Britain Neither Wants Nor Needs US Abortion Politics

We are a nation of pragmatists, not bio-libertarians

I expect I’ll lose readers in some quarters for saying this, but I am an abortion centrist. A core argument in Feminism Against Progress is that its legalisation created a key plank of the bio-libertarianism that has marginalised mothering in the women’s movement to all our detriment. But in the same book I also argued that given societal changes downstream of its legalisation, as things stand limited legalisation is currently the least worst settlement.

I dare say many of you will find this position unsatisfying, whether because it’s too conservative, or not conservative enough. But my views fall squarely within the British mainstream, as well as within a British political tradition historically more rooted in pragmatism than ideology. In general in Britain abortion is illegal, but under the 1967 Abortion Act it is permitted in some circumstances, with signoff from two doctors. In practice, such signoff tends to be routine in early pregnancy, and more carefully scrutinised in the second trimester. It is not permitted at all after 24 weeks, except (itself controversially, and some say with heavy eugenic overtones) in the case of medical emergency, disability, or severe illness.

Unlike the bitter American debate, British abortion law has broadly been treated as a matter of settled public consensus for decades. Our laws are also, by European standards, pretty liberal. I personally think they could be tighter; but overall things work okay.

But as I warned in Feminism Against Progress, bio-libertarianism is a dogmatic, extremist, maximalist ideology. It asserts that there must be no legal or moral constraint at all on anything to with bodies, ever. The frontline for such activism is America, where (as both cause and consequence) abortion is a central culture-war battlefield. Thus, as I also warned in Feminism Against Progress, American abortion politics are now shouldering their way into the British discourse.

And, with the greatest of affection and respect to my many dear American friends, American abortion discourse really doesn’t belong in Britain. We are temperamentally unsuited. But despite this, bio-libertarian ideology is wafted here by American cultural clout and the transnational spread of transhumanist technology and ideas, all fanned by de-territorialised internet discourse. It doubtless doesn’t help either that much of our ruling class believes Britain is an American blue state, that for some reason isn’t allowed to help choose the President.

And in the view of adherents, even Britain’s liberal abortion laws are intolerable. Accordingly, two of the most rabid bio-libertarians in Parliament, Labour MPs Stella Creasy and Tonia Antoniazzi, have proposed an amendment to the latest Crime and Policing Bill that would decriminalise abortion in the UK, all the way up to full term. Antoniazzi has made it clear that she’s fine with the implications of this change, and that a pregnant woman would be able to end the life of a baby in her womb that, under other circumstances, would survive premature birth.

I am stating the obvious when I point out that this position is basically indistinguishable from decriminalising infanticide.

As I understand it, the progressive case for changing the law anyway is that yes, it is pretty drastic - but you would, the reasoning goes, have to be desperate to do something so shocking, and it is wrong and cruel to punish someone for being desperate.

There have been a few such prosecutions in recent years, in the UK, and in each case the woman’s predicament was indeed an unhappy one, where a compelling case could be made for compassion. But unfortunately for progressives such as Creasy and Antoniazzi, it does not follow from such pitiful stories that decriminalising the behaviour in question would be both compassionate to the individual, while also leaving the wider societal framework otherwise intact. It doesn’t work like that. The law does not merely channel the behaviour of otherwise blank slate individuals; it helps to create the moral baseline within which society operates.

Law is normative. This basic insight recurs all the way back to Aristotle. And yet, again and again, we see progressive legislators operating from an entirely different set of assumptions. Roughly: that 1) social norms coalesce as it were spontaneously, and 2) don’t require any formal scaffolding to thrive. This is 3) because people are basically good, and need only to be 4) freed from unjust or punitive material or social pressures, in order to be the best possible versions of themselves, along moral lines which pre-exist as per 1).¹

From this perspective, the progressive fervour for decriminalising antisocial behaviour makes much more sense. In this view, behaviours that degrade the public square overall such as shoplifting, prostitution, or rough sleeping can and should be treated with compassion, and never invite punitive reactions. Everyone is naturally good, and and just needs help; antisocial behaviour is simply evidence of severe distress. And obviously punishing people for being in distress is wrong. But what if, in fact, baseline social norms are not self-evident? Even a cursory glance at the evolution of mores through history supports this - as, indeed, does any acquaintance with world cultures beyond ordering exotic takeaway.

If we accept in principle that social mores are not self-evident but malleable, we can also grasp that what a culture considers to be normatively acceptable must be bounded by a criminal code. If you have no means of sanctioning an unwanted behaviour, you are effectively saying the behaviour itself doesn’t matter all that much. And because people actually aren’t “naturally good” in some Rousseauean way, once you take the lid off antisocial behaviour you are almost guaranteed to get more of it. With weary predictablility for example, decriminalising shoplifting tends to result in more shoplifting - because the law has tacitly stated that shoplifting is no big deal.

Following the same logic, we can reasonably infer that decriminalising abortion to full term will make the same kind of tacit moral assertion. But where rampant shoplifting is bad enough, here we would be asserting - all in the name supposedly of “compassion” - that killing an otherwise viable pre-term baby in utero is no big deal. It doesn’t matter what else people say surrounding that. Absent scaffolding from the law, social stigma is just someone’s opinion.

To decriminalise is, tacitly, to normalise. Decriminalising late term abortion will result in more late-term abortions. Do we care? I think we should care. And caring (perhaps ironically) requires a measure of hard-heartedness, because the way social norms actually function makes it unhappily necessary to punish women who procure very late term abortions - because if we don’t, we are tacitly normalising the behaviour.

And yet in any given case, doing so is sure to feel hard-hearted - because the normative effect of such prosecutions is the very thing which creates the social climate that, in turn, more or less guarantees that any incidents which do occur come with a tragic story. When we consider those tragic stories, and feel bad about making them worse with prosecution, we should also bear in mind that the deed itself is terrible, and that a very late-term abortion really is functionally indistinguishable from infanticide. And we should recall that if we do not punish infanticide, we are tacitly assenting to its normalisation.

My most pro-life readers will no doubt point out that strictly speaking, if you take the view that life begins at conception, all abortion is indistinguishable from infanticide. And yes, this is probably true. But in this unhappy area, British pragmatism has settled on a general consensus that while this may be strictly true, it is very much more concretely so once an infant is able to survive outside the womb. Hence the ban on abortion after 24 weeks; for me even this is very late, but it is the compromise we have. After the second trimester, more or less everyone agrees it’s a baby. That we have laws governing what happens after that reflects an equally longstanding consensus that once it’s a baby, it’s no longer merely a matter of personal preference but fundamental shared social norms about the duty of care owed to babies. Decriminalisation makes a radically different statement; that a mother choosing to killing her viable baby in utero is no big deal, at any point, even after we’ve all more or less accepted it’s a baby. I don’t want to live in a society that takes this view, and I expect you don’t either.

If you think we have any kind of duty of care to babies, this has to be reflected (however pragmatically and messily etc) in the law. Sure, it might be possible to adjust existing legislation, or adjust sentencing guidelines, or put better support in place. Things can always be better. But really, the argument I am making is fundamentally a small-c conservative one, which is to say that when an overall settlement works well enough we should leave it alone and certainly not actively make it worse.

And yet, here we are. The most charitable interpretation of the Creasy/Antoniazzi amendment is that it is motivated by a mix of misplaced empathy and woeful misunderstanding of the relationship between law, normativity, and human behaviour. But it must not be permitted to pass. Just as decriminalising shoplifting legitimises more shoplifting, decriminalising late term abortion will normalise killing viable unborn babies that even pro-choice normies accept are babies. Downstream of the horrified reaction this will elicit will come a newly embittered public debate on a formerly settled issue, yet another importation of American-style biopolitics where it doesn’t belong, and - beyond this - perhaps the very backlash pro-choice women fear most of all.

In sum, then: this policy is reckless, stupid, and unBritish, will incentivise the behaviour it addresses, and tends only towards the eventual tacit legalisation of infanticide. You do not have to be a pro-lifer to oppose it. It should be rejected out of hand, and its proponents drummed from Parliament.

1. We can infer from the great many things that do end up being criminalised under progressive regimes that this is only partly true and that, for progressives as much as anyone else, there are plenty of crimes that admit of no extenuating circumstances. But good luck getting a progressive to see that. If it helps, read everything I say here as qualified by an overall Schmittian assessment of the parties involved.