Mandatory abortions

So much for choice.

Ethics, a top-tier philosophy journal, just published an article arguing for mandatory abortions for all underage pregnancies, even if this requires "sedation or physical restraint" of mothers who do not want their babies killed.

Written by Kimberley Brownlee and Alyssa Izatt, respectively a professor and grad student in the University of British Columbia’s philosophy department, the article insists that children don’t get a choice. If a girl gets pregnant, then “her adult caregivers should view her impregnation as a malady and take steps to terminate it,” even if this means tying her down for a third-trimester abortion. The only exception would be if “an older adolescent is credibly deemed to no longer be a child”—an independently wealthy 17-year-old might not be subjected to a forced abortion, but for any other girl, it’s her body, their choice.

This pivot from choice to coercion is supposedly necessary because having a baby is risky and laden with responsibility. It’s also true that the authors exaggerate the risks. For instance, though their legal and cultural focus is on the United States, they rely on global data about pregnancy risks. This exaggeration is critical to their argument, for as Izatt put it in an interview: “Seeing impregnation as a serious medical harm clarifies that adults responsible for a child’s care have a duty to intervene, just as they would with other threats to her health and future.” She added that, “In no other context do we ask children to make decisions of such magnitude.”

Not so fast. Sex-rejecting medical “transitions” for minors are an obvious example the authors should have considered, given that they went out of their way to signal support for gender ideology. And there is sex itself, which is the cause of the pregnancies the authors are so keen to violently end—but they give no sign of believing that minors should be discouraged from sexual exploration, at least with other minors. Their paternalism is one of convenience, not conviction, a single-issue exception for mandatory abortions. As Brownlee put it, “We should be pro-abortion when the patient is a child.”

Their selective paternalism results in constant self-contradiction. For example, they argue that “children are dependents who are owed care from adult caregivers.” Well, yes, but they emphasize the duty to care for children only in order to deny a duty to care for children in the womb, whom they believe to be worthless, with no rights that the born are bound to respect. But this would still not justify violently violating a girl’s bodily integrity with a forced abortion—and oddly, Brownlee’s previous work includes arguing against labeling rapists as, well, rapists; she warns that it could make us prejudiced against them.

Here she and Izatt provide an argument for mandatory abortion that they believe holds regardless of the value of human life in utero. They begin with a nod toward an old thought experiment—if you were unwillingly turned into a life-support system for an ailing violinist, would you have a right to disconnect him? The scenario has been debated for decades, but its fundamental problem is that it is ridiculous to analogize the normal process of human reproduction to a bizarre medical experiment. Pregnancy is not a disease, let alone some sort of body horror scenario from science fiction.

The new Ethics article adds a fresh twist by noting that limits are imposed on children even when they are voluntarily trying to save another person’s life (often that of a close relative) via living organ donation. They then argue that children should likewise have limits imposed on them (for their own good) when it comes to keeping another person alive during pregnancy. Just as a 15-year-old might be prohibited from donating part of her liver to try to save her dying younger sister, so too should she be prohibited from using her body to gestate a baby. And so we arrive at forced abortion, purportedly for the girl’s good.

Living organ donation is also a poor analogy to pregnancy. But if taken seriously, it proves more than the authors intend. After all, if we are abandoning choice for paternalism, the calculations may easily run the other way if we consider the interests of the other children involved. Arguments can easily be concocted for why children should be allowed, encouraged, and maybe even compelled to serve as living organ donors for younger siblings (e.g., it provides the greatest good for the greatest number, or is the most virtuous choice). And, of course, we might paternalistically conclude that pregnant girls should carry their babies to term rather than having them killed.

Philosophically this article was a failure, filled with bad analogies and arguments that are easily flipped the other way. It is, however, a reminder that liberals and liberalism are never really neutral but have their own values that they will impose in blood.