It was inevitable that the abortion debate would come to centre stage in the current inflammation of debate about the place of religion in public matters, expressed as the degree to which personal religious views can or should influence the public duties of those who have both – such as magistrates and doctors. To critical eyes, what is happening is a surge of effort by the nation’s religious minorities to run everything and everyone their own way; to the votaries of one or another of the religions, the steam-roller of secularism, majoritarianism and law has gone too far for their tastes. To dispassionate observers it must at least be evident that activism in one of the major religions has encouraged some in others to be more assertive likewise, a case of roiling up, of hornets’ nests.
Let’s hope that the following is common ground: that in almost every case in which a pregnancy is terminated for almost any of the many reasons why a termination is felt necessary by the woman involved, the decision and its circumstances are serious and often difficult ones. There may be women who carelessly see abortion as a form of back-up contraception, but they cannot be the benchmark here.
What is not common ground is the claim that abortion is acceptable as a solution to the serious kinds of circumstances envisaged. For all supporters (me included) of a woman’s right to choose what happens in and to her body and her life, the case is clear. Pregnancy is a vastly consequential matter, which is why abortion has to be a valid option. When faced with the task of considering the irruption of those vast consequences – typically unsought and unwanted if abortion is the contemplated remedy – into everything a woman has in the way of existing commitments and plans, she has to have that option, and in medically safe and legal ways.
This is accepted in UK society, and provided for in its law by a 1967 Act. But minorities continue to oppose it, and would like to see the law itself aborted – even though the consequence would be knitting needles in back streets, and the attendant horrors and greater tragedies that this would bring back.
The focus of present discussion is those medical personnel who do not wish to be party to terminations of pregnancy. The 1967 Act grants them exemption on grounds of conscience. The exemption has been further taken to imply that anti-abortion medical staff are not under a duty to refer women to practitioners who will perform abortions, on the grounds that this would make the objector instrumental in procuring them.
This makes the situation of medical personnel different from that of a magistrate who does not wish to act in conformity with anti-discrimination legislation in such cases as placing children in need of fostering into the care of gay couples. The anti-discrimination legislation does not provide exemptions on grounds of conscience, and quite rightly so; the legislation outlaws discriminating against people on grounds that are not matters of choice (ethnicity, sexuality, age, disability), whereas the 1967 abortion Act concerns a matter of choice. Some who support the idea of conscience-based exemption in general fail to see the difference, nor the injustice and chaos that would ensue if our legislators were incapable of drawing that distinction likewise.
The problem has since arisen, though, that medical personnel who oppose abortion have been using their position of authority and influence – both very considerable, for a distressed woman seeking help in a crisis – to try to persuade women not to have abortions. This is as disgraceful and unacceptable as someone using such a position of authority and influence to persuade a woman to have an abortion. Even if a conscientious-objector health worker simply refused to engage either way with a woman in crisis, relying on the 1967 exemption to have nothing to do with her and her problem, that would be a dereliction: it conflicts with the duty of care medical personnel have to those in need.
On the face of it this would seem to entail a serious dilemma for both sides of the equation – for troubled women who know only their local GPs and turn to them first for help, only to find (say) a devout Catholic in the chair opposite; and for the objecting practitioners themselves, because of the conflict between their personal conscience and their duty of care (unless they – falsely and irresponsibly – think that they serve the latter by persuading their patients on non-medical grounds to act in conformity to their own beliefs).
The solution is however simple, though it needs a coda to the 1967 Act to be made fully effective. It is that there should be agencies (an individual or unit in a health practice or hospital) devoted to advising women about all the options available to them in the case of an unwanted pregnancy – not to persuade them either way, but to inform them, and to put them in touch with the further agencies (support, adoption, termination) depending on the decision that the woman herself then makes. A conscience-objector doctor or nurse can have no scruples about referring a woman to such an agency, because they are not thereby acting as an agent to the procurement of an abortion. And they are not imposing their own personal minority view with consequences for a woman (and if they are successful in their propaganda, an ensuing child) when it is not their consciences and circumstances which should be the determiner of what happens, but that woman’s. For women alone have the right to decide what happens in and to their own bodies and lives reproductively, and to exercise that right safely and lawfully.