The rest of the world is inclined to feel a little bemused
by the furore in the United States over abortion, but
it should not be. Fundamental issues of principle are
at stake which have universal application. The US, in
turn, could do worse than to look elsewhere for insights that
could light the way to a compromise solution. With the
overturning by the Supreme Court of the Roe versus Wade
judgment, made by the same court in 1973, conservative states
are moving to impose prohibitions on legal abortion; liberal
states are likely to loosen restrictions. It has triggered an
almighty row, which could have a decisive impact on the
outcome of forthcoming elections, including the presidential
race in 2024.
Many are alarmed and dismayed by the removal of what they
had come to think was almost a definition of American
womanhood. They believed that women had the “right to
choose”, guaranteed by the US Constitution, whether to remain
pregnant or to terminate their pregnancy. Yet this is not a right
that is universally recognised. Elsewhere, access to abortion is
more often seen as a concession, in the name of compassion, to
relieve women in stressful circumstances. Across the continent
of Europe, for instance, with exceptions such as Poland and
Malta, abortion has been legalised up to about the twelfth week
of pregnancy. The consensus is remarkable: from Belgium to
Slovakia, 14 countries allow abortion up to 12 weeks, and most
of the others allow it from 10 to 15. Most jurisdictions also allow
rare exceptions to the rule.
The US, which normally sees itself among mainstream
Western nations, could learn from these compromises, which
often reflect the public will as expressed in
lengthy democratic debate. In the US, the
“rights” argument has been deployed on both
sides, with the “right to choose” opposed to “the
right to life”. The argument over Roe v. Wade
shows the limitations of a rights-based debate.
While codes of human rights are an important
element in building civilised societies, they can
lead to the clash of all-or-nothing absolutes
that are almost impossible to resolve.
In the Irish abortion referendum four
years ago, two-thirds of the electorate
voted to repeal the 1983 constitutional amendment that
had guaranteed the right to life of the unborn, making
abortion illegal unless the pregnancy was life-threatening.
The Irish parliament then enacted a 12-week limit on legal
abortions, much influenced by other European examples,
and this remains the law today. This compromise emerged
from a process called a Citizens’ Assembly, where 99 ordinary
citizens from all walks of life and various religious
persuasions had sifted the evidence and arguments, and
framed a consensus. The (English) Electoral Reform Society
recommended the Irish Citizens’ Assembly model for
resolving difficult moral and political dilemmas in the United
Kingdom. There are similar elements in the way the Good
Friday Agreement was designed to operate in Northern
Ireland, forcing those with opposing views to talk to each
other, and more importantly, listen to each other. It ends the
“all or nothing”, “winner takes all” approach, which can be the
bugbear of democratic politics everywhere.
The right to life enshrines the fundamental truth that all
human life is sacred and deserves respect at every stage of a
pregnancy. And the right to choose defends the bodily
autonomy of women, who should not be coerced into childbearing
against their settled will and regardless of the
consequences. The views of the Catholic Church in Ireland
were not ignored by the Citizens’ Assembly, but nor were they
decisive. Since the referendum, the Church has placed its
emphasis – as is also happening in the United States – on
helping women to keep their children rather than abort them.
This recognises that one of the principal drivers of abortion is
poverty – lack of income, poor housing, low pay, limited access
to health facilities and so on.
A fair and just society would be one in which abortion was
never necessary for a woman’s survival or for her ability to care
for her children. And the US is shamefully inadequate in
terms of affordable healthcare, with rates of infant and
maternal mortality closer to what would be expected in the
poorest parts of the world. It is a very unequal society with
race a major factor in the divisions: a high proportion of those
women who seek abortion are African American.
Religion played a major part in the campaign against
Roe v. Wade, but it was not the Catholic Church that
led the way. This is one of the more disturbing aspects
of the situation now unfolding in the United States.
There is a close correlation between the states now moving
towards highly restrictive abortion legislation and those most
emphatically against any measures to control the ownership of
guns. These states are largely Republican, though often with
Democrat-controlled big cities. They are where
support for former President Donald Trump was
and is strongest; where movements like “Make
America Great Again” are most at home; and where
many believe that the 2020 presidential election
was stolen and that Trump was the true victor and
that he, not Joe Biden, should be in the White
House. They are also – and this is the most striking
feature in this phenomenon – home to the brand of
fundamentalist, creationist conservative
evangelicalism that is peculiarly American. This
ideology sees the US as having a God-given mission
to be the Scriptural “city on the hill”, a beacon of
righteousness. Being anti-abortion fits neatly into this ideology,
but it is fundamentally about something else: the ideology,
almost a religion in itself, of American exceptionalism.
American Catholicism has to be careful not to be tainted by it.
Roe v. Wade always was an unsafe judgment, hanging by a
logical string of legal arguments stretched to breaking point.
It moved from the 14th amendment, which was introduced
to force states in the South to grant voting rights to newly
freed slaves, to a doctrine of privacy, which was not obviously
the plain meaning of the words, to a right to abortion up to
foetal viability which, the court unexpectedly found, is
implied in the right to privacy. Women’s rights campaigners
in the US did not realise how precarious Roe v. Wade was
until too late. Had they worked to build a democratic
consensus for a 12-week compromise along mainstream
European lines, they might well have succeeded by now.
Instead, in the all-or-nothing logic of the abortion debate as
they themselves defined it, they went for all and may have
got nothing.
