I recently explained, here, why I would not be signing a petition which calls for abortions to be banned once a heartbeat was detected. However, I thought it would be helpful to talk more about the kind of debate we should be engaging in and how we should seek to move it forward.
I believe that the crucial point ethically is that human life begins at conception. That’s when you have at least one human being in the womb. That the fertilised egg is human, is alive and is not an organ or appendage of the mother is uncontroversial. Indeed, it remains legally the case that it is a criminal offence to attack and seek to destroy that life. What has changed over the past 60 or so years is the areas where exceptions/justifications/excuses are allowed for taking that life.
However, the reasons for those exceptions and arbitrary time limits connected to them starts from where there is debate, where there is confusion. So, whilst it is uncontroversial, scientifically that the zygote is alive and human, we cannot say the same about personhood being recognised. That’s because whilst we might refer to them as a person, colloquially, personhood is both philosophically and legally a technical concept. So, the question is about where do we recognise personhood so that the baby is recognised as having proper status and rights.
De-facto, because of how the law on abortion has worked, creating justifiable exceptions, I would argue that implicitly personhood is from conception. However, because that isn’t clearly understood, I believe that the best next step is to work to get that explicitly stated in law.
The consequence of this small legal change would be to begin to reframe the debate, that will affect how people think about babies in the womb and that will begin to change the culture meaning that further changes to the law on abortion become possible, not imposed onto society but wanted by society.
Faithroots 