An enormous weakness in American pro life policy is the equating of full term abortion and early term abortion. Yes, in God’s eyes they may be equivalent, but God doesn’t vote. It would’ve been easy to convince Americans to vote against full term abortion but not compromising has gotten us into a mess.
There must be a qualitative moral difference between killing a viable baby and terminating an early, under 12 week, pregnancy, even if both are wrong. If I can’t explain that difference in philosophical terms I still believe the difference is real.
The British system seems sane to me. You cannot compel people to be good but you can compel them to be more responsible.
I’m fully expecting blowback for taking a centrist stance on this. We should be able to build bridges between reasonable minded sex realists on both sides - but the internet incentive is always to polarise and push for the extreme view. It bodes ill for policy on any issue with tradeoffs on all sides. I just want our laws left alone, they work okay even if it’s not ideal from a purist pov,. So much in politics could be a bit better if we aimed for something that just works okay even if it’s not perfect
Absolutely. I don’t understand why this isn’t self evident to people. Surely keeping a nurse from suffocating a full term infant is better than nothing. A lot better.
I am afraid we are no longer a society with common anything let alone common sense.
I have my own views but here I am really making that most unexciting of things, a small-conservative argument for not making worse something imperfect but functional
That’s a mighty fine distinction you are making there between viability and sentience. I’m sure we can find people who detect no “sentience” in a child two weeks out of the womb, however wrong we may think they are in ignoring the evidence before them. There are probably some few who think the same of a two year old. I myself have been accused of implacable stupidity. Sounds like I better watch my step.
Sure, it means some level of awareness or self-awareness. There are some who say there is rudimentary self-awareness in the womb, though that seems like a stretch to me (see Erich Neumann on consciousness). My point is that sentience, unlike viability (notwithstanding continuing improvement in medical practices that may extend viability), is an awfully stretchy standard. On the topic of abortion, stretchy to the point of sketchy, it seems to me. But then, I’m a man.
If you are in an auto accident, and the doctors are confident that you will make a full recovery, it would be wrong to kill you.
You might not be able to live on your own (not viable) for a short time, and you might be in a temporary coma (temporarily not sentient), but if all that needs to happen is to not kill you for you to live a full life...
Inside me there are two wolves. One wolf says that comprehending and reproducing this argument for legal scaffolding of moral norms, even if to object to it, is a minimum for a mid 2:1. Another wolf says lol I don't think most of the laptop-in-Islington-cafe-class could hack it
What the UK want to to the last Labour government, under Mrs Ardern. This was and is a disaster. One of many. By the time she resigned, kindness made people wince, for that kind of compassion is tyrannical and cruel.
from an American "abortion centrist": When I wrote this emotional two-part essay twenty years ago, https://ambivablog.typepad.com/ambivablog/2005/01/note_this_essay.html, most of my readers with rare exceptions "found this position unsatisfying," They were either 100% "pro-life" or 100% "pro-choice" and were irritable with me for not throwing in my lot with one camp or the other. Ironically I think biological sex is one of the few things that actually IS "binary," and I don't understand the human penchant for forcing every other complex, ambiguous issue into that mold.
Also, I don't think life begins at conception. I think it starts at implantation. There is no human life without relationship, and the mother's body's agreement to the zygote's burrowing into the uterine lining is the striking of a bond. Severing that bond is one of the things that's tragic about abortion. That is suggested in the above essay and more explicitly explored in this one, which I venture tp think might particularly interest you: https://open.substack.com/pub/anniegottlieb/p/extrauterine-children?r=16gkv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Thank you so much for sharing this. I found so much in your account that echoes my own thoughts on this unhappy subject.
In my gloomier moments though I do also wonder if this kind of ambivalence is a luxury product, for those of us who specialise in ruminating, and in fact once you get to policy and popular mores blunter instruments are needed. I guess perhaps I defend the British abortion settlement against maximalist ideologues like Creasy because it makes an acceptable fist of such ambivalence while also being a mostly workable policy.
Thank you for this generous response. You're quite right that going to such complexity is a luxury that presupposes leisure (the sad leisure of the childless not by choice, in this case) and possibly decadence 😂 and is in any case politically useless, but I felt driven at that time to dig down to the heart of the matter. The two pieces of this that I'm glad to have managed to get "on paper" (that dates me) are that "there is no human life without relationship" (therefore life and relationship begin at implantation) and the once-only quality of the individual. At the time I wrote it I thought Plan B prevented implantation, which would be the window where it is interference in "fate," if you will, but by no definition murder. But it turns out Plan B just prevents ovulation, or something. Again, thank you. It's rare to find a reader, much less such a discerning one.
Delighted to see some abortion centrists out in the open. I think we are actually the majority (in the US and UK) but that we keep quiet because the extremists are so loud and impossible to dialogue with in any productive way. We’re also kind of boring from the perspective of mass media, while simultaneously pissing off both sides, thus we’re excluded from much of the conversation, and we tend to stay at home vs. get out in the streets, whether with picket signs or rosaries…my point being that I think “polarization” on this issue is actually an illusion created by two, relatively small and diametrically opposed groups of extremists.
My view is based squarely on anecdotal and experiential evidence, I admit!, but as someone who leads a very purple life and is often in conversation with people on both sides, I’ve realized there’s far more middle ground than either side would like us to believe.
One interesting observation I’ve noted is how the maternal experience tends to temper very progressive views about abortion. This was true for me and for many of the once decidedly pro-choice women I’ve spoken too, in that the experience of gestating a child in one’s body, and feeling it growing and moving, makes one very uncomfortable with the idea of abortion, especially after the first trimester, but it’s also very uncomfortable for mothers to imagine dictating another woman’s decisions around such a momentous issue. The natural outcome of these two empathic views is to strike a balance between the rights of mothers and unborn babies, which ends up looking something like what Mary is defending here… though I agree that 24 weeks is far too late. I know two women whose babies were born at 24 weeks, and they’re now toddlers.
Maybe I’m outing myself as a bit naive here, but I even find that some vocal pro-life and pro-choice ppl in my life unwittingly find themselves in less polarized territory after a heartfelt conversation.
And sure, maybe the centrist position is a luxury position, but frankly, I think it’s the only natural one to take if you’re embodied, empathic, non-ideological, and a deep thinker—all of which are good things!
(Also, I’m a mother of two toddlers with very little leisure time, and this is still very much my view!)
Love this. I’m so glad to know you’re “out there” and hope you’re right that there are many more.
In an age of sound bites, Mary is right that legality in the first trimester is the crude compromise that probably comes closest to approximating the balanced justice of the issue (like trying to map a curve with rigid sticks). (At least) two individuals’ vital interests are at stake and the outcome to strive for whenever possible is to align them.
So much of it has to do with “second-wave” feminists trying to vindicate ourselves as human beings by devaluing motherhood, in reaction to having been restricted to it and devalued along with it. All the “higher,” and higher-status (yes, women care about status!), human stuff was coded male, and women were both shut out of it and held to be unfit for it. I remember this firsthand because I was a child in the 1950s and in college before feminism. In reaction, you could say we threw the baby out with the bathwater.
I agree with every word of this! I’ve always said that (some) second wave feminists internalized “the patriarchy’s” degraded view of motherhood (in addition to many other forms of misogyny) instead of defining it on their own terms.
I also often feel like we are fighting the wrong fight. Because if what we really value is life and relationship, then we should be fighting for a world in which motherhood (and children above all!) are so valued, both through social mores and policy etc. that the idea of abortion seems as preposterous and self-condemning as turning down a Nobel.
My general take is that the right underestimates the burden of bearing, giving birth to, and raising a child while the left underestimates what this experience can give you, which is ultimately immeasurable, even and also under desperate circumstances. What we need is policy that understands the complexity of what’s actually at stake and can hold the fullness of the experience of having children in balance, for the sake of children most of all.
Because the truth is that it’s not women, but children (born and unborn) who bear the brunt of the cost of the failures on both sides.
"as preposterous and self-condemning as turning down a Nobel" ‼️❤️
"the right underestimates the burden of bearing, giving birth to, and raising a child while the left underestimates what this experience can give you, which is ultimately immeasurable, even and also under desperate circumstances."
"Because the truth is that it’s not women, but children (born and unborn) who bear the brunt of the cost of the failures on both sides."
I can't share this widely enough.
I am curious what this comment community thinks of the informal movement (it really adds up to one) of young fathers getting much more intimately involved in infant and toddler care. I have the unsubstantiated sense that some on the right think this is a "nonbinary," emasculating domestication, imprisonment in the "longhouse." I don't have this impression of the ones in my family. My impression is that they aren't competing with mothers, they're supporting and respecting them, appreciating and sharing the burden, acknowledging the primary importance to everyone of raising children, and tapping into the human qualities of nurturing in themselves, in their own distinctive male key. That part of themselves ("the heart") has been denied to men (coded feminine) much as "the mind and spirit" were declared off limits (or, if claimed, disdained as masculinizing) for women.
It helps that these men (and women!) spent their 20s being as wild and free as they needed to be, and exited adolescence around 30, marrying a partner they'd already lived with for several years. In a time when there is so much to find out about oneself, others, and the world, I approve of this new lifecycle timeline! 😂 (Who asked me?) Admittedly it does put time pressure on women's fertility, and it also breaks the male-pattern rhythm of our careers in a way that needs to be welcomed and made space for.
Thanks for this. Your well crafted essay lays out the argument for consideration of the normative effect of laws that is rarely articulated in America. It of course applies to many particular social norms; but in regard to abortion, in America today, proof of the normative effect of laws that allow unlimited abortion is the near taboo placed on discussion of limiting abortion once unlimited. This, for two reasons: first, as you point out, the demonic empathy toward specific real or theoretical circumstances (a lawyer might say, hard cases make bad law); second, as many have noted in regard to parents who sex transition their children, the unthinkable consequence of being wrong. That second consideration is a political killer, a social bomb of nuclear scale. An individual who has committed a vile act can really only come back from it through a religious conversion, perhaps. In the meantime, considering past acts to be vile is itself vile to the perpetrator.
I think this stinking moral mess is tearing America apart as the social proof of acceptability of maximalist views on topic after topic (abortion, climate change, immigration, now trans-humanism) makes reasoned discussion itself nearly impossible. People with sense don’t dare bring these topics up in mixed company in America for fear of catastrophic social blowback. If England can avoid this consequence on abortion, well, good on you.
On the one end, termination at the beginning of life, we have settled law. Now at the other end, assisted termination near the end of life, we are attempting to establish settled law. I don't know if that means anything, but I do find it interesting.
Yesterday I read a wonderful piece by Kathleen Stock titled "The Big Bang Myth" which I highly recommend. My takeaway after reading it is that we conscious Human Beings on this tiny planet in a vast universe are very lucky to get to partake in it. An almost infinite list of close to perfect things had to happen for our very existence. Some might call it a miracle. Here's the link - https://unherd.com/2025/06/the-big-bang-myth/?us=1
Good for you to step up to bat on this issue. Both of the extreme positions (at no time / at any time) have such severe consequences that some in-between point must be made to be acceptable. At least in the UK, a rational/pragmatic approach exists. In the US, the approach has been to intentionally evade a consistent set of rules (so as to keep the issue broiling forever).
Yes and my point is exactly that we in the U.K. must hold on to this imperfect but functional settlement and not allow it to be turned into stupid extremism by Stella Creasy
I read a poll once that showed approximately 85% of Americans on both sides support 1st trimester abortions. That is where I stand. It’s extremism shown by those who would make a woman carry to term the result of a rape. It’s also extremism to believe it should be legal to bash the head in of a full term baby in the birth canal.
You cannot go halfway. Either you have all of God or none of God. You cannot say, we take Christian ethics here, banning infanticide, but not here, as we want our abortion before 24 weeks.
This is true of the darkness of hell also. You may want the devil up to 24 weeks and no farther, but there will come a time when he will be satisfied with 24 weeks no longer. And because you have opened the door 24 inches, you will have no power to stop him swinging it all the way open.
note, please do not take my comment as a reason not to speak your mind. i think on this issue we are missing each other due to inadequate discussion, and reaching new points of consensus is going to involve stepping on toes. We all have to be open, and we should be concerned that not thinking of strategic needs in addition to moral imperative.
Cross-talk between America and England regarding abortion is very difficult. English still learn about conservative America through the filters of the progressive American press. Among the right, the Pro-life position serves as a humanizing and moderating force on the right, and it has a solid predictive value for who is a person of good will--although it is not perfect. Also, the case in England perfectly demonstrates that when you let down the guard on the Pro Life movement and you stop pressing it, you will get the unstoppable rise of euthanasia. The advocacy groups for both movements are highly overlapping, and they will fight the abortion war before they fight to kill the unwanted. No strong pro life movement in New York, in Canada, in Europe and in England left the country naked and unable to mount a fight against euthanasia. Abortion is the Ardennes of culture politics, once it's been crossed, there are no more natural defenses.
Walter Block has a provocative view on abortion that I offer for consideration—“Evictionism”.
“While a pregnant woman should be legally required to help the fetus survive outside her body whenever that is possible, she retains the legal right to evict the fetus at any time during her pregnancy.
In Block’s view, eviction is a distinct element of abortion. It’s critically important to understanding Block’s argument that he doesn’t view abortion as a single act, but a complex action of eviction plus killing. More precisely, eviction (as opposed to abortion) is an early end to pregnancy that doesn’t unnecessarily result in fetal death. A non-viable fetus may be evicted from the mother’s womb even though it will inevitably result in fetal death. Viability is the point at which a fetus can survive outside the mother’s womb. By definition, a fetus cannot survive before “viability” and will die outside the womb.
Block argues that since the fetus is an “innocent trespasser”, eviction must be by the “gentlest means possible.” Since eviction is a woman’s right as a property owner, there may be no legal prohibition against her liberty to evict. Since we do not yet have technology to extend viability to the earliest stages of pregnancy, lethal eviction during non-viability is, in Block’s view, the gentlest means of eviction possible, and does not constitute abortion.
Over time, technological advancement could extend viability to near conception, and make lethal eviction obsolete. Surely, this creates motivation on the part of prolifers to push for medical innovations in order to save fetal lives, moving towards a legal order that permits only non-lethal eviction. Evictionism would also allow for present legal prohibition against late-term abortion. It would also legally require a woman who evicted her viable fetus to secure a substitute caretaker.
In the meantime, pro-choice women would only be permitted legal access to lethal eviction pre-viability. After viability, she could still have access to non-lethal eviction, thus protecting her rights to bodily autonomy throughout her entire pregnancy.”
Another great piece, I wish we had this wisdom in our government. I used to think that Britain was somehow different to America, but all I've seen for a generation is that we are simply downstream of the US on every issue, as you say we think we're a Blue State. Perhaps JK Rowling and the court ruling on gender are a small step in the direction of Britain as an independent nation.
To me the pragmatic approach seems like an attempt to try and hold the line, with no reinforcements on route. Stella Creasy and other "Empathists" like her won't stop. A couple of European states have eases their laws in the past 5 years. With how America brained and anti anything associated with Christianity I can easily see that bill passing and large numbers of women being convinced to support it. If it does pass I doubt there will be any political will to try and reduce it regardless of who get into power next.
It's certainly true that Britain avoided the Roe v Wade that turned out to be absolutist (despite the wording): thus avoiding much conflict!
However, you understand that human nature is not play dough to be formed according to ideology. And we do know the fundamental purpose of the "reproductive system": and if not, we will be replaced by those who do. Reality is not impressed with us: conform to reality or disappear from the future.
But there's another issue: is killing your own off spring (a rejection of our own future) something that we humans can do and still flourish? Is it really, in the long term, on the menu of viable options? Or is it something so fundamentally inhuman that it signals the beginning of the end?
Infanticide was relatively normal in the Roman Empire, and it was Christianity that changed that. It is certainly unclear whether a society can legalise killing babies and remain Christian, though perhaps in our case the causality runs the other way.
An enormous weakness in American pro life policy is the equating of full term abortion and early term abortion. Yes, in God’s eyes they may be equivalent, but God doesn’t vote. It would’ve been easy to convince Americans to vote against full term abortion but not compromising has gotten us into a mess.
There must be a qualitative moral difference between killing a viable baby and terminating an early, under 12 week, pregnancy, even if both are wrong. If I can’t explain that difference in philosophical terms I still believe the difference is real.
The British system seems sane to me. You cannot compel people to be good but you can compel them to be more responsible.
I’m fully expecting blowback for taking a centrist stance on this. We should be able to build bridges between reasonable minded sex realists on both sides - but the internet incentive is always to polarise and push for the extreme view. It bodes ill for policy on any issue with tradeoffs on all sides. I just want our laws left alone, they work okay even if it’s not ideal from a purist pov,. So much in politics could be a bit better if we aimed for something that just works okay even if it’s not perfect
Absolutely. I don’t understand why this isn’t self evident to people. Surely keeping a nurse from suffocating a full term infant is better than nothing. A lot better.
I am afraid we are no longer a society with common anything let alone common sense.
I offer up only a little bit of blowback on one small point: should the standard for abortion be viability? Or sentience?
It seems to me that viability of the fetus is a ghastly standard. Shouldn’t sentience be our main concern?
If the law’s primary concern isn’t preventing the deliberate infliction of pain and distress, then what’s even the point of our laws and regulations?
I have my own views but here I am really making that most unexciting of things, a small-conservative argument for not making worse something imperfect but functional
That’s a mighty fine distinction you are making there between viability and sentience. I’m sure we can find people who detect no “sentience” in a child two weeks out of the womb, however wrong we may think they are in ignoring the evidence before them. There are probably some few who think the same of a two year old. I myself have been accused of implacable stupidity. Sounds like I better watch my step.
I’m pretty sure you don’t know what the word sentience means, based on this comment.
Sure, it means some level of awareness or self-awareness. There are some who say there is rudimentary self-awareness in the womb, though that seems like a stretch to me (see Erich Neumann on consciousness). My point is that sentience, unlike viability (notwithstanding continuing improvement in medical practices that may extend viability), is an awfully stretchy standard. On the topic of abortion, stretchy to the point of sketchy, it seems to me. But then, I’m a man.
sentience hits at age 2, or what?
The philosopher Peter Singer has made this argument from a utilitarian perspective. It’s not good.
Of course neither standard makes sense.
If you are in an auto accident, and the doctors are confident that you will make a full recovery, it would be wrong to kill you.
You might not be able to live on your own (not viable) for a short time, and you might be in a temporary coma (temporarily not sentient), but if all that needs to happen is to not kill you for you to live a full life...
Inside me there are two wolves. One wolf says that comprehending and reproducing this argument for legal scaffolding of moral norms, even if to object to it, is a minimum for a mid 2:1. Another wolf says lol I don't think most of the laptop-in-Islington-cafe-class could hack it
What the UK want to to the last Labour government, under Mrs Ardern. This was and is a disaster. One of many. By the time she resigned, kindness made people wince, for that kind of compassion is tyrannical and cruel.
from an American "abortion centrist": When I wrote this emotional two-part essay twenty years ago, https://ambivablog.typepad.com/ambivablog/2005/01/note_this_essay.html, most of my readers with rare exceptions "found this position unsatisfying," They were either 100% "pro-life" or 100% "pro-choice" and were irritable with me for not throwing in my lot with one camp or the other. Ironically I think biological sex is one of the few things that actually IS "binary," and I don't understand the human penchant for forcing every other complex, ambiguous issue into that mold.
Also, I don't think life begins at conception. I think it starts at implantation. There is no human life without relationship, and the mother's body's agreement to the zygote's burrowing into the uterine lining is the striking of a bond. Severing that bond is one of the things that's tragic about abortion. That is suggested in the above essay and more explicitly explored in this one, which I venture tp think might particularly interest you: https://open.substack.com/pub/anniegottlieb/p/extrauterine-children?r=16gkv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Thank you, if you do take a look.
Thank you so much for sharing this. I found so much in your account that echoes my own thoughts on this unhappy subject.
In my gloomier moments though I do also wonder if this kind of ambivalence is a luxury product, for those of us who specialise in ruminating, and in fact once you get to policy and popular mores blunter instruments are needed. I guess perhaps I defend the British abortion settlement against maximalist ideologues like Creasy because it makes an acceptable fist of such ambivalence while also being a mostly workable policy.
Thank you for this generous response. You're quite right that going to such complexity is a luxury that presupposes leisure (the sad leisure of the childless not by choice, in this case) and possibly decadence 😂 and is in any case politically useless, but I felt driven at that time to dig down to the heart of the matter. The two pieces of this that I'm glad to have managed to get "on paper" (that dates me) are that "there is no human life without relationship" (therefore life and relationship begin at implantation) and the once-only quality of the individual. At the time I wrote it I thought Plan B prevented implantation, which would be the window where it is interference in "fate," if you will, but by no definition murder. But it turns out Plan B just prevents ovulation, or something. Again, thank you. It's rare to find a reader, much less such a discerning one.
Delighted to see some abortion centrists out in the open. I think we are actually the majority (in the US and UK) but that we keep quiet because the extremists are so loud and impossible to dialogue with in any productive way. We’re also kind of boring from the perspective of mass media, while simultaneously pissing off both sides, thus we’re excluded from much of the conversation, and we tend to stay at home vs. get out in the streets, whether with picket signs or rosaries…my point being that I think “polarization” on this issue is actually an illusion created by two, relatively small and diametrically opposed groups of extremists.
My view is based squarely on anecdotal and experiential evidence, I admit!, but as someone who leads a very purple life and is often in conversation with people on both sides, I’ve realized there’s far more middle ground than either side would like us to believe.
One interesting observation I’ve noted is how the maternal experience tends to temper very progressive views about abortion. This was true for me and for many of the once decidedly pro-choice women I’ve spoken too, in that the experience of gestating a child in one’s body, and feeling it growing and moving, makes one very uncomfortable with the idea of abortion, especially after the first trimester, but it’s also very uncomfortable for mothers to imagine dictating another woman’s decisions around such a momentous issue. The natural outcome of these two empathic views is to strike a balance between the rights of mothers and unborn babies, which ends up looking something like what Mary is defending here… though I agree that 24 weeks is far too late. I know two women whose babies were born at 24 weeks, and they’re now toddlers.
Maybe I’m outing myself as a bit naive here, but I even find that some vocal pro-life and pro-choice ppl in my life unwittingly find themselves in less polarized territory after a heartfelt conversation.
And sure, maybe the centrist position is a luxury position, but frankly, I think it’s the only natural one to take if you’re embodied, empathic, non-ideological, and a deep thinker—all of which are good things!
(Also, I’m a mother of two toddlers with very little leisure time, and this is still very much my view!)
Love this. I’m so glad to know you’re “out there” and hope you’re right that there are many more.
In an age of sound bites, Mary is right that legality in the first trimester is the crude compromise that probably comes closest to approximating the balanced justice of the issue (like trying to map a curve with rigid sticks). (At least) two individuals’ vital interests are at stake and the outcome to strive for whenever possible is to align them.
So much of it has to do with “second-wave” feminists trying to vindicate ourselves as human beings by devaluing motherhood, in reaction to having been restricted to it and devalued along with it. All the “higher,” and higher-status (yes, women care about status!), human stuff was coded male, and women were both shut out of it and held to be unfit for it. I remember this firsthand because I was a child in the 1950s and in college before feminism. In reaction, you could say we threw the baby out with the bathwater.
I agree with every word of this! I’ve always said that (some) second wave feminists internalized “the patriarchy’s” degraded view of motherhood (in addition to many other forms of misogyny) instead of defining it on their own terms.
I also often feel like we are fighting the wrong fight. Because if what we really value is life and relationship, then we should be fighting for a world in which motherhood (and children above all!) are so valued, both through social mores and policy etc. that the idea of abortion seems as preposterous and self-condemning as turning down a Nobel.
My general take is that the right underestimates the burden of bearing, giving birth to, and raising a child while the left underestimates what this experience can give you, which is ultimately immeasurable, even and also under desperate circumstances. What we need is policy that understands the complexity of what’s actually at stake and can hold the fullness of the experience of having children in balance, for the sake of children most of all.
Because the truth is that it’s not women, but children (born and unborn) who bear the brunt of the cost of the failures on both sides.
💯
"as preposterous and self-condemning as turning down a Nobel" ‼️❤️
"the right underestimates the burden of bearing, giving birth to, and raising a child while the left underestimates what this experience can give you, which is ultimately immeasurable, even and also under desperate circumstances."
"Because the truth is that it’s not women, but children (born and unborn) who bear the brunt of the cost of the failures on both sides."
I can't share this widely enough.
I am curious what this comment community thinks of the informal movement (it really adds up to one) of young fathers getting much more intimately involved in infant and toddler care. I have the unsubstantiated sense that some on the right think this is a "nonbinary," emasculating domestication, imprisonment in the "longhouse." I don't have this impression of the ones in my family. My impression is that they aren't competing with mothers, they're supporting and respecting them, appreciating and sharing the burden, acknowledging the primary importance to everyone of raising children, and tapping into the human qualities of nurturing in themselves, in their own distinctive male key. That part of themselves ("the heart") has been denied to men (coded feminine) much as "the mind and spirit" were declared off limits (or, if claimed, disdained as masculinizing) for women.
It helps that these men (and women!) spent their 20s being as wild and free as they needed to be, and exited adolescence around 30, marrying a partner they'd already lived with for several years. In a time when there is so much to find out about oneself, others, and the world, I approve of this new lifecycle timeline! 😂 (Who asked me?) Admittedly it does put time pressure on women's fertility, and it also breaks the male-pattern rhythm of our careers in a way that needs to be welcomed and made space for.
Thanks for this. Your well crafted essay lays out the argument for consideration of the normative effect of laws that is rarely articulated in America. It of course applies to many particular social norms; but in regard to abortion, in America today, proof of the normative effect of laws that allow unlimited abortion is the near taboo placed on discussion of limiting abortion once unlimited. This, for two reasons: first, as you point out, the demonic empathy toward specific real or theoretical circumstances (a lawyer might say, hard cases make bad law); second, as many have noted in regard to parents who sex transition their children, the unthinkable consequence of being wrong. That second consideration is a political killer, a social bomb of nuclear scale. An individual who has committed a vile act can really only come back from it through a religious conversion, perhaps. In the meantime, considering past acts to be vile is itself vile to the perpetrator.
I think this stinking moral mess is tearing America apart as the social proof of acceptability of maximalist views on topic after topic (abortion, climate change, immigration, now trans-humanism) makes reasoned discussion itself nearly impossible. People with sense don’t dare bring these topics up in mixed company in America for fear of catastrophic social blowback. If England can avoid this consequence on abortion, well, good on you.
On the one end, termination at the beginning of life, we have settled law. Now at the other end, assisted termination near the end of life, we are attempting to establish settled law. I don't know if that means anything, but I do find it interesting.
Yesterday I read a wonderful piece by Kathleen Stock titled "The Big Bang Myth" which I highly recommend. My takeaway after reading it is that we conscious Human Beings on this tiny planet in a vast universe are very lucky to get to partake in it. An almost infinite list of close to perfect things had to happen for our very existence. Some might call it a miracle. Here's the link - https://unherd.com/2025/06/the-big-bang-myth/?us=1
Good for you to step up to bat on this issue. Both of the extreme positions (at no time / at any time) have such severe consequences that some in-between point must be made to be acceptable. At least in the UK, a rational/pragmatic approach exists. In the US, the approach has been to intentionally evade a consistent set of rules (so as to keep the issue broiling forever).
Yes and my point is exactly that we in the U.K. must hold on to this imperfect but functional settlement and not allow it to be turned into stupid extremism by Stella Creasy
I read a poll once that showed approximately 85% of Americans on both sides support 1st trimester abortions. That is where I stand. It’s extremism shown by those who would make a woman carry to term the result of a rape. It’s also extremism to believe it should be legal to bash the head in of a full term baby in the birth canal.
You cannot go halfway. Either you have all of God or none of God. You cannot say, we take Christian ethics here, banning infanticide, but not here, as we want our abortion before 24 weeks.
This is true of the darkness of hell also. You may want the devil up to 24 weeks and no farther, but there will come a time when he will be satisfied with 24 weeks no longer. And because you have opened the door 24 inches, you will have no power to stop him swinging it all the way open.
note, please do not take my comment as a reason not to speak your mind. i think on this issue we are missing each other due to inadequate discussion, and reaching new points of consensus is going to involve stepping on toes. We all have to be open, and we should be concerned that not thinking of strategic needs in addition to moral imperative.
Cross-talk between America and England regarding abortion is very difficult. English still learn about conservative America through the filters of the progressive American press. Among the right, the Pro-life position serves as a humanizing and moderating force on the right, and it has a solid predictive value for who is a person of good will--although it is not perfect. Also, the case in England perfectly demonstrates that when you let down the guard on the Pro Life movement and you stop pressing it, you will get the unstoppable rise of euthanasia. The advocacy groups for both movements are highly overlapping, and they will fight the abortion war before they fight to kill the unwanted. No strong pro life movement in New York, in Canada, in Europe and in England left the country naked and unable to mount a fight against euthanasia. Abortion is the Ardennes of culture politics, once it's been crossed, there are no more natural defenses.
What is it about Labour women who are pushing these abhorrent ammendments about life and death and trans issues?
Very well expressed Mary, I wish I could have your measured approach to these arguments, I just become apoplectic with exasperation and anger!!
Walter Block has a provocative view on abortion that I offer for consideration—“Evictionism”.
“While a pregnant woman should be legally required to help the fetus survive outside her body whenever that is possible, she retains the legal right to evict the fetus at any time during her pregnancy.
In Block’s view, eviction is a distinct element of abortion. It’s critically important to understanding Block’s argument that he doesn’t view abortion as a single act, but a complex action of eviction plus killing. More precisely, eviction (as opposed to abortion) is an early end to pregnancy that doesn’t unnecessarily result in fetal death. A non-viable fetus may be evicted from the mother’s womb even though it will inevitably result in fetal death. Viability is the point at which a fetus can survive outside the mother’s womb. By definition, a fetus cannot survive before “viability” and will die outside the womb.
Block argues that since the fetus is an “innocent trespasser”, eviction must be by the “gentlest means possible.” Since eviction is a woman’s right as a property owner, there may be no legal prohibition against her liberty to evict. Since we do not yet have technology to extend viability to the earliest stages of pregnancy, lethal eviction during non-viability is, in Block’s view, the gentlest means of eviction possible, and does not constitute abortion.
Over time, technological advancement could extend viability to near conception, and make lethal eviction obsolete. Surely, this creates motivation on the part of prolifers to push for medical innovations in order to save fetal lives, moving towards a legal order that permits only non-lethal eviction. Evictionism would also allow for present legal prohibition against late-term abortion. It would also legally require a woman who evicted her viable fetus to secure a substitute caretaker.
In the meantime, pro-choice women would only be permitted legal access to lethal eviction pre-viability. After viability, she could still have access to non-lethal eviction, thus protecting her rights to bodily autonomy throughout her entire pregnancy.”
(Credit: “What is Evictionism?”)
Another great piece, I wish we had this wisdom in our government. I used to think that Britain was somehow different to America, but all I've seen for a generation is that we are simply downstream of the US on every issue, as you say we think we're a Blue State. Perhaps JK Rowling and the court ruling on gender are a small step in the direction of Britain as an independent nation.
To me the pragmatic approach seems like an attempt to try and hold the line, with no reinforcements on route. Stella Creasy and other "Empathists" like her won't stop. A couple of European states have eases their laws in the past 5 years. With how America brained and anti anything associated with Christianity I can easily see that bill passing and large numbers of women being convinced to support it. If it does pass I doubt there will be any political will to try and reduce it regardless of who get into power next.
It's certainly true that Britain avoided the Roe v Wade that turned out to be absolutist (despite the wording): thus avoiding much conflict!
However, you understand that human nature is not play dough to be formed according to ideology. And we do know the fundamental purpose of the "reproductive system": and if not, we will be replaced by those who do. Reality is not impressed with us: conform to reality or disappear from the future.
But there's another issue: is killing your own off spring (a rejection of our own future) something that we humans can do and still flourish? Is it really, in the long term, on the menu of viable options? Or is it something so fundamentally inhuman that it signals the beginning of the end?
Infanticide was relatively normal in the Roman Empire, and it was Christianity that changed that. It is certainly unclear whether a society can legalise killing babies and remain Christian, though perhaps in our case the causality runs the other way.
Yes Tom Holland says you can tell when a settlement became Christian because there aren't baby bones in the archeological digs.