Essentially my belief is that there is a difference between potential life and real life that needs recognising, even if the foetus is “viable”, and given the investment that parents have in the real life of the potential inside them it is up to them to decide whether that life is realised. The effects of a new child, especially an unwanted one though even a wanted one, on a person and a family are too important, too influential and potentially too devastating to be left to chance on the basis of a medical argument.

Thanks for the reply.

I agree entirely that these are human issues.

I had two points, such as they were, that I thought were worth pointing out.

Firstly, with the way the debate is being framed. If we are all led to agree that ‘viability’ is the gold standard, then where does that lead us? As Anton Vowl pointed out, there could, at least in theory, be no abortion after insemination if biotech advances in that direction. Would the ‘morning after’ pill be criminalised? Sure, it’s a thought experiment, but if folk accept the framing, it is where they’ll end up.

Secondly, that there seems to be a lot of wishful thinking going on re viability in the here and now. Especially at anything less than 24 weeks.

I’m not the biggest fan of utilitarian arguments, certainly, but I’ve no fundamental problem with people turning to utilitarianism as a means of trying to resolve the complex dilemmas that abortion raises, so long as they’re honest in the appraisal of where they’re coming from. It’s not my favourite political philosophy by any means, and I’ll happily argue that there are often better approaches one can take on many issues than those offered by utilitarianism, but it is and remains perfectly respectable philosophy and therefore not one that I’m inclined to dismiss out of hand.

What I do dislike are situations in which people rely on what are quite obviously utilitarian arguments but try to pretend that they’re something else – that does get right up my nose because its hypocritical and intellectually dishonest, for starters, but more particularly because it often the case that such pretences are put up in order to support on undeserved and unsustainable claim to moral superiority.

Utilitarian ethics is a very different animal from either religious or Kantian ethics and, in many respects, more difficult to argue successfully (and well) than either of the others, due to utilitarianism’s lack of absolutes and fixed positions. Unless you’re extremely careful in constructing your argument and defining its boundaries and limitations then arguments from utility are to easily prone to rhetorical attack using ’slippery slope’ arguments.

I agree entirely that the actual science does not, at the moment, support the use of viability as argument for reducing the upper time limit for elective abortions – what I’ve tried to demonstrate in the other thread is that regardless of whether science appears to support the viability argument or not, the argument itself is unsafe and unreliable.

I’ll leave it there for now, not least because I know there’s another post coming tomorrow, from Donald, that will open out some of these questions even further.

What I will say is that however anyone chooses to try to resolve these questions, these are unmistakably human issues and therefore require human solutions – if anyone’s only arguments are those that appeal exclusively to the authority of abstractions like ‘god’ and science then they missed the point of this debate entirely.

See my comment (42) above. Which cross posted with your own.

My point, for what it is worth, is that the 24 week criteria, is not an absolute. And neither should it be.

It is, on the best available scientific evidence, an optimistic minimum re viability. See posts 1 and 13.

If you want to attack the likes of Dorries, then one line would be to suggest that she doesn’t have a clue what she’s talking about. And there is ample evidence that she doesn’t. Or believes in miracles. Which I somewhat suspect is the case. Miracles that come at the cost of lots of other families having to deal with the somewhat mundane reality of living with a severely disabled child. So, for every miracle, a thousand lives will be blighted….

No.

I am pointing out, and perhaps you are the only person that is at least listening, that the termination of a pregnancy is not always restricted to a 24 week deadline. That, if there are reasons, such as life threatening (to the mother) or indeed serious disability(to the child), then that hurdle is moot.

I am not at all convinced that the ‘viability’ criteria is valid.

Can I put it this way?

There are at least two strands to this debate.

Firstly there is the feckless arguement. That, because the man didn’t use a condom or that the woman didn’t use the pill, the foetus is just a ‘mistake’. Well, maybe aye, maybe naw. In that event I can see the ‘viability’ arguement having force. I might not like it, err.. I don’t, but I can see the arguement and I think women have an inalienable right to decide. It is them after all that would have the direct responsibility for looking after the child.

Secondly, there are circumstances, such as discovering that you are carrying a foetus that will be severely disabled if it comes to term. In this case, termination is available up to birth. No 24 week rule, and, in my opinion, neither should there be.

I see these as two distinct and different issues. What I do not understand is the quite frankly ludicrous idea that ’social’ abortions, ones that have no medical adverse prognosis, are tied into a debatable concept of ‘viability’. If you have read the links I have provided, then you will see that even at 24 weeks the prognosis for a child born at that term is extremely poor.

Unity will accuse me of utilitarianism, perhaps with some justification. I do not know if there is anywhere else for me to go. Abortion, in my book, is not something to agree to simply because it is an inalienable right. I hope that the players on that stage are acting out their own moral dilemmas with the sort of rigour that folk on this thread have brought to the arguement.

It is the case that termination of a pregnancy can occur at any date. You have all got hung up, on the 24 week exemption. At that point it is perhaps the mothers opinion, which is fair enough, what about terminations beyond that ? I am no eugenicist, but the State allows terminations up to birth, should we see it as a ‘Bad idea’

Or, perhaps serious folk are being less than sensible?

Which is precisely what I intended to do in terms of picking up a specific theme that’s there in your post and building on it to (hopefully) deliver a supporting line of argument.

This is one of those things that blogs can do and do really well. By having several different people take on the same basic issue but from slightly different angles what you get is well-rounded set of arguments in which many, if not most of the ‘but what if’ questions have been thought through and addressed.

To my mind what we’re seeing emerge on this particular issue augers well for Sunny’s idea of developing a manifesto – there is already enough meat in the various discussions we’ve had abortion over the last few weeks for us to construct what would be a very credible and solidly argued policy position on the future development of abortion law – better than anything I’ve seen from any politician or political party of late – and if we can bring that same process to bear on other issues then I think we’ll be very well set for publishing an actual ‘manifesto’ in the run in to the next GE.

On the subject of tone you’re definitely preaching to the converted here, as anyone who knows my stuff from MoT will happily testify to. I’m always up for a bit of robust debate and on the matter of offending people, I have no problem with that as long its done intelligently and with clarity of intent. If you’re going to shoot someone’s sacred cow then you might as well use an elephant gun and shoot the bugger properly – the only thing I dislike is where someone’s causes offence just for the sake of doing it and without any sense of purpose behind what they’re doing.

To put it terms of popular culture its what makes John Lydon a genius and Liam Gallagher a tedious boor – when Lydon does something to piss people off he does it with a purpose, knows who and what his target and is and almost invariably hits the mark. Gallagher just runs off at the mouth for the sake of flapping his gums.

So a bit of aggression and passion, absolutely, as long as we’re careful to make it focussed aggression.

Appreciate your comments – there’s just one point that I’m trying to get across that I don’t think I’ve quite managed to explain properly yet on this thread:

It’s not a question of feeling defensive – this is a great debate and I think we’re doing something here at LC that simply is not being done elsewhere. Long may it last, and long may everyone who has a view on abortion keep responding with the passion and anger that the topic excites.

I also interpreted Unity’s contribution today as the addressing of a slightly different point. Again, all well and good.

What interested me was that in this thread, towards the top, a number of people raised the issue of tone, and wondered particularly about the approach I take in some of my responses to comments.

It seemed to me that they raised their concerns in a reasonable manner that deserved some addressing. I have no intention of watering down my approach to the subject of abortion rights, particularly because I believe that the anti-abortion lobby must be responded to robustly at this point in history, but I do believe that the commentators who had an issue with my tone in this thread raised an interesting point.

That point is – how should the liberal left express itself? What does the liberal left consider acceptable, and what sort of expression does it consider over the top?

It’s my personal view, for instance, that the left can be a little nambly-pambly when it comes to publication – when I was a branch publicity officer in Unison, for example, and produced the branch newsletter, people were forever trying to water the newsletter down because they were ultimately concerned about offending people. They were a little obsessed, in my view, with the notion of offering NOTHING but reasoned, cautious debate. Reasoned debate is extremely important and I’m glad to see plenty of people going for it here – not least because it offers an important counterpoint to my own jaundiced rantings – but there are times too when the people you’re writing about deserve nothing less that a kick in the goolies. I’m more than happy to be the person who delivers that when it comes to remarking upon the antics of pro-lifers.

The thing I am most passionate about – more passionate, even, than defending legal abortion – is freedom. That’s what it comes down to at the end of the day. I want to be free to say exactly what I think, and I get extremely angry when people try to shut me down. Likewise, others must be free to say what they think about what I think. And they do, and always have. Sometimes, they even involve the authorities. I was dragged before the press council in New Zealand for abusing the royal family in one of my articles for the New Zealand Herald. And doubtless, someone will come on here after reading this and say that basically, what they think of me is that I’m shite. And then some. Fair enough.

What I was suggesting, though, is that we had at some point a public yarn about the way that the left expresses itself. We don’t have to do it right now, but maybe it’s one to think about.

One last point – I have no illusions at all about the kind of responses my views on abortion will generate with some people. I am fairly battle-scarred, as most women who write on controversial topics for newspapers and blogs need to be.

I have indeed read everything that has been posted on mine and Unity’s post thus far. Tone and topic have emerged as two different issues. My own view is that the Left needs to demonstrate plenty of aggression. God only knows the Right does.

Reading this, and the comments/tone on my own post on the viability argument I can;t help feel that all we have going on here is a bit of miscommunication and a misunderstanding or two about intent.

What Nick and some others have put up are some very probing questions which are asking for rather more of us that a critique of the arguments being advanced by Dorries et al.

The underlying message I take from both threads is that while we’re doing a very good job of systematically knocking over the arguments that are being put up in support of efforts to reduce the upper time limit on abortion, what we’re not necessarily doing anything like as well is advancing a positive argument for the present status quo.

In that sense what’s coming out is the idea that while people are happy to accept the findings of the S&TC that there is no medical.scientific case for change they are less certain on the question of whether or not there may be a solid moral, ethical or political case for leaving things as they are and its on those issues that they’re asking for answers and for us to put up a robust argument – what they want to hear is not that there’s no reason to change things but that there are some very good reasons for keeping things as they are.

I’m guessing a little here, Kate, but my suspicion is that if you take a step back and re-read everything you’ll see that a far amount of the discussion here has come in from ‘left-field’ and is maybe not quite what you might have expected to get given the slightly more emotional tone of your original post – which is perfectly fine as far I’m concerned – and people are asking questions that are a little different and rather more nuanced that you’d usually expect to find on a run of the mill abortion thread. In fact, if you look really closely you’ll find that on a few occasions you and some of the others are pretty much agreeing with each other on the important issues but actually arguing about why you agree.

It seem to be that that’s causing a misunderstanding or two to arise, rather than there being any hint of genuine and serious differences of opinion (Matt excepted) and I’m not about the criticise anyone for having a part in that at all because its clear that the majority of people are trying to have a genuine, committed and intelligent debate…

…just not quite the same debate, or so it looks.

But surely it’s important that contributors can then follow through with some reasonably nuanced and intelligent argument and avoid the condescension and vague abuse that Kate seems to employ against anyone who decides to challenge her?

As far as I can see above, she’s followed through with reasonable arguments. So she’s somewhat frustrated when people don’t get her arguments. That’s hardly a reason to start getting scared is it?

The remarks from Nick above go to the heart of this debate and he makes some fairly crucial observations that Kate either wilfully ignores or simply misrepresents so they’re easier to refute

That can be said of many debates in blogs all over the web. We constantly accuse our opponents of mis-representing our arguments. Fortunately, Kate doesn’t do it as blindly as our friend Donal Blaney tried last week. Not only that, he refused to publish the comment I made in response which wasn’t even abusive.

So, despite the fact that we have a tight comments policy, it is exercised more loosely than other blogs.

Kate’s fine as she is play. Play the ball not the woman.

FFS, if a woman can’t write honestly and passionately about abortion, on a site dedicated to liberal/left values, then we may as well pack up and go home now.

The complaints raised above centre very much on issues of freedom of speech – the freedom to be insulted and to insult, and for a female to describe opportunistic politicians as opportunistic, and to be a major cow in a thread about abortion that appears to have been – how can I put this – largely commandeered by blokes. If you’re a female, 40 miles, well and good.

My proposal is that if people are unhappy with the tone of pieces on this site – as they state outright in this thread that they are – we should have a good debate about that and have it right here in public. We were always going to debate comments and tone anyway.

Doesn’t have to be around a topic like abortion, although that might be useful.

Hundreds of women have turned up to these Abortion Rights meetings, and been extremely vociferous about keeping the 24 week limit, and what reducing it would mean for the abortion rights movement. I am far from the only one.

Looking at the response to this piece, and to Unity’s today, it would seem some that readers of this site tend more to the notion of compromise on the viability question. That opinion is more than fair enough to hold, but it doesn’t mean that the hundreds of women that attend the Abortion Rights rallies – and think that the reducing of the 24 week time limit represents the beginning of an erosion of legal abortion – shouldn’t also have a voice. It is a furious voice, and I don’t attempt to mask that in my own case.

I get absolutely livid when the likes of Nadine Dorries try so blatantly to generate hysteria in the populace by showing pictures of babies tooling round in the womb, etc, and – and this is the part I most dislike – claim that their time-limit politics are all about a concern about the ugliness of late abortion and the pain babies may or may not feel in the womb at 24 weeks, etc, etc.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with teasing out issues of foetal sensitivity, etc – that’s not the part I find problematic. The part I find problematic is – well, put simply, that this terrific concern about babies disappears from view entirely when the baby is actually born. Dianne Abbot raised this at the last Abortion Rights meeting, and much as Dianne gets on my nerves, she was absolutely right. Politicans who argue in favour of reduced time limits for abortion should also argue in favour of, for instance, greatly improved maternity leave benefits, and state-funded childcare. And so on.

Your comment about red herrings is incorrect. My contribution to this thread is good – I am right about parliament’s science and technology committee findings on viability and I am absolutely right to describe the likes of Dorries and Widdecombe as mafia. I don’t go for the jugular in all my articles – my trade union pieces, for example, are interview-based, and mostly consist of interviewees doing the talking – but the political opportunism of Dorries et al makes me furious. I refuse to hide that. There is no poor argument there.

I accept, though, that I am merely one punter in a world of millions and that we all have different views. That being the case, a discussion about the ways we express those views on a liberal left website is surely in order?

People have complained on this site in the past about the way, for example, that I’ve described those of faith. I didn’t agree with their angle at all, and nor, it appeared, did a number of other readers, but some did and so a public discussion was rightly had. Why shouldn’t we start one about the tone female writers use in a male-dominated political blogworld? Where’s the red herring there?

If you think it’s a minor financial inconvenienvce you are either very rich or have never had children and if you view children as “aliens” perhaps its just as well

No.

I ask because we have seen calls over the weekend for the re-introduction of the death penalty. 3 murderers have been told they will die in prison, ie they are now permanently attached to the ‘life support’ of a sovreign state until they die naturally. Does this mean that the sovreign state should have the right to dispose of them as it pleases?

No, absolutely not for any number of reasons, not least of which being that the use of the death penalty seriously diminishes the moral authority of the state.

Next question.

Does this mean that anti-abortionists should actually be happy in letting immigrants in to this country as it stands given that they are obviously happy for 200,000 extra kids born a year to put a strain on our housing stock and infrastructure anyway?

The difference between this comparison and yours on the death penalty? Mine actually has a tangible point without a logical leap of faith.

This is simply an issue where people have intrinsically different morals and that is nigh on impossible to change through speaking at each other.

“I see abortion as a question of balancing notional rights, i.e. the foetuses right to life and the mother’s right of self determination and personal sovereignty ”

I was interested in a topical tangent here.

If sovreignty is a concern in this debate, is that the same sovreignty that also pertains to nation states?

I ask because we have seen calls over the weekend for the re-introduction of the death penalty. 3 murderers have been told they will die in prison, ie they are now permanently attached to the ‘life support’ of a sovreign state until they die naturally. Does this mean that the sovreign state should have the right to dispose of them as it pleases?

Don’t agree with the earlier comments in this thread about tone – abortion is an emotive topic, and I rather feel I am responding appropriately, not least in the context of the language that the anti-abortion lobby uses about pro-choicers – but I would be right up for a closer discussion on the subject of tone on the site, even, I guess, if I am the target for the dissatisfied.

We were always going to have more of an in-depth discussion about the comments process on the site – whether it was working, whether it was too generous or too strict, etc – so now might be a good time to pick that up again. There’d be a certain fab irony to it as well, if readers thought that one of the LC writers was among the leading violators of acceptable standards. Cool.

It’s all about discussing what does and doesn’t constitute free speech, and who is sensitive to what and whether they ought to be. Really, it would be a better idea if someone started a new blog on the subject – Sunny?

I’ve just queued up an article here (for 9am tomorrow) explaining why the argument from viability is unsafe and unsatisfactory, particularly for those who take religious/moral view on abortion – it also explains why I choose not to rely it personally.

I’ve outlined this before in detail (elsewhere) but I support the current 24 week limit and see no reason to change it even if medical technology pushes back the limits of ‘viability’.

Why?

Well because I see abortion as a question of balancing notional rights, i.e. the foetuses right to life and the mother’s right of self determination and personal sovereignty and moreover a situation in which there can be no perfect solution, i.e. one which either respects the rights of both parties in full or which brings them into balance without causing harm to one or both.

In such a situation the best one can hope to do is find a ‘best-fit’ solution which serves to minimise the harm caused to either party – in my personal view this necessitates that if you are to carry an abortion it should be done before the foetus begins to develop the base capacity for awareness of itself and its immediate environment a process which has a stating point, in physiological terms, of around 26 weeks gestation.

If one is to abort a foetus then the least harmful basis on which to do it is that at which it has no possibility of having been aware of its existence and its on that basis that I rest my personal view, one that will change if and only if there is clear evidence that the capacity for awareness develops earlier in the gestational process.

It ain’t perfect but its clear and consistent and that’ll do for me…

I was suggesting a thought experiment in which a foetus could be viable straight after conception. And I was saying that, even if that were the case, I would still be in favour of abortion. Others may not. That was the question I was trying to provoke – whether people see termination as the ‘lesser of two evils’ or ‘morally wrong only if the foetus could be viable’. Personally I don’t, but maybe others do. Maybe, as cjcjcj suggests, the majority of people do. That would be interesting to me if that were the case. I just don’t know whether it is.

The pro-choice lobby speaks…