For legal and ethical guidance on abortion, let’s look to Europe

For legal and ethical guidance on abortion, let’s look to Europe

Antiabortion protesters alongside abortion-rights supporters outside the Supreme Court on Jan. 19, 2018. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

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 By Michael Gerson

Columnist

Today at 4:16 p.m. EST

Little of this can be attributed to activist religious groups “imposing” a moral vision. These are some of the most secular countries in the world. European abortion law engages in legal and ethical balancing because there are contending liberal values that require balancing — a public responsibility to value human dignity and a public duty to respect the autonomy of those who become pregnant.

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This remains the issue that will not go away because it not only divides advocacy groups; it divides individual minds. Few people have an immediate sense of moral identification with a blastocyst. But it’s difficult to deny that a fetus at 21 weeks is one of our own kind — not a potential human, but a human at an early stage of development.

The problem comes in the drawing of legal and moral lines, because such distinctions seem so disturbingly arbitrary. One traditional Christian instance of line-drawing, for example, was at quickening — when a mother could feel a child inside her. But this seems absurd when generalized as a moral principle. Do humans really attain rights only when they can alert us to their existence? How does a perception in some other mind magically generate worth in a fetus?

Others have proposed the presence of fetal brain activity to be determinative. Yet the human distinctive is not found in the random firing of neurons; it is found in self-conscious rationality, and this does not develop until well after birth.

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For many, viability seems an easy stopping point. And it might eventually be a useful landing place for political compromise. But this seems to be particularly weak and dangerous as an ethical principle. Do we really want to argue that dependent human beings are proportionately less valuable? Should this also apply to human beings with profound intellectual or physical disabilities?

On abortion, there is often a massive gap between the stakes of the debate and the confidence of our moral intuitions. For some, the arbitrariness of lines leads them to elevate autonomy over all other claims. Because pregnant people face a unique burden, they should have the sole decision. But establishing the moment of birth as morally dispositive has problems of its own.

No one should dismiss the human reality of trauma and devastation experienced by those aborting a child late in pregnancy. But as a legal reality, an exclusive emphasis on autonomy would allow elective abortion until birth — a truly extreme position in the context of most abortion law. Nascent life would be accorded no inherent value at all.

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In the U.S. debate, religion does play a broader role in abortion controversy. And it can come out in cruel and judgmental ways. Some people are pro-birth rather than pro-life. But it is neither just nor democratic to declare that all opinions informed by religion are fundamentally personal and thus democratically illegitimate. It rigs the debate to argue that John Stuart Mill’s philosophy can be the basis for convictions about human worth, but not centuries of Jewish and Christian philosophic reflection on the demands of human dignity.

Principled pro-life reasoning makes claims about physical and ethical reality. As the philosopher Paul Ramsey pointed out, the genetic uniqueness of an individual is established from the earliest moments. “In all essential respects,” he argued, “the individual is whoever he is going to become from the moment of impregnation. … Thereafter, his subsequent development cannot be described as his becoming something he is not now.”

These maximal convictions are not conducive to compromise. Yet our society has little other choice but to balance the incompatible. The history of Roe v. Wade demonstrates the unsustainability of a few people on a single court declaring that one side can never prevail. The same would have been true if the Supreme Court had decided in 1973 that the 14th Amendment applied to everyone after conception. Such a verdict would also not have been imposable on a culturally diverse, deeply divided nation.

The explicit or effective ending of Roe comes at a low point in America’s political capacity for deliberation. But there is no more fundamental task of a political community than to define the human community. And what sounds impossible will soon be unavoidable.