In "Why are Northern Ireland's abortion laws different to the rest of the UK?" (2016), Jon Kelly reports on the history and current situation of abortion in the United Kingdom country of Northern Ireland. Kelly tells us that unlike the rest of the UK, abortion remains largely illegal in Northern Ireland, whose women must therefore travel to England or elsewhere if they want a safe abortion to end a pregnancy. According to current Northern Ireland law, not even "fatal foetal abnormalities, rape [or] incest" are reasons for a legal abortion, which Day says is likely a result of the still strong, although decreasing, belief in the Christian religion in Northern Ireland.
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My Yes/No question is:
Must the law allow women an abortion on request?
My answer is:
Yes, with almost no limitations.
Abortion is a very controversial issue in most countries, with some people strongly favouring it and others equally strongly opposing it. One of these groups must be wrong. Both think they have strong reasons, but one group's reasons are not as strong as they think them. The groups that argue for legal abortion are right. But those in favour of abortion must show why the opposing side is wrong.
First, the main reason in favour of abortion is that human beings have a right to make basic decisions about their own lives, so women who are pregnant, for any reason, have the right to decide not to give birth but to abort the foetus for any reason. Some of these reasons might be awful. For example, a woman might say that she was too lazy to insist that the man responsible use a condom to prevent pregnancy, so she is using abortion to correct a birth control failure by herself and her partner. This does not seem to me a very good reason, but it is not bad enough to deny the woman concerned the right not to have an abortion. It would be morally wrong for the state to force her to have an unwanted baby because she and her male friend had been irresponsible and lazy. Indeed, since much of our personality and behaviour are determined by genes, that the parents are irresponsible, lazy and generally foolish is a reason in favour of abortion.
The usual opposing argument to abortion is, as Kelly says, based on religion. it is that a living thing is sacred and may not be killed. This is a bad argument for several reasons. First, as stated it means that all killing of all things is wrong: cats and carrots are living things, so it would be wrong to kill cats and carrots. This sounds silly, so the argument is usually refined a bit: it's wrong to kill living human beings.
But this is also problematic. There is an issue as to what a human being is. Until late in pregnancy, the embryo and foetus are not obviously human beings. For the first few weeks, it's a blob of cells with human DNA. If human being is defined as "living cells with human DNA," then every time you have a shower, you are committing murder as you wash away and destroy living human cells with DNA. This sounds silly: taking a daily shower does not make us serial mass murderers. I think the definition problem, although challenging for those opposed to abortion, can be answered. But there is a far more serious problem that cannot be answered: not all human beings are persons. And it is being a person that is the morally relevant criteria.
In the movie I, Robot starring Will Smith, Sonny the robot is a person, so it would be wrong to kill him or treat him as a mere object. The cells that will, if not aborted, go on to become a human person are not yet a person. As soon as we say that they will become a person, we admit that they are not now a person, and it is persons, not human beings, that have human rights or the rights of persons generally. Carrots have no rights and may be killed for food or other reasons with few worries. Cats are not persons, but like other animals they can feel, which puts limits on how they may justly be treated. Human beings such as ourselves are fully persons: we are aware of ourselves as individuals, we make plans and have desires, and we can make decisions about our lives. These are defining characteristics of persons, and an unborn foetus does not possess these characteristics of a person, so even if the unborn child is a human being, it is not a person and cannot have any right that would be stronger than the rights of the pregnant woman, who must therefore have a right to a safe, legal abortion. Law that denies this is immoral.
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Reference
Legalize an abortion can be "A double-edged sword".
ReplyDeleteYou've got the point that everyone has her own reasons even that reasons might sound sucks, according to your example above, like having sex without any protection just because they're too lazy. Then, imagine that how many doctors have to work so hard get rid of the "living cells with human DNA" for the irresponsible people who even too lazy to use condom. There'd be lots more crap work for the doctors ,were the abortion is illegal.
By the way, abortion should be allow with some conditions for helping the ones who really need it.
Yes, even though some people think that an abortion is very bad behavior and contrast with many religious; but, if women are pregnant and bear the infant unwillingly, they may well not take care of her child and enables her child to be a burden in society.
ReplyDeleteIn addition, not only an infant will have lots of problems, but their parents (both father and mother) have to get into trouble too.
Parents have to allocate their time to take care of their infant. Thus, it's tough if parents are still studying in high school or university. And at last, Perhaps, they will decide to leave their infant, that you can see a lot on news.
I agree with Chan. The evidence is strong that when women are forced by a society to have unwanted babies, those babies remain unwanted and are more likely to suffer neglect, abuse and end up pursuing criminal careers. Abortion is the better option for all persons involved.
DeleteIt is morally wrong to force women, especially teenage girls in school, to have children. If a religion says otherwise, that only shows that the religion is immoral in its teachings, but that can hardly surprise anyone when we look at some of the things religions lead their believers to do to other human beings.