The Meaning of Life - Conclusion

by Kevin Carey

G21 Staff Writer

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Kevin Carey

I should also say that much of the background for this discussion comes from two of Ronald Dworkin's superb books Freedom's Law and Life's Dominion. There is hardly a sentence in the first that I do not agree with but in the case of the second I admire its arguments, would support legislation based on them for abortion and euthanasia, but do not personally accept his positions on either.

The most useful starting point for discussion is the detail in the Majority Opinion written in Roe by Justice Harry Blackmun who specified that, in normal circumstances, no abortion should take place after the second trimester. This would allow the woman adequate time to make a decision, forbid the destruction (except in highly specified situations) of an entity with a nervous system capable of feeling pain and it would prevent the destruction of an entity so close to being a human being that it might devalue the general respect for life.

Setting aside the legal confusions of the 'right', Blackmun's Opinion is being attacked on two moral fronts. The first is the Roman Catholic position that life is God given and that, except where the mother's life is in danger, no abortion (or euthanasia) is ever justified and that, indeed, all 'interference' with the link between sex and the birth of children, other than that just mentioned, is forbidden.

Setting aside the purpose of medicine, and surgery in general, and in vitro fertilisation in particular, this is at least a position that is easy to grasp though it suffers severely from a lack of proportionality both in the relativity of supposed sexual misdemeanours to other kinds of misdemeanour (the "Mortal sin" is a single and final unit of damnation without gradation) and within the class of sexual misdemeanours between, for example, the use of a condom and an abortion in the third trimester. It is, in other words, a clumsy but perfectly acceptable moral position but it is no basis for an argument about legislation in a multi-cultural society.

One might, as I do, almost entirely agree with this position but not want that position to be reflected in legislation. As far as I am concerned, these are matters where the only legitimate means of changing a mind is persuasion and, even then, such arguments as are deployed must not be overbearingly presented by the strong to alter the behaviour of the weak for that is its own kind of tyranny.

The second line of attack is by those, including the American 'right', which might accept the Roman Catholic line but which also think either that all forms of human life are equal and/or that respect for 'human life' in general must be maintained through forbidding all abortion except under the Catholic dispensation -- with the possible extension of it to pregnancies caused through rape.

The first of these arguments clearly does not meet the criterion of proportionality; an ovum at the instant of fertilisation is not the same form of life as a fully formed human being, capable of feeling pain and exercising a conscience. I may think it so but the law cannot.

And, indeed, almost everywhere in the democratic world the law does not.

This argument, related to the Catholic position, is tenable but not, as I have pointed out, when held by supporters of military conscription and, by extension, those who support judicial murder. Bush's distinction between 'innocent' life and criminal life is a distinction of substance. It may have been made for a very coherent moral reason but it destroys any notion that all human life should be treated identically.

The argument that every individual entity must be allowed to develop into a human being, regardless of the wishes of the person carrying it, in order to preserve respect for life in general is, again, morally simple but disproportionate.

There is something perverse -- this is Dworkin's most powerful and persuasive argument -- in expressing your value for life by forcing people to bear children against their will or to wreck the dignity of a long life through refusing the termination of life support for those in a persistent, vegetative state.

Again, the law should allow anything that can be private to be private.

There is no reason why a woman's decision not to bear a child nor a loved one's decision to terminate life support should be matters for public enforcement. No matter what the moral grounds, there are no legal grounds for it.

But are there moral grounds for making legal rules about the nature of human life?

There are; but these are not the ones commonly advanced.

Those who assert moral arguments about "the right to life" are asserting a right to interfere in the lives of others based on an argument about the purposes for which medicinal and surgical techniques can or cannot be used.

They are not arguing, for instance (or only a very few of them) that no medicine or surgery is ever justified. Many of them use, or at least do not oppose the use of, contraceptives which also happen to be abortifacients.

Some opponents of abortion are in favour of IVF as an extension to the right to life while others see it as an unpardonable interference with nature.

This line of discussion, all within the confines of life in the first two trimesters, tries to set out conditions in which it is proper or improper to use fertilising material for choosing the sex of a child, in the case of the sperm 'sorting' technique and under what conditions fertilised material should be used for medical research.

It seems to me that this argument about technology gets us nowhere: it does not provide skeletal material for a framework; it is, consequently, incapable of delivering proportionate solutions; and it repeats the error of confusing what a technology can do and how we choose to use it.

In other words, the central core of morality, intention, is absent from these arguments.

Let us, then, start with abortion within the first two trimesters and work backwards. Like all other acts, abortion should not be undertaken as a selfish act. The law cannot delve into this area so Blackmun's Opinion is purely practical on this point. There is evidence that many abortions are selfish, that they are undertaken, for instance, to preserve a woman's career pattern but there is also strong evidence that the majority of abortions in the United States take place for unselfish reasons, with potential mothers fearing the consequences for their next potential child and existing children.

There is some evidence, too, that some abortions are considered to be the unfortunate by-product of a failure to apply contraception effectively but, again, there is evidence that many more take place because of an ignorance of contraception.

As a believer in high taxation and high standards of universal, compulsory, publicl- funded education, I have no problem in proposing a remedy for poverty and ignorance as major factors in women choosing an abortion. I propose that every citizen be accorded such a minimum income, in line with family commitments, that poverty simply cannot be advanced as a ground for an abortion.

I also propose a proper educational framework which includes, early, thorough sex and relationships education throughout the public school system.

But it is the very people that oppose abortion who are least prepared to do anything about the grounds most often cited for it. If they really want to assert the right to life then their minimum moral obligation is to see that everybody who wants to bring a child into the world is not prevented from enjoying that supposed "right" simply because they are poor.

To give him credit, this was one of the major reasons for the stance of Pope Paul VI on birth control; he quite rightly saw it as an easy option for rich countries which did not want to spend enough on development assistance in poor countries, an aspect of Humanae Vitae that the American 'right' seems to have slid over during its reading of this sacred text.

It is also the same people who oppose proper sex and relationships education in the public school system -- in spite of evidence now stretching back eighty years that unwanted pregnancy is a major symptom of ignorance -- which, more often than not, is closely associated with poverty. The assertion here is that sex and relationships education should be a private matter but that is to confuse, to use an example, the public requirement for a driving test and the private right to decide where to drive once qualified.

Such a moral position, based on the centrality of intent, should also rule out abortion simply because the child does not meet the parents' minimum requirements, such as its sex and its genetic propensities.

I would also argue, personally, that this moral position should rule out abortion because a foetus will or is likely to become a seriously disabled human being but I recognise that this is a highly personal pronouncement by somebody who has never been faced with the dilemma.

It has to be recognised that it must also be allowed that it is extremely difficult to separate the possibly selfish act of preventing the birth of a disabled child and the humane wish not to create a person who will suffer. It is difficult, for example in my own case, to persuade people who do not know me well that, even though I am totally blind, I would not exchange my life for that of any other person I have ever met. Most people I meet casually, such as cab drivers, simply don't believe me. They think my life is an unmitigated disaster for me and a burden for everyone else.

This leads us backwards to sperm 'sorting'. I automatically revolt at the thought because as an idea it has "Selfish" written all over it, but there are two major qualifications to be made. The first is that there may be very good reasons, concerned with the sexually based propensity to suffer from hereditary diseases, why parents may wish to choose the sex of a child. I put this in the same moral place as the argument above about disability and abortion. The second qualification is that, ironically, if sexual technology allows us to choose the sex of our offspring we may need the very same technology to create balance. There is every reason to believe that the world in general and Asia in particular will bias human births severely in favour of males and that, therefore, there will have to be economic incentives to create females. This will not only be a matter of near symmetry; a severe imbalance, particularly in favour of men, will cause profound social unrest. Sexual technology already means that eggs are much more precious than sperm but if that is exacerbated by severe sexual frustration in males between 15 and 30, the consequences will be unimaginably brutal.

As usual, the moral stance turns on motive rather than technology. What initially appears to be unmitigatedly repugnant may be invoked as the lesser of evils, even if its very use was the initial cause of the evil.

Turning, finally, to the case of the use of fertilised material for stem cell research, I find this the most difficult to oppose because we have built into us -- by God if that's your preference, as it is mine -- a massive urge to create life and an equally massive urge to retain our own as long as possible.

Both of these fundamental drives, which are only very slowly moderated by prosperity, make it very difficult to find an argument against research that helps create or prolong life if the means are not threatening individual human beings or society.

Much as my own instinct balks at what is being done by scientists, I see no legal or moral case against it as long as it is not exploited for excessive economic gain or for purposes of social engineering.

That last point leads to the central problem of how far we should 'interfere' with individual foetuses to such an extent that we create, for the most benign set of uncoordinated reasons, a steadily more genetically refined 'master race'.

The answer here, more than anywhere else, is profoundly moral and refers to motive.

It is not proportionate to put Hitler and Aspirin on an equal footing. The argument is, in the final analysis, much more to do with why we do things not what we do.

If only Bush and his supporters could get that simple idea into their heads, the sooner we would have a debate which might lead to the establishment of a moral framework which can then inform legislation and legal interpretation.

As I have pointed out, the two frameworks are not and should not be identical but they are both basic requirements for an informed debate. The core problem that stands out from this discussion is that the one yardstick for judging these issues above all others is the elimination of selfishness, a characteristic which Bush and his allies epitomise. That is a bad start.

It is easy to jeer at those who would kill doctors who carry out abortions in order to preserve the "right to life", as it is easy to think of abortion as the resort of the sexually wanton and the economically feckless; and it is, in many ways, easier still to hide behind the unforgiving, unundulating wall of the Humanae Vitae of Pope Paul VI and his successors -- but none of this will answer the case.

The questions, if anything, will get more difficult as technology in the area most central to our drives, continues to develop. If Bush manages to overturn Roe it will be a disaster for the whole civilised world, upholding tyranny in the name of rights, imposing degradation in the name of dignity, causing death in the name of life. He must be stopped.

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References

Dworkin, Ronald: Life's Dominion: An Argument About Abortion and Euthanasia, Harper Collins, 1993.

Dworkin, Ronald: Freedom's Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution, Oxford University Press, 1996.

Paul VI, His Holiness the Pope: Humanae Vitae: Encyclical On the Regulation of Birth, 25.07.68.


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"Meaning of Life" Opening (Stay with us!)

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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