Ethical Concern

Professor Kathleen Stock exemplifies the feminism that is being challenged profoundly by sex-selective abortion:

This may seem a strange question, but what exactly is wrong with terminating the lives of female foetuses, simply because they are female? The official progressive line is that where an abortion is wanted, it should be facilitated wherever possible; that personal reasons for doing it should not be challenged by the state. Yet when a Scottish Government-commissioned report was released last week, arguing that a blind eye should be turned to sex-selective terminations, there was general consternation.

Or here is another puzzle. Why does the British Pregnancy Advisory Service — the UK’s main abortion provider, and uncompromising in its mission to facilitate women’s reproductive choices, whatever they are — explain on its website that their clients may take “pregnancy remains” away afterwards for a “private service, burial or cremation”? Why might anyone want to do such a thing?

It is easy enough to arrive at the answers to these questions in your head, provided you don’t have to say them out loud. The first says: ending the lives of foetuses simply because they are female is nowhere near good enough a justification for such a momentous action. Abortions should only be done for a highly restricted set of reasons. They should not be just nodded through for any reason a pregnant woman likes.

And the second says: a woman might want to have a private service or burial afterwards for her foetus, because she recognises that her decision helped to cause the death of her child — or of her potential child, if you prefer. Either way, she may well be grieving the loss.

Underpinning each of these answers are further facts, equally difficult to spell out in polite society. A life is deliberately ended during the abortion process, whatever else is saved or enabled. Deliberately causing death is a morally serious matter, deserving deep consideration and adequate justification. For some, it is tempting to picture any pregnant adult woman contemplating this as in an unsought, perhaps even coerced situation, with no real responsibility for the outcome. But in a society that contains sex education, consensual relationships, free contraception, and the morning-after pill in pharmacies, this is just not true for many.

Putting things like this does not mean that abortion must be wrong. In a fraught situation with no winners, even the right decision can produce awful outcomes. Sometimes life forces you to opt, very reluctantly, for the least worst thing rather than the best.

But thanks to the hegemonic, sanitised account of abortion circulated by influential medical and feminist organisations, this difficult conversation is not even available. Instead, enormous efforts are made to make the decision sound no more important than choosing to get a haircut, or opting to let it grow out. On this view, as summed up in the new Scottish report, “women should have the right to their own reproductive choices and are best placed to make pregnancy decisions based on their personal circumstances”. It’s just healthcare, after all — or so the experts keep insisting — and the fact that the health of the occupant in the womb is not obviously improved by the process is neither here nor there.

From the bland starting point of these people, it would be weirdly arbitrary to oppose women having abortions on sex-selective grounds. Why shouldn’t they have one for any reason they like, since the action is essentially trivial anyway? So morally negligible is the process supposed to be, that for years several Royal Colleges have been arguing it should be fully decriminalised, even up to full-term. In June this year, the House of Commons agreed.

During parliamentary debate at the time, ethical concern was mainly reserved for pregnant women who had illegal late-term abortions at home, and who then faced the supposedly cruel threat of prosecution afterwards. Implicit was the idea that such women could only have done harm to their own health, and not to anyone else’s; and hence that there was no need for any law to punish them, nor to deter future others from doing the same.

And now a Scottish “expert group” is arguing not just for decriminalisation, but for a significant relaxation of current medical requirements too. Up to 24 weeks, you should be able to abort for any reason you like — including “because it’s a girl”, or indeed “because it’s a boy”. Post-24 weeks, current regulations restrict abortion to cases where the baby or mother’s life or health is gravely threatened; but the authors say that this too should be changed.

According to their recommendations, two “appropriately trained registered healthcare professionals” — not necessarily doctors — should now decide whether a post-24 weeks abortion is “appropriate”, vaguely taking relevant circumstances into account. Unspoken here is the fact that “appropriately trained” assessors will not be able to rule any such decision out; for on what grounds could they, or their trainers, object? It has already been conceded that abortion is a decision only relevant to the woman concerned. She is simply exercising her autonomy, with no downsides for anyone else important.

It is not that this conspiracy of silence is badly motivated. Indeed, perversely, the staunch commitment to maintaining levels of denial pays secret tribute to the weightiness of the decision, coupled with the knowledge that so many women have already made that choice. There is a lot of guilt, shame, regret; not for everyone but certainly for some, albeit that most therapists will not openly acknowledge it either. In a spirit of sisterhood there is an urge not just to keep away from a painful place, but to try and make it less painful by positive reframing. Other women will try to make you feel better about a terrible haircut. Of course they are going to do it here too.

Signs of the desire to avoid reality are everywhere in the Scottish report. As usual with these things, there is a fussy focus on language. At one point, the sex of pregnant women is referred to as “assigned at birth”, technically making sex-selective abortion impossible anyway. Abortion is — to repeat — just a matter of receiving “healthcare”, a domain which suddenly and conveniently has no ethical dimensions whatsoever.

There is also a lot of cherry-picking, camouflaged in technocratic language. International “best practice” on abortion should be followed, we are told, except when it comes to endorsing the more conservative gestational age limits common in Europe. The concerns of dissenting “stakeholders” worried about existing age limits are waved away. Any attempt to bring the question back to morality is placed out of bounds: “the moral status” of the foetus, we are told, “fell outwith the scope of the review”.

In this way, the authors pretend to themselves they are not doing ethics, when quite obviously they have already taken a view. Admittedly, it is historically a complicated subject. Over the past few decades, there has been much philosophical discussion of whether foetuses count as babies, or human beings, or persons in their own right. It seems to me that, at least by the time we are urgently resuscitating their identically aged peers in neonatal intensive care units, they are clearly all three.

But even if younger, non-viable foetuses were only a kind of pre-human animal — animate and perhaps sentient, but otherwise unfortunately deficient in the personhood stakes — they should surely still be of some moral concern. They would not therefore be nothing. As a society, we care a lot about animals, and disapprove of harming them for no good reason. Why not here too?

I know how these conversations tend to go. Along with anger at the heresy — not to mention irrelevant comparisons to draconian US regimes — there will likely be deference paid to the supposed real-life judgements of actual women. People don’t tend to get an abortion lightly, I will be told. Actually, I know that is not always true. But to the extent that it is, it can only confirm my basic point: unlike many of those professionally interested in the subject, others understand that there is a weighty decision to be made about a prospective death, and not every motivation is a good one. The state putting limits on unacceptable decision-making is therefore as it should be. This is not the same as a “ban”.

It will take courage to talk openly about the social and personal losses of abortion, as well as the gains. Doing so need not entail placing unhelpful blame or stigma on woman who have had one (or two, or three); nor upon the medics who carried it out. It is clear that a well-oiled system, governed by a code of silence towards half of the story, has colluded to produce present behaviour. But unless someone challenges the vision, we are not so much faced with a slippery slope as an utterly frictionless one.

The numbers are leaping up annually — perhaps fuelled by the continuation of the pills-by-post scheme, first instigated during Covid and then kept on. We already have highly permissive rules, and yet they keep being challenged by people with simple-minded fixations, who show no signs of wanting to slow things down.

In order to complain about this respectably, you are not supposed to approach directly, but have to find some circuitous route: to talk hyperbolically about the evils of sex-selection, or about the dire spectre of population decline. You can’t mention the most obvious ethical difficulty: hundreds and thousands of deaths. By all means, let’s talk about the effects of abortion on adults. But – if we have to use mindless bureaucratic language – let’s not pretend that there aren’t other stakeholders here too.

This country now has 48 abortions for every 100 live births. That is not because Muslims do not want daughters. Muslims are not keen on abortion, and there are far too few of them to produce those numbers.

China is less than two per cent Muslim, and there are only 200,000 Muslims, mostly foreign workers, among the 51.75 million inhabitants of South Korea. Taiwan is less than one per cent Muslim, as is Vietnam. The Muslim 14 per cent of the population of India accounts for only 6.6 per cent of sex-selective abortions in the country that accounts for 50 per cent of the world’s missing female births. Like the husband who murdered her, Anu Bansal was a Hindu, as are 86.7 per cent of those who procure female foeticide, although Hindus are only 80 per cent of the population. The figures for Sikhs are 4.9 and 1.7. The practice is increasingly evident among the richer residents of the urban areas of Nepal, which is proportionally the most Hindu country in the world.

There is a certain culture of female infanticide in urban Pakistan, but Muhammad explicitly condemned it, since it had been prevalent in pre-Islamic Arabia, and British Pakistanis mostly descend from the God-fearing countryside, with even New Mirpur City only the seventy-fourth most populous. There is no such culture in Bangladesh. Were a Bill to ban sex-selective abortion to come before the House of Commons, then be in no doubt that those voting for the ban would include Shockat Adam, Adnan Hussain, Iqbal Mohamed and Ayoub Khan.

Even before the formal decriminalisation of abortion, this figure came less than a week after a Prime Minister who was in favour of assisted suicide had been unable to make the case in principle against the death penalty. The legalisation of assisted suicide would give to a High Court judge in the Family Division such power over life and death as no judge in this country had enjoyed since the abolition of capital punishment. My paternal grandfather was born before such working-class men could vote, and my maternal ancestors included African slaves, Indian indentured labourers, and Chinese coolies. We who come off the lower orders and the lesser breeds, and perhaps especially those of us who are disabled, know perfectly well who would be euthanised, and how, and why. Even if we had made it past the industrial scale abortion that disproportionately targeted us, then we would face euthanasia as yet another lethal weapon in the deadly armoury of our mortal enemies, alongside their wars, alongside their self-indulgent refusal to enforce the drug laws, alongside Police brutality and other street violence, alongside the numerous life-shortening consequences of economic inequality, and now putatively alongside the death penalty.

This is class and race war, and we must fight to the death. That death must not be ours, but the death of the global capitalist system. Having subjected itself to that system to a unique extent, Britain is uniquely placed to overthrow it, and to replace it with an order founded on the absolute sanctity of each individual human life from the point of fertilisation to the point of natural death. That foundation would and could be secured only by absolute fidelity to the only global institution that was irrevocably committed to that principle, including the full range of its economic, social, cultural and political implications.

Without a robust material realism, there can be no pursuit of economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, led by those who suffered most as a result of economic inequality, namely the working class, and led by those who suffered most as a result of international conflict, namely the working class and the youth. Feelings are real, but they are not facts. As poverty of aspiration is a real feeling, but economic inequality is a fact, so gender identity is a real feeling, but biological sex is a fact. Those who failed to hold the first line cannot hold the second, and those who are failing to hold the second line will be unable to hold the first.

Demonstrably, then, dialectical materialism has too often failed to provide that robust basis. Nor, in itself, can natural science, which cannot prove the ontological existence of material reality, but rather presupposes it. What is needed is Thomism, which by definition exists within the wider Augustinian tradition. Fundamental to both is absolute fidelity to the Roman Magisterium, which is itself irrevocably committed to the Thomist metaphysical system, within which its own indispensable role precludes any degeneration comparable to that of much of the ancestrally Marxian Left into gender self-identification.

At least until the base of Blairite Eurocommunism and of Starmerite Pabloism wanted to abort boys as part of its demonisation of working-class and nonwhite males, which leads to violence that is not restricted to, but which undoubtedly includes, sexual humiliation such as at Medomsley Detention Centre, and such as the United Nations Human Rights Council, in a June 2024 report that was also highly critical of Hamas, found to be inflicted on Palestinian men and boys by the Israeli Defence Forces. A month later, the unrepentant Sde Teiman rapists held a defiant press conference, and their supporters rioted, among them Members of the Knesset and men in the uniforms of the IDF’s Force 100. Fear of the black male is fundamental to the capitalist system that was founded on the transatlantic slave trade, and the slave trade financed enclosure. There has always been One Struggle.

Accordingly, the Scotland of the post-Sturgeon SNP is moving formally to legalise sex-selective abortion. Whatever happened to gender self-identification? Was sex not “assigned at birth”? On what pro-choice grounds could anyone object to this particular choice? If half of unborn children were male, in the old-fashioned sense of having Y chromosomes, then how could they be part of a woman’s body? And in that case, then how could the other half be part of that body, either?

Yet never in British history has there been a prosecution for sex-selective abortion. In 2013, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, declined to bring charges against two doctors who had been caught on camera agreeing to arrange abortions of girls because of their sex. He wrote to the Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, that, “The law does not, in terms, expressly prohibit gender-specific abortions; rather it prohibits any abortion carried out without two medical practitioners having formed a view, in good faith, that the health risks of continuing with a pregnancy outweigh those of termination.” Starmer had concluded that there would be no public interest in a prosecution. That has been the conclusion in every such case.

The NHS is funding the experimental testing of puberty blockers on children after the original experiment on sheep had had to be abandoned because the blockers had caused impaired memory, altered behaviour, enlarged amygdala, and lasting brain damage even once the treatment had stopped. What say you, Wes Streeting? But then, the law forbids the inhumane killing of third trimester vertebrate fetuses of any species except our own. Margaret Thatcher abolished the time limit on abortion where there was “a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped”, of which the risk did not need to be quantified, nor the abnormalities specified. Even before that fig leaf is discarded, this country already has 48 abortions for every 100 live births.