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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You make a persuasive argument. Doable is better than impossible. That said, determined people will always find a way around laws. That that level of determinization is usually driven desperation makes compromise understandable. Also, because we're discussing some of the most private decisions that can be made, any legal repercussions involve an invasion of privacy: an issue that today is given short shrift.
My only further comment is that women, particularly in America, in my opinion invite invasion of privacy by making hubristic claims, such as, my body my business. For the baby in question is not her body; it is the baby's body. While it is not totally independent, neither is, arguably, is anyone.
At the bottom of the ‘slippery slope’ is a hole from which one may never escape. A prudent approach to staying out of the hole is to stay well away from the slide…!
We have so far in Britain had a pragmatic muddle that respects the seriousness of the issue without being too harsh - hard cases are few and far between and usually there is a loophole, with prosecution for cases where there is abuse and bad faith or coercion. Sort of works, as with end of life care, but the absolutists can’t have this. The pro-life position may be right but it has no power and is largely reactive anyway, so the reformers can say “aren’t we nice moderate people unlike those hard-liners with their American obsession …”
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
Abortions take place regardles regardless of laws and norms. Or at least, that is the conclusion I have drawn from studying it during two periods of Middle East history. The first from the Ottoman era. There are texts written by doctors about how to perform abortions safely. The second comes from the period of the British Mandate in Palestine. Abortion was illegal during British rule. But the German Jewish immigration in the 1930s brought many middle class Jews for whom abortion was a method of birth control. And that practice continued despite the law.
Good for you, we have been a pragmatic nation and long may it reign. I believe law needs balance and pragmatism for it to work in any sensible way, dogmatic ideology has no place in it.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You make a persuasive argument. Doable is better than impossible. That said, determined people will always find a way around laws. That that level of determinization is usually driven desperation makes compromise understandable. Also, because we're discussing some of the most private decisions that can be made, any legal repercussions involve an invasion of privacy: an issue that today is given short shrift.
My only further comment is that women, particularly in America, in my opinion invite invasion of privacy by making hubristic claims, such as, my body my business. For the baby in question is not her body; it is the baby's body. While it is not totally independent, neither is, arguably, is anyone.
At the bottom of the ‘slippery slope’ is a hole from which one may never escape. A prudent approach to staying out of the hole is to stay well away from the slide…!
We have so far in Britain had a pragmatic muddle that respects the seriousness of the issue without being too harsh - hard cases are few and far between and usually there is a loophole, with prosecution for cases where there is abuse and bad faith or coercion. Sort of works, as with end of life care, but the absolutists can’t have this. The pro-life position may be right but it has no power and is largely reactive anyway, so the reformers can say “aren’t we nice moderate people unlike those hard-liners with their American obsession …”
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
Abortions take place regardles regardless of laws and norms. Or at least, that is the conclusion I have drawn from studying it during two periods of Middle East history. The first from the Ottoman era. There are texts written by doctors about how to perform abortions safely. The second comes from the period of the British Mandate in Palestine. Abortion was illegal during British rule. But the German Jewish immigration in the 1930s brought many middle class Jews for whom abortion was a method of birth control. And that practice continued despite the law.
Murder, rape, robbery, etc. take place regardless of laws and norms--and they have throughout the centuries!
That doesn't imply we should legalize them.
Good for you, we have been a pragmatic nation and long may it reign. I believe law needs balance and pragmatism for it to work in any sensible way, dogmatic ideology has no place in it.
Is pragmatism not its own ideology?