Decriminalising abortion is a bad thing

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Imagine you’re a British MP considering whether to vote ‘yes’ on an amendment that decriminalises the killing of three-year-old conjoined twins with ginger hair, AB blood, and the power to roll their tongues.

Its advocates say: “Look at this news story! SYMPATHETIC MOTHER OF 20 TERMINATES UPBRINGING OF TWO-FOR-ONE SOULLESS REDHEADS WITH USEFUL BLOOD TYPE; DUE TO OUTDATED LAW WHICH CRIMINALISES PRIVATE DECISIONS, SYMPATHETIC MOTHER OF 20 WAS FORCED TO USE UNSAFE METHOD NOT RECOMMENDED BY THE NHS (PICNIC, LIGHTNING), WHICH RESULTED IN PERMANENT INJURY; DUE TO ARCHAIC LAW, SYMPATHETIC MOTHER OF 20 IS IN PRISON; PEOPLE OUTRAGED. You see, a bill that decriminalises the killing of three-year-old conjoined twins with ginger hair, AB blood, and the power to roll their tongues won’t noticeably increase the number of terminated upbringings. All it will do is ensure that things like this will never happen again. Besides, the amendment wouldn’t legalise the killing of three-year-old conjoined twins with ginger hair, AB blood, and the power to roll their tongues — it would just decriminalise it, which is different.”

I suspect you would not be bowled over by this argument.

In the same way, despite being pro-choice (reasons here), I was not bowled over by the case for a proposed amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill that decriminalised all abortions in England and Wales, which MPs voted overwhelmingly in favour of six days ago.

It’s fuzzy what exactly it means to be ‘pro-choice’, but I take it you can be pro-choice with regard to early abortion and pro-life with regard to later ones. (Indeed, in the UK, this position is extremely common, and most pro-choice philosophers I’m aware of think this way as well.)

To be clear, there is a non-trivial difference between legalisation and decriminalisation. Decriminalisation means that women in England and Wales who procure abortions after 24 weeks can’t be prosecuted. Still, according to a cross-party amendment briefing,

• There would be no change to the 10-week limit on telemedicine, agreed by Parliament in 2022;

• Abortions would still require two doctors’ signatures to be legally provided;

• Women would still have to meet one of the grounds laid out in the Abortion Act 1967;

• Non-consensual abortion would remain a crime at any gestation;

• Those experiencing any form of violence against women and girls would no longer face prison time for having an abortion and;

• Anybody, including a medical professional, who assisted a woman in obtaining an abortion outside the law would be liable for prosecution.

Even so, I submit that decriminalising every late-term abortion is still a bad thing, just as it would be bad to decriminalise the killing of three-year-old dicephalus conjoined twins with ginger hair, AB blood, and the power to roll their tongues.

There is a winning-arguments-against-pro-choicers course you can watch online where pro-life students are instructed to parry pro-choice talking points with a strategy called ‘Trot Out the Toddler’. Suppose a pro-choicer says: ‘abortion should be decriminalised because an unwanted pregnancy can prevent her from pursuing her career’.

Trotting out the toddler, the pro-lifer is meant to say something like: ‘I really sympathise with women in that situation [etc., etc., long spiel], but suppose there were a woman who — for some reason — didn’t have the option of putting up her toddler for adoption, and looking after him was making her career impossible: should her decision to kill him be decriminalised?’

The pro-choicer is then expected to say: ‘but toddlers aren’t the same as foetuses!’, whereupon the pro-lifer winsomely points out that in that case, their support for decriminalising abortion really depends on their prior belief about whether abortion is murder, morally speaking. After all, in cases where killing a small human is murder (e.g., when that child is a toddler), nearly all pro-choicers agree that it should be illegal for her to end its life.

As far as I can tell, there is no morally relevant difference between killing a toddler and killing a foetus in the final months of pregnancy. What would the difference be? Both are conscious, both are sentient, both can survive outside of the mother’s body with the right sort of care in place. And, in the case of new-borns, neither late foetuses nor new-borns are rational, self-aware, able to speak, capable of independent survival, or able to do much of anything.

Yet, I assume you’ll agree, infanticide should not be decriminalised, even for the newly born.

Even if you think I’m wrong about late-term abortions being murder, I assume you not utterly confident that late abortions aren’t murder. After all, they really look like murder! And when considering whether to decriminalise all late-term abortions, the question isn’t only ‘Is this murder?’ but also ‘What is the risk that it’s murder?’. My philosopher friend James Reilly has a good thought experiment along these lines:

[H]aving recently been the victims of a serious financial crime, you and your family now face the prospect of imminent house foreclosure. Your friends and relatives refuse to provide any sort of assistance. The local homeless shelters are short-staffed and under-funded, so there is a decent chance that your entire family will spend at least a few nights a week sleeping on the streets. What is more, the economic situation in your town is not good: work is scarce, and you yourself have recently been laid off. If you lose your house, it will be extremely difficult to get back on your feet.

One night, just when all seems lost, a strange man appears with a tantalizing offer: if you push his magic red button, all of your financial woes will be alleviated. The bank will forgive your debts, you’ll get to keep your house, and you’ll even get your old job back. There is just one little catch: pushing the button has a 10% chance of killing an unwanted orphan child. Their death will be instant, painless, and a direct causal result of you pushing the button. Nobody else will be harmed in any way.

It seems obvious that it would be seriously immoral to push the red button.

Likewise for late-term abortion: even if you’re less than 50% sure that it isn’t murder, moral risk avoidance tells in favour of not killing, given that there’s still a decent chance you’re killing a person.

Now suppose, for some reason, that lots of people find themselves in this situation, and it’s brought to the attention of Parliament. Should MPs vote to decriminalise these risky acts of button-pushing?

We can haggle about just how confident MPs should be that late-term abortion isn’t murder before they can vote to decriminalise the act in good conscience; but I’m skeptical that any of the MPs who voted to decriminalise could have passed this threshold, given that they only debated the law for two hours.

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