The 'right to choose'

It's possible to be opposed to abortion and still support 'the woman's right to choose' on the grounds that it is a matter of moral choice and that the proper person to decide is the pregnant woman. She should not need to have permission from doctors. But the choice is still the exercise of a moral judgment. You don't need to agree with the judgment to acknowledge that it is their call and not yours. In other words there shouldn't be a law against everything that you think is morally objectionable. Otherwise some of us might still be stoning adulterers (some of us of course still are!).

However, if you think that abortion is murder then you would seek to ensure that the law will prevent women from making this choice . The extreme form of this is taking the law into your own hands ... It seems obvious to me that if, for instance and as it were at random, the Catholic Church had the power, it would make abortion illegal, along with much else.

(Talking about the woman's right to choose is problematic, though, in a way that doesn't undermine the view that she ought to be allowed to make her own choice in the matter. You only have a 'right' if it is legally sanctioned. Sometimes the rhetoric of 'rights' is just tantamount to claiming that someone ought to have the right. Similarly with the rights of the unborn child).

I belong to the group who think that the pregnant woman should make the decision but believe that abortion can be a morally regrettable act, but in a way that depends absolutely upon the circumstances, timing and the motivation. But 'regrettable' is a fairly mild word. We live in a messy world and I agree with Rowan Williams that sometimes an abortion is the least worst option. But I would qualify that by saying that we should have to be talking about a late abortion to justify this kind of language. I do not think that it is 'murder'. If I thought it was 'murder', if I thought of it under that description, I would expect the full weight of the law ... etc., as in any case of wilful murder, an expression which carries the weight of our horror at such an act. So, the Cardinal, if he had the power, would make it illegal/criminal because he thinks that it is a criminal act, and this because we are taking the life of a human being and a human being is a human being whether they are a skipping child or a vigorous youth or a foetus. I think that view depends upon an a priori view, a 'faith position', about the nature of the human being as endowed at conception with a soul. Well, in one way, even an embryo is a human being, at the earliest stage of its development, but I think also that the stage of development, and I have in mind the progression towards self-consciousness, makes a moral difference to the nature of the act of bringing its life to an end. Of course we are ambivalent about abortion in a way that we are not ambivalent about other forms of taking life. This ambivalence is one of the facts in the case. Calling it 'murder' is a way of registering the gravity of the act, resisting calling it murder registers the sense that it doesn't have the same gravity even if it is still grave. I have in mind relatively late abortions when I use the word 'grave'. But even there the measure of the gravity has to be balanced against the gravity of the circumstances. I cannot think in these terms about the morning after pill or very early abortions. But once you believe that the act is one of wilful murder and that no one realises what is being done then that will determine a passion of opposition and even a kind of despair, except that we don't have marches in London in the way we have against, say, the war in Iraq. This is not to say that a child can't be murdered in the womb as sometimes happens in the atrocities of war zones. But the main thing is that I am not a woman and have not been faced with the situation, and even to put it like that is to fail to distinguish all the kinds of case. Of course some people would say that this has nothing to do with it and the moral facts of the case are quite independent of one's situation ... But it is just in these kinds of case that deep differences rise to the surface. I have been reflecting on how I have been formulating these sentences and am acutely aware of my caution and uneasiness about using words like 'wrong' or 'objectionable' or 'dubious', partly because language reflects the deep differences I have just mentioned and words are snares for the unwary.

.... Partly because words like 'wrong' are never really the last word: 'you are causing suffering', 'you are taking a life', are the last word, I think. Do you have to add, as though to someone completely stupid ... 'and these things are wrong!'? As though they are startled into good behaviour not because they realise they are hurting someone but because they have recalled that doing so is wrong (dogs can get as far as that, you bad boy, Fido!).