If you leaf through the transcripts of the parliamentary debates over the Abortion Bill, much was made, both for and against abortion, of the unborn child as a “potential human life”. In the 1960s, those who insisted that human life began at conception were still often considered to be dogmatic, at best philosophically romantic, in their assertions. Human life began, so it was commonly held, at some indeterminate point between conception and birth which could be debated. The recognisable value of the woman’s life, and her rights under law, were only weighed against the “potential” life and rights of the unborn child.
Yet today, after more than eight million abortions in Britain, it is a medically established and accepted fact that a new, independent and identifiable genetic human life does, in fact, begin at conception. This raises an inescapable question for our whole society: when do human rights begin?
Our language of human rights, legal and philosophical, has been formed with the implicit understanding that human life and human rights are indivisible propositions. But our understanding of when human life begins has evolved.
If, as we now know, human life does begin at conception, the legal presumption would seem to be that such human life is, at the very least, invested with the human right to life. To argue against this requires that we split human “personhood” from human life, and posit that personhood (and therefore rights) are conferred or acquired through societal membership or participation. There are a number of serious repercussions to this train of thought.
If personhood is not simply tested against the presence of human life, what then is the test? If abortion is taken as a self-contained issue, perhaps there can be coherent argument for some sort of viability test, whether it be brain activity, an independent heartbeat, response to external stimuli, ability to breathe outside the womb, etc.
But personhood and human rights cannot be debated just within the womb. Once we accept that there is such a thing, philosophically or legally, as a human life which is not a person, this can and will be applied to human life outside the womb too. Here the different viability tests make for uncomfortable failing cases: people in comas may lack brain activity, people with pacemakers may not be able to sustain their own heartbeat independently, people on ventilators cannot breathe for themselves. Does someone lacking any or all of these criteria lose their personhood and human rights? As the debate about euthanasia develops across Europe, these are not idle questions.
Of course, we are all comfortable with some rights being qualified by our ability to exercise them. We do not confer the right to vote, for example, until an age when we are capable of using it responsibly. But, at least in Britain, we are supposed to accept that the right to life is absolute; even those guilty of the most appalling crimes are not subjected to the death penalty. And we hold this right to life to be innate, not acquired. Life is spared not out of appreciation for the social contribution of serial killers and rapists, but because we assign an absolute value to human life as life.
As members of a modern progressive democracy, we should be horrified by the idea of non-persons or lesser-persons. If personhood and rights are no longer to be held as synonymous with the fact of human life, and are somehow linked to societal participation, what does this portend for how we might come to treat the disabled? Indeed, the very status, value and personhood of the disabled is unquestionably bound up in how our society views abortion.
However much it makes for an easier social truce on the subject, treating the right to life as a discrete question of viability and social membership in the womb will simply not wash, either as philosophy or legal theory.
If the right to human life can be essentially means-tested, we can only skirt the wider implications for the elderly, the infirm and the disabled for so long. Sooner or later we have to make a determination: is the right to life inalienable to human life, or conferred by society. And we have to make this determination mindful that what rights we acknowledge society can give, we are implicitly affirming it can take away again.
Fifty years ago, the Abortion Act was brought into law with the purported aim of protecting the lives of expectant mothers. It is impossible to claim with a straight face that, even considering the woman alone, abortion in Britain is practiced as a life-saving endeavour. On the contrary, the statistics show it is overwhelmingly performed with the sole intention of ending a human life.
Today, the Abortion Act enshrines a legal distinction not just between the born and the unborn, but also between “viable” and “unviable” human life, between the disabled and the so-called normal. Regardless of whether Parliament intended this at the time, it has created legal categories of human life which are lesser or even non-persons under the law. It has enshrined the idea that the most basic of human rights, to life itself, is subject to vague and arbitrary criteria which we as a society have barely begun to acknowledge, let alone consider the wider consequences of. This is the inhuman legacy of a dehumanising law.
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