Is This God's Country? by Robert Audi;

Author:Robert Audi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Why Is Abortion a Legal Concern in Democracies?

Abortion is obviously a concern of certain religions. Insofar as religion is an engine of law-making—as with abortion—this partly explains why democratic governments with large religious populations are in fact concerned with it. Beyond this, it’s not obvious why it should be a governmental concern beyond the appropriate healthcare responsibilities for citizens and other residents. In the not-so-distant past, women were denied the vote, and even their healthcare was largely controlled by their husbands or other males. What healthcare they could afford and who would provide it were commonly not up to them. Now, however, American women (and many others) typically regard determining their health needs as mainly up to them in consultation with medical professionals.

Since women have the same basic healthcare rights as men, why should democratic governments concern themselves with abortion except insofar as it impacts the health or rights of the pregnant woman? If the reason is that the developing human creature in the womb is a person with all the basic rights persons have, then government should also be concerned with whether there should be all the legal rights that go with being a person. Must the census-takers recalculate the population to take account of both pregnancies and embryos stored by couples hoping to bring at least one to infancy? Should tax deductions extend to the developing creature? Must death of the preborn be treated as death now is, not just statistically but in terms of responsibilities for burial or cremation?

Indeed, must we speak of “the preborn” human creature as a person in the many cases where miscarriages occur early in pregnancies—and if we do, must women who suffer spontaneous miscarriages also have to report a person’s death and be subject to other procedures this requires? Especially since miscarriages can be drug-induced at home, women suffering miscarriages at home might have to provide evidence to eliminate this possibility. Women with spontaneous miscarriages—and some physicians treating them—would be substantially burdened.

This is not all. Must inheritance tax laws apply to the deceased creature, with the potential of estate settlements that reduce inheritance to the families in question? Must counting people for political districting include pregnancies—with two additional persons given twinning? Would male parents of the developing creature have all the moral and legal rights and responsibilities of husbands even if there is to be no marriage with the women in question? These are only some of the complications that would ensue if the personhood-at-conception view of human development is taken to be a legitimate basis of law-making.

As American society now stands, the question why the law should govern how a woman deals with her pregnancy is an increasingly widespread concern in American political thinking. If we don’t simply assume (as most Americans do not) that persons—in the sense entailing all the rights persons have—come into existence “at conception,” there is no clear, widely accepted answer. The question bears emphasis: why, apart from religious beliefs, is so much energy in America devoted

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