Feeding The Fish

It’d be safe to say I’m happy about this, there was a bit of worry there for a while but MPs demonstrated that they’re with the public and the science on this one. This is exactly the reason that no matter how low New Labour goes I’m still very concerned about the prospect of a future Conservative government; not only because I’m not convinced that Cameron is being that successful in moving his party (as James Graham notes he often seems to be rebelling against them rather than leading them in a new direction) but also because in this case Cameron bought the 20 week argument which not only lacked evidence but, as I’ll go into later, makes no sense in the long run. Of course, living in a safe Conservative seat my opinion on all of this is pretty meaningless so let’s get into abortion, something I first studied for RS GCSE coursework (which mostly consisted of finding and using bible verses in support and opposition), the overriding sense I took away from that was that abortion was something that was inherently wrong, but sometimes necessary. Unsurprisingly perhaps for anyone who’s read this blog before, this isn’t something I hold by now.

I see absolutely no moral difficulty in abortion provided care is taken to place the upper limit before the physical changes that make consciousness a possibility have occurred. If we have someone who is absolutely and irrevocably brain dead, then is removing them from a life support machine murder? They’re undeniably physically human but mentally there’s nothing there. I really see no difference between that situation and a baby at 24 weeks except that whilst the brain-dead person was once capable of feeling pain and human thought (and there’s always the faint concern that there is something possible to revive there), the baby has definitely yet to develop physically enough to allow any of that to happen. Would it be easier if we remained a nice blobish ball of cells until they magically rearranged themselves into an almost working baby? Yes. Do I have any moral qualms about terminating life that is physically but not mentally human? No. There is nothing sacred about human DNA that means anything containing must be preserved at all costs, but there is something special about human consciousness that we should take consideration of, and we do by placing the limit at 24 weeks before it’s possible for it to physically have emerged yet.

To me it doesn’t matter how viable something is, if it’s not joined up upstairs we should feel no compulsion to save it. Yes, it’s useful this time round that the 20 week crowd were talking bollocks but one day they won’t be, I think it’s fairly safe to say that the viability will continue to drop. Studying this at 16 I stupidly followed this line of thinking to reason that abortion is only a short term issue until technology developed. What if one day we can create artificial wombs that can be used to sustain a embryo from 12 weeks? What if we’re able to physically transfer embryos from one to the other? They’ll be no need for abortion! They can just be transfered and put up for adoption! Won’t that be wonderful? But wait, what if the machines get so good they can take over from 5 weeks? Or from two weeks? Or even from day one?

The argument from viability taken to it’s ultimate conclusion says we have a responsibility to bring all the viable embryos we can to term. Given that we can develop an embryo from a single week, don’t we have a responsibility to save all we can? But wait, what about all those week-old embryos that don’t manage to implant on the uterus wall? There’s nothing different about them except bad luck, should we allow them to die because of that? How can we not act if we have it in out power to prevent this natural genocide of two thirds of all human life? It’d be best to force women who might have unattached embryos knocking around (or perhaps all women, just to be safe) to collect and turn in their menstruation so any embryos can be extracted and brought to term.

This (hopefully) is plainly absurd and horrifying, but it’s exactly the position the argument from viability leads us to given perfect technology. It’s been a useful ally in this debate because the 20 weekers used it whilst lacking evidence that viability has dropped, but there seems to be a general spirit that if it were true it’d be an entirely reasonable argument - This just ain’t so. The only cut off of importance in development is the brain, the seat of what makes us human and sentient, and the key changes we’re talking about here don’t appear till after 26 weeks. 24 weeks will still be an entirely reasonable upper limit for abortion even if viability was possible from zero weeks and that’s something we’ll have to remember when this comes around in ten or twenty years when viability really has dropped.