Report on Probability A

I just saw a bit of an interview with Sarah Palin where the talk turned to abortion, which Palin is in favour of making illegal. She was confronted by the host with this moral conundrum: if a girl is raped by her father and becomes pregnant as a result, Palin’s policy would be that the girl would be forced to have the child. Palin’s response to this was that she would “counsel the girl to choose life.”

Right. Abortion. The question which divides people on this issue is whether depriving an embryo of its life is equivalent to what we would call murder. An answer to this is currently, and possibly for all time, obscure – biologically I suppose the argument is that an embryo is not developed enough to have true consciousness, however the fact remains that consciousness, its nature and origins, is still a mystery to us; the nature of the interaction between the physical and the mental has been a subject of debate for centuries and is still seen as one of the fundamental problems of philosophy. The argument from religion postulates that we all possess a soul from the moment we enter the physical world, and until the above problem is solved, claims such as this cannot be disproved. Where am I? Well, to say that abortion is the moral solution to the above conundrum we have to accept that the well being of the mother has a greater value than whatever life it is that an embryo possesses. For the above reasons I don’t think that a rational, logical argument will ever be able to establish whether or not this is the case.

At this point, as this is a blog, I suppose I’d better weigh in with my opinion…I’m not sure that I’m in favour of abortion, for the same reason that I think a lot of people are not in favour of abortion: I find it impossible to say that destroying something that will, at least, become a person, is ever an acceptable moral choice. We don’t know what the psychical nature of an embryo is – we don’t know if it could experience pain, if it could experience emotion – but we do have an idea of what it will eventually become, a living being like ourselves…and a root principle of most moral systems is a feeling, not a principle, that life must be protected and maintained. Not because we’ve reasoned it out, but because we feel that life has to be protected and cherished. So there’s my position; I’m happy to just listen to my emotions on this issue.

So. I’m probably against abortion and so is Palin. Hooray. But is she really? Lets have a look at her response to the question that she would “counsel the girl to choose life.” Palin has made it clear that she wants abortion to be made illegal, so we could question that value of her “counselling” in a situation where the girl would in any case be forced to take her advice. This, I think, reveals the big problem in the abortion debate: the people who will have the real power to affect abortion laws simply haven’t thought through the implications of their respective positions. Palin was forced here to use soft language: “counsel”, to defend her position – to me that is a representation of a climb down; if she really stuck by her opinion her answer to the conundrum would have been “yes, I do believe it should be illegal for the girl to have an abortion.” What she was faced with was an attack on the idea that the issue of abortion is clear cut enough to warrant an absolutist response such as “abortion should be illegal.” This kind of slip makes it clear that Palin’s (and in turn McCain’s) position on the issue isn’t one of principle (Palin showed an obvious confusion as to what her principles in fact were). What Palin is doing is pandering to voters who do have a principled position on the issue, however dogmatic and unpalatable that position may be.

Right, I’ll stop with the polemic – if we are faced with a choice of the mother’s wellbeing verses the embryo’s we will get nowhere through arguing. What if we accept that we just don’t know the answer; in this case I think we’d have to accept that we should take a course of action which reflects the needs of both. If we just make abortion illegal we are condemning someone to a life of suffering, inflicted upon her through no fault of her own – if we don’t want abortion to take place what is needed is a system that prevents this suffering, that does whatever is necessary to make sure that the mother’s life could go on as it would have done had the child not been born, and also that tries to give the child as normal a life as is possible under the circumstances. The problem here is that those who want abortion illegalised generally don’t favour any kind of welfare program either.

Anyway, that’s just a rough sketch of my views (wrong or right, I really have no idea). The paragraph above doesn’t really take into account all of the issues that would arise from giving birth to a child as the result of an incestuous rape – just that I really do see two victims of such an atrocity, both of whom need to be cared for if it’s at all possible to do so. Basically, it would be nice if we made decisions on these issues based on emotion (and a little bit of reason just to grease the gears) rather than religious dogma and “political realities.”