Abortion Legislation, Secular & Religious arguments and Public Policy - Part 1

Introduction

            The debate over abortion is important because it can serve towards establishing a moral corrective to those who espouse moral relativism: the view that there are no objective, universal moral norms or principles that apply to everyone. Moral relativism arguably hinders discussion and potential moral progress. This debate will also impact this current generation and the generations to come. Issues like the worth of human dignity; moral decision-making, judgment evaluation and consideration of one’s duties to other individuals are relevant in the abortion debate as well as in one’s broader life.

I will sketch four main issues that I think are prevalent in the abortion controversy and provide some insight about them: Framing the core disagreement, the categorization of “secular arguments” and “religious arguments”, establishing the right policy and legislating policy. Lastly I will conclude with a brief interview with a philosopher Patrick Lee who teaches at Franciscan University in focusing on two key questions: Why do secular thinkers frame this issue as a conflict of two subjects “Religious Faith” vs. “Secular Knowledge”; and How can pro-lifers lend their views and influence current policies so as to protect the unborn?

Framing the core disagreement

Oftentimes at first blush it can be difficult to discern the dividing line between abortions rights advocates and pro-life advocates. Some might be tempted to think that no substantial progress can be made in establishing dialogues with people that have opposing viewpoints. I will briefly demonstrate that the real disagreement between those that support and oppose abortion rights is not a matter of whether each side takes certain core moral principles to be valid and objectively true. For example, both sides agree that one ought to respect and value human life and that one ought to respect personal autonomy. With a few exceptions, those who defend a right to an abortion (pro-choice advocates) believe they should value the lives of children that are born and oppositions to abortion rights (pro-life advocates) uphold a woman’s right “to choose”.

So where does the disagreement lie if both sides affirm both principles? The disagreement lies in the extent of application of those principles to the unborn and the factual dispute regarding the unborn’s identity. Does the pro-choice advocate believe that they ought to recognize and respect the value of the unborn? No. It is because they do not think it is the sort of thing that deserves respect in the way a toddler does, which turns out to be the real issue of disagreement. Supporters of abortion rights disagree with opposition to abortion rights on the identity of the unborn and this can be demonstrated with a simple clarification: If pro-choice advocates will appeal to poverty to justify abortion on moral or legal grounds but would not on whether we can kill 2 year olds for the same reasons, then he or she has assumed the unborn are not human beings. Hence the disagreement lies in the factual dispute of the unborn’s identity, not women’s choice, poverty, or economic equity. 

Secular and Religious arguments

One of the most prominent obstacles for pro-life legislation is the issue of legislating one’s religious point of view. It is commonplace to hear this line when one is debating about passing a law that would protect the unborn because secularists will oftentimes invoke the separation of church and state clause to – not refute the pro-life position – but to make it incapable of being defended in principle.

            

          This is related to the nature of knowledge. To put it simply, to say one knows something means one has (1) encountered it directly by way of the five senses (2) direct access to it by way of introspection (like your own thoughts) or (3) arrived at some conclusion in an argument. If one’s position can be known or refuted by way of reason and since reason is a publically accessible avenue of knowing for any reasonable (religious or not) citizen, then he or she can legislate that policy because it passes the measure test for what counts as knowable claim. 

In the case of abortion, secularists will say that the pro-life position is inherently religious and since religious beliefs are not items of knowledge, one cannot reasonably legislate a policy based on the pro-life position. One way of response is by denying that this debate is about two subjects (secular knowledge vs. religious faith) but rival accounts of the nature of human personhood as it applies to the unborn. Sophisticated defenders of abortion rights will typically single out a certain point in a human being’s development at which it becomes a person as way of construing what a person is. Sophisticated pro-life advocates will argue that the unborn is a person because it has a personal nature - which it had at the moment it came into being - that grounds certain ultimate capacities and functions that are natural byproducts of what it is. In essence, the unborn is either a person because of what it is or because it can exercise certain functions.