makers not to prohibit it.

The basic idea of pragmatism is that laws should be designed so that they actually achieve what is worth achieving as effectively as possible. Therefore, what a pragmatic view will mean for the supporter of a conservative position when it comes to abortion policy depends on empirical facts. Whether or not abortion prohibition will be recommended depends on the extent to which such a prohibition would promote the moral values involved in the conservative position.

Pragmatism is the typical view taken by supporters of liberal abortion laws who agree that abortions are bad and should be avoided as far as possible, but claim prohibition to be a bad and ineffective way to reach such an aim.

A common estimation is that approximately half a million illegal abortions are performed every year throughout the world. It is a well known fact that pregnant women who live in countries with restrictive abortion laws often travel abroad if they want to have an abortion. Simpler methods for performing abortion in the form of pills that are easily traded on the black market are making illegal abortion even more accessible. These are some of the facts that are commonly cited by pragmatists as evidence for the ineffectiveness of abortion prohibition.

High morbidity and mortality rates as a consequence of abortions being performed by unqualified abortionists or by pregnant women themselves, is used as evidence for the claim that abortion prohibition not only is ineffective, but also inflicts unnecessary suffering. The punishing of women discovered to have had an illegal abortion, as well as fear of such punishment, are further factors quoted to support the same point. Another factor is social injustice, as wealthy women are able to travel abroad to seek terminations by qualified practitioners despite the prohibition, whilst the not-so-wealthy are left with unsafe alternatives.

Moreover, if a restrictive abortion policy is to be made effective, it would seem to require the taking of measures that are hardly compatible with most people's conception of a minimally decent society. Compulsory monthly general pregnancy screening of the entire fertile female population combined with round-the-clock police surveillance of pregnant women in order to prevent them from going abroad to have abortions performed is only one example.

A final example of pragmatic reasoning among supporters of liberal abortion policies concerns the policy of making abortion available on certain specified indications, in particular the risks of certain fetal abnormalities. State authorities in countries which adopt such a policy thereby hold a specific and official view regarding what kind of people should be aborted at the fetal stage. This official attitude is of course projected onto the population in general, spreading a deprecating attitude towards disabled and retarded people. For the supporter of the conservative position this should be particularly intolerable, since the dissemination of moral opinions totally opposed to any reasonable idea of the equal worth of human persons is involved. Pragmatically, it thus seems preferable, even from the point of view of the conservative position, to have legal abortion available without any indications other than regular medical considerations of safety and that the abortion is wanted by the pregnant woman.

For and against:

There are things to be said for and against both fundamentalism and pragmatism. For example, fundamentalism makes things much simpler and more straightforward. All we need to know in order to determine whether or not some behaviour should be prohibited is whether it is immoral or not. For a pragmatist, that information may of course be relevant, but it does not settle the issue. Complex empirical matters, such as the possible efficiency of prohibition, have to be taken into account as well.

From the point of view of pragmatism, however, the perspective is different. The pragmatist asks, why prohibit some behaviour and punish offenders if such a policy does not serve the purpose of making the world a better place? Of course, pragmatists have to acknowledge that laws have effects not only through their immediate influence on behaviour, but also through the ideological messages they communicate to the population (such as the message given by the prohibition of theft that one should not steal another's belongings). But if such factors have been taken into account and a prohibition would still not change anything for the better, what is then the use of it? There are two fundamentalist responses to that question:

The first response is simply that "use", "efficiency", "serving", "promoting" and so on are not the issue. Rather, what is important for society is to avoid official involvement in immoral acts such as abortions, and to publicly express dislike of such acts. Whether or not this would have any significant effect on the number of such acts being performed is not considered to be relevant. Even if such a policy would ensure that the acts in question will be performed in even more harmful ways, the fundamentalist is not moved. Morality, according to this view, is not primarily about the individual's relation to others - about reducing suffering and stimulating human flourishing. Rather, morality is about the individual's relation to himself - about keeping one's own hands clean. The business of the moral person is not to make the world less bad from a moral point of view, but just to avoid immoral behaviour himself, come what may. As Solzhenitsyn said in his Nobel lecture: "Let the lie come into the world, even dominate the world, but not through me" (3).

The second response employs a somewhat different perspective. Here, the important thing is to punish wrongdoers. Simply put, the argument for ineffective and even harmful abortion prohibition is that it at least makes possible the legal punishment of women who have abortions performed and those who treat them. Obviously, since the laws making such punishment possible do not appear to effect any real improvement, even from the point of view of the conservative position, the alleged value of such punishment cannot be based on it having any edifying effects. Rather, the punishment of wrongdoers must be seen as being desirable of itself, even at the price of changes for the worse. I have encountered this kind of reasoning among some Christian priests in Poland and Sweden defending abortion prohibition.

Conclusion

As I have already remarked, my own sympathies rest with pragmatism. The fundamentalist defence against the pragmatist challenge that abortion prohibition makes things worse, even if a conservative position regarding the morality of abortion is taken for granted, strikes me as cruel and lacking of empathy. I cannot but view morality as a basis for the law and thus abortion prohibition as immoral unless it effects some improvement for people.

However, it should be noted that the adoption of pragmatism also makes life hard for those who want to argue for liberal abortion laws on the ground that abortion is not morally wrong. That argument will not satisfy a pragmatist, since the legalising of a behaviour may have harmful effects, even if that behaviour of itself is not prohibited by morality. For example, it has been argued that a legal acceptance of abortion will lead to a softening of our moral aversion against killing. Having got used to the idea of killing fetuses, we might gradually become more open to infanticide and, after that, the killing people in general. I do not know of any argument supporting that such a prospect is a real danger. Rather, it seems that, historically, infanticide has been more accepted in societies were abortion has been legally prohibited. But if there is any truth in the prophecy that liberal abortion laws put us on a slippery slope of moral degeneration, this has to be taken seriously by the pragmatist. Thus, pragmatism does not guarantee that liberal abortion legislation is justified - rather, it is an empirical matter whether or not this is the case.

Christian Munthe is Professor of Philosophy at the Centre for Research Ethics, Brogatan 4, S-413 01 Goteborg, SWEDEN. (Fax +46-31-7734863)
E-mail cmunthe@cre.gu.se

REFERENCES
  1. My doctoral dissertation, Livets slut i rivets borjan. En studie i abortetik (The End of Life in Its Beginning. A Study on the Morality of Abortion), Edsbruk, Sweden: Thales 1992, includes a critical survey of most positions and arguments regarding the issue of the individual morality of abortion.
  2. Holmgren, Kristina Legal Abortion During Very Early Pregnancy. Women's Experiences and Ethical Conflicts, Stockholm: Karolinska Institutet 1994.
  3. Quoted by Jonathan Glover in his "'It Makes No Difference Whether Or Not I Do It"', in Singer (ed.), Applied Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986, p. 138.

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