Worth and Welfare in the Controversy over Abortion Worth and Welfare in the Controversy over Abortion Christopher Miles Coope * © Christopher Miles Coope 2006 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WlT 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. . . - ISBN 978-1-349-41358-4 ISBN 978-0-230-50913-9 (eBook) DOl 10.1057/9780230509139 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coope, Christopher. Worth and welfare in the controversy over abortion I Christopher Miles Coope. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-333-76018-2 (doth) 1. Abortion - Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title. HQ767.15.C68 2005 179.7'6-dc22 2005047531 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 1S 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 Transferred to Digital Printing 2007 In memory of Nicholas Coope (1980-1998) Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks Contents Preface viii Part 1: Introductory 1 Part 2: Worth 51 Part 3: Rights and Interests 163 Part 4: Arguing about Interests 231 Part 5: The Idea of a Right to Life 302 Index 335 vii Preface Many books, I suppose, come about by accident. This is certainly one of them. I had simply set out to write some notes for our students here at The University of Leeds. One day a week, these students take a break from their work in the community and follow our course of Health Care Ethics. Year on year, they have impressed me with their enthusiasm, their friendliness and their willingness to walk in the strange ways of our subject. It has always been a privilege to write for them, and I think about them affec tionately now, as once again I set about it. Abortion tends to take over the lives of those who write about it. Yet this is no bad thing, for without a certain amount of 'taking over' one would not succeed. Abortion is an important public issue, so our attention is not misplaced. It also raises theoretical difficulties in philosophy, many of which are not in ethics at all - as this book will show. Even those interested neither in the issue nor in the philosophical difficulties could still become fascinated by abortion as a controversy simply because of the extraordinary curiosities of the public debate. But being 'taken over' has its dangers. We who write about abortion and who think that there is a public issue of great moment should not lose sight of the fact that there are so many equally important problems faced by the world. Some of these naturally have to do with children. I have a good friend, a paediatrician, who in her professional life has been able to do far more to ensure a respect for young human individuals than a philosopher writing about abortion could hope to do. My views about this subject have changed greatly over the years. I cannot pretend that they have changed as a result of anything very sophisticated by way of argument - at least in regard to argument closely related to the topic. In fact my current thoughts about abortion are somewhat naive. I do not think of this as a defect. I am inclined to follow Berkeley in this matter: thinking that so often in philosophy we first raise a dust and then complain we cannot see. A simple argument justifying the exposure of infants on the grounds that 'The Tok went in for it and they were not such a bad lot', is - however unsatisfactory it may be - more to be trusted than a justification of the same on the basis of the latest extravagance of academic philosophy. There are times when it is better to believe a peasant than a pedant. Despite all the talk of the sanctity of life, I do not regard the issue as particularly 'religious'. But I am not so sure that our underlying and uncon troversial beliefs about homicide, beliefs which people are just not prepared to give up (or rather, are not yet prepared to give up) can deeply be under stood without religious beliefs which I and many others have been, perhaps understandably, reluctant to adopt. Nietzsche, I imagine, saw this only too viii Preface ix well. About these beliefs I will only say here that the philosophical founda tions of agnosticism appear to me not as strong as they once seemed, and that I for one am continually tempted to jump ship. And insofar as this is so, it is in part an outcome of my work on this controversy. I do not ever remember that questions about abortion featured at all in my upbringing, in my teenage years say. I certainly heard plenty about religion at my school, but abortion seemed not to be a matter of public concern at that time. It must have seemed beyond consideration. The issue first came to my attention when, as a student of psychology, I chanced to read Glanville Williams's newly published The Sanctity of Life and the Crimi nal Law,l taking it up, no doubt, because it was not on the reading list. This book also discussed other matters: suicide, euthanasia, and contraception (though what this last had to do with the sanctity of life was, and remains, something of a puzzle). The book was derived from lectures given at Colum bia University, and seems to have had a crucial impact at the time on the development of (what is called) liberal thinking about abortion. For a brief while Glanville Williams was my guide. It must have all seemed pleasantly shocking and agreeably secularist. To me, 'both human history and the history of ethics was just beginning', and I wanted to be part of it. 2 It was around this time that I found myself, with a few other students, interviewing A. J. Ayer for a TV programme. He answered all our questions with his customary energy and ease. Naturally I wanted to ask him about the sort of issues I had been reading about in The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law. In fact, I afterwards sent my copy of the book to him, which he then read 'with pleasure and approval'. The book must have caused a stir, for it was picked over by a panel of notables on the then Third Programme. It received, I remember, a curiously cold response from the philosopher on the panel, who seemed not willing to join in the discussion at all and was given a quarantined space all to herself. Not much pleasure or approval there. She was G. E. M. Anscombe, at that time just a name to me. As it turned out, I was later to find myself in tutorial conversations with both these philosophers at Oxford and I successively learned much from them.3 1 The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law, London: Faber and Faber, 1958. Glanville Williams, Professor of Law at Cambridge, was from 1962 to 1997 President of the Abortion Law Reform Association. 2 I owe this phrase to Derek Parfit. In Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) he heads one of his sections: 'How both human history, and the history of ethics, may just be beginning'. He claims that 'Non-Religious Ethics has been systematically studied, by many people, only since about 1960' (p. 453). The debate about Glanville Williams's book dates from 1958, slightly before history. 3 Some idea of what Elizabeth Anscom be must have said can now be gleaned, almost SO years later, from 'Glanville Williams' The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law: a Review', in Mary Geach and Luke Gormally. eds, Human Life, Action and Ethics, Essays by G. E. M. Anscombe, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005. x Preface By the time I reached Oxford, however, I had long forgotten the problems of abortion and kindred topics. My days were spent largely on the philoso phy of psychology and the philosophy of language. I dare say the matter never crossed my mind until, many years later, my wife was pregnant with our fourth child. Since she was then well on in her thirties she was of course offered 'the tests'. Well, who wants a damaged baby? I was, I remember, quite anxious that the chromosomes should carefully be counted. I just refused to consider what if Distressing choices, I must have said to myself, should not be faced while it was still unsettled whether the question arose. In dedicating the book to the memory of the child in question, my son and good friend Nicholas, who died on the cliffs of Glen Clova while I was writing it, I cannot help thinking back to these beginnings. I am acutely aware that had 'the tests' turned out differently, he might well have been killed by doctors, with my connivance, before he was born. Luck saved him - and me. How many there are who have not been lucky. Part 1: Introductory 1.1 The academic problem and the unhappiness behind it In September 1995 three pro-choice activists in Boston sat down with three pro-life activists. They were answering a call from civic leaders, the state Governor and the local Catholic bishop, for talks between the representa tives of 'choice' and of 'life' after a man had shot dead two receptionists at clinics in the area. After more than 150 hours of conversations over the next five and a half years these six activists decided to reveal to the world at large what they had achieved. And what was that? On the substance of their disagreement: nothing. 'Since that first fear-filled meeting, we have experienced a paradox. While learning to treat each other with dignity and respect, we have all become firmer in our views about abortion.11 It is here, when all else fails, that our curious study philosophy has a part to play. Philosophy is the art of the intractable. It is what we call upon when we do not know what further information would be relevant. As so often, we need to recognise that our difficulties might have to do with under standing better the information we already have. We may need to retreat a bit to consider more carefully our presuppositions. And we doubtless need at least to recognise that there are several problems, not just one. Some of these problems might be of our own making. But other problems must lie deep in the nature of things. No one may yet know how to deal with this or that aspect. We must think things out patiently and slowly. If we do so we may hope to learn something not just about the immediate issue but about moral philosophy and perhaps even about ourselves.2 1 Anne Fowler, Nicki Nichols Gamble, Frances X. Hogan, Melissa Kogut, Madeline McComish and Barbara Thorp, Boston Globe, 28 January 2001. 2 We do ourselves no good by misdescribing or mystifying our difficulties. Kristin Luker in her well known book, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) gives an unfortunate account of the difficulty of agreement. 'The two sides', she says, 'share almost no common premises.' But 1