to know, and that was that. Afterwards, I had to rest and be careful that no infection set in. The doctor did give me antibiotics and "emergency" pills for use if I started to hemorrhage. If an infection did set in or if I did begin to hemorrhage, I was to go directly to a hospital. It would be termed a miscarriage. Thankfully, I never had to go through that experience. Everything went well, and in three days I returned home a childless woman. Afterward The sense of relief after it was all over is unexplainable. It is like a heavy load lifted off your shoulders. Since the abortion I have never felt guilty, nor have I ever regretted the action that I took. As a free, thinking person I took the action which was the best for me at that time, and I do not feel that I have been irresponsible. Also, I have continued to form new relationships with people that I meet. I should add that I never told my family about my abortion. I guess basically because I never wanted to hurt them or disappoint them, which I think is a common trait in all children towards their parents. So often in a case such as mine, we look upon the woman as dirty, forgetting that she is a thinking, feeling person and needs support in a time such as this. I was lucky in that I had friends I could lean upon, and I must add that my Christian faith helped me get through this ordeal too. Since my abortion, I have continued working at my job of community service through the church. Part of my job is to do problem pregnancy counseling, which is to help women who find themselves in a situation similar to mine. I do not feel that I have shortchanged society, the people I work for or with, or myself. This experience has helped me better to understand my own humanness and the humanness of others. I do not recommend that a person have an abortion in order to discover humanness in others, but we can all learn from our own mistakes. We all make mistakes, but why should we have to pay for them for the rest of our lives when there is so much to live for and to do in this world? An Ethicist Looks at Abortion What About Abortion on Demand? By Robert M. Veatch Sixteen states now have liberalized or free abortion laws in the United States.1 In three states (California, Texas, and Wisconsin) laws prohibiting abortion have been declared to be an unconstitutional infringement of the right of privacy. There can be no doubt that legal and ethical revolution is blazing through our state legislatures and courts. Like all movements of rapid social change, the ethical arguments behind the new judgments are not always clearly articulated. What is the ethical basis for abortion reform, and what is its implication for future policies? INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND THE SANCTITY OF LIFE "He is not a murderer who brings about abortion before the soul is in the body," is one of the more plausible positions in the abortion debate. It is not a crusading slogan of a radical abortion reformer in the contemporary revolution, but the seasoned ethical judgment of Gratian, the famous twelfth century codified of the Church's canon law. It is typical of the balancing logic regarding the morality of abortion which has been one of the major positions in the Christian Church from the ROBERT M. VEATCH is Associate for Medical Ethics at the Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences, in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. With graduate degrees in both pharmacology and theology, he served two years as teaching fellow at the Harvard Divinity School. fourth century to the present including such theologically radical perspectives as those of Augustine, Jerome, Thomas, and the National Council of Churches. While they all see moral objections to abortion, for them abortion is not homicide. It is a unique moral event which requires its own ethical analysis. Two simplistic views There are two more simple ethical views on abortion. One, characterized by contemporary reviewers of the ethics of abortion as the right wing, builds its ethical position on the single ethical claim of the absolute sanctity of innocent human life. In his uncompromising encyclical Casti Connubii in 1930, Pope Pius XI made the logically flawless argument: The infliction of death whether upon mother or upon child is against the commandment of God and the voice of nature: "Thou shalt not kill." The lives of both are equally sacred.... [There does not] exist any so-called right of extreme necessity which could extend to the direct killing of an innocent human being. The second of the single-principle ethical views is held by the radical left wing. Its absolute principle is the right of individual privacy. This is the ethical principle behind the recent freeabortion court decisions. Spokesmen for the women's liberation movement, probably the most profound and significant socioethical revolution of this era, have waved placards and argued rationally that a woman should have the right to control her own body. Marya Mannes, for example, argues: Suddenly, the expulsion of a tiny piece of a woman's body is called criminal because long ago, after learned discussions, men determined that this tiny piece was Life, and its expulsion murder. . . . What right has anyone but the woman herself to decide?3 1. Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Kansas, Maryland, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia. 2. Two of the most thorough reviews of abortion ethics are Ralph B. Potter, "The Abortion Debate," in The Religious Situation 1968 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968); and Daniel Callahan, Abortion: Law, Choice, and Morality (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1970). Both set the spectrum of positions with a right, a left, and a center. They should be consulted for a thorough treatment of the ethics of abortion. 3. Marya Mannes, "A Woman Views Abortion," in Alan F. Guttmacher, ed., The Case for Legalized Abortion Now (Berkeley, California: Diablo Press, 1967), 57. Abortion is no medical problem The Illinois Citizens for the Medical Control of Abortion has charged that "to construe abortion performed by a duly licensed physician as a crime interferes with the physician's right to practice medicine. . . ." According to this view abortion is a "strictly medical problem" and should be left to the judgment of the physician. The fact is that there are few things that are less a medical problem. An early abortion performed by a competent physician under proper conditions is safer than child-birth. To claim that an obstetrician-gynecologist, who has spent a lifetime becoming an expert on the female utérus, is also an expert on the moral dilemma of abortion is what I call the generalization of expertise. It is wrong to assume that the expert in the technical facts and skills in any given area also has special competence in the philosophical and ethical aspects of that area. While it is enlightened medicine to see the medical implications of all areas of human life, it is a dangerous reductionism then to conclude that the physician is the proper consultant for all those areas. Two absolutes cannot exist together The funny thing about the principle of individual rights is that the various claims are mutually exclusive. It cannot at the same time be the absolute right of any woman to have an abortion and of any physician to make decisions as he pleases. Physicians should have the right to object conscientiously to procedures they find ethically objectionable and female human beings should have exactly the same rights as their male counterparts including the right to control their own bodies, but only one right in any interacting set can be absolutized; in fact, absolutizing even one will probably lead to ethical dilemmas. Absolutizing of two ethical principles, the sanctity of life and individual rights by the right and left wings respectively, has led to a bitter, at times exasperating, confrontation. Conservative legislators cannot understand the callousness of woman's rights groups who want to kill human beings capriciously; individual rights proponents consider the doctrinaire fundamentalism of the right wing oldfashioned, paternalistically authoritarian, and cruelly insensitive. The fact of the matter is that the two groups are talking past each other. The two principles are not contradictory. It is perfectly compatible to hold that innocent life is sacred and that individuals have the right to control their own bodies. Since neither group carries out the debate in terms of the other's fundamental principle, each appears capriciously immoral in the light of the other. I would suggest that it is not sound politically, legally, or ethically to argue for abortion on demand solely on the basis of individual rights. Politically it is currently making some headway, but generates tremendous resistance by those who think abortion is murder. If there are more plausible arguments for the position, then they should be used. Legally, the recent court decisions are very dangerous. Without confronting the question of whether the fetus is human or not, the courts are, in some cases, granting the right to destroy it. This is a dangerous legal precedent, as is realized by theologians like Paul Ramsey who claim that, unless one is able to distinguish fundamentally between the fetus and the infant, all the arguments for abortion are sound arguments for infanticide.1 Ethically the absolutizing of individual rights is an apotheosis of the individual in utter disregard of his responsibility to his fellow men and to the larger universe of creation. A BETTER BASIS FOR A POSITION It is a mistake, however, to believe that one can only reach the conclusions of the right and left wings by absolutizing a single ethical principle. It is logically possible to reject the claim that the fetus is "fully human" and still conclude that it is absolutely wrong to destroy it under any circumstances at a point in history. This might be the case where a society (such as Adam's or Noah's when God gave the profertility command to be fruitful and multiply) was extremely close to extinction. Likewise, it is also logically possible to support an abortionon-demand position for reasons other than that solely of individual rights. If the fetus is merely a piece of tissue then society should have very little if any interest in it, and the argument from individual rights should be persuasive. If the fetus is a full human being then society should have great interest, 4. Paul Ramsey, "Reference Points in Deciding About Abortion," in John T. Noonan, Jr., ed., The Morality of Abortion: Legal and Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 79. |