Rowan Williams: Britain's abortion debate lacks a moral dimension

From the Guardian (U.K.), a piece by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury [boldface mine]:

Most of those who voted for the 1967 Abortion Act did so in the clear belief that they were making provision for extreme and tragic situations: conception as a result of rape, foetal or perinatal complications threatening a mother's life. Forty years on, many of these same people have expressed their dismay at what has happened. As some of the issues are reopened in connection with the proposed legislation on embryo research, it is important to think about where this unease comes from and whether it has any lessons for us now.

Many supporters of the 1967 Act started from a strong sense of taking for granted the wrongness of ending an unborn life. What people might now call their 'default position' was still that abortion was a profoundly undesirable thing and that a universal presumption of care for the foetus from the moment of conception was the norm.

But the rapidly spiralling statistics - nearly 200,000 abortions a year in England and Wales - tell their own story. We are not now dealing with a relatively small number of extreme cases (and clinical advances have in fact reduced the number of strictly medical dilemmas envisaged in 1967 act's supporters). When we hear, as in a recent survey reported in the Lancet, that one-third of pregnancies in Europe end in abortion, we may well ask what has happened.

Recent discussion on making it simpler for women to administer abortion-inducing drugs at home underlines the growing belief that abortion is essentially a matter of individual decision and not the kind of major moral choice that should involve a sharing of perspective and judgment. And that necessarily means that certain presumptions have changed. Not only has there been an obvious weakening of the feeling that abortion is a last resort; the development of embryo research has brought with it the hint of a more instrumental approach to the human organism in its earliest days.

Paradoxically, the language of 'foetal rights' has strengthened over the last few decades, leading to a real tension with this growing normalisation of abortion. The pregnant woman who smokes or drinks heavily is widely regarded as guilty of infringing the rights of her unborn child; yet at the same time, with no apparent sense of incongruity, there is discussion of the possibility of the liberty of the pregnant woman herself to perform the actions that will terminate a pregnancy. . .

. . . But when do we get to the point where accepting the inevitability of tough decisions that may hurt the conscience has become so routine that we stop noticing that there ever was a strain on the conscience, let alone why that strain should be there at all?

The process is one that can be traced in other, more familiar, areas. You start with the presumption that abortion is unavoidably the ending of a life, but perhaps there are situations where it is the least awful outcome, and so you reluctantly conclude that some provision should be made for these situations. Or you start from the presumption that marriage is a lifelong union, but it is appallingly cruel to refuse relief to people who are being systematically damaged by deeply unhappy marriages and you accept more rapid paths towards divorce. You take it for granted that marriage and family life are foundational things in a properly nurturing and stable society, but many mature and responsible people choose to live in partnerships other than marriage and because no one wants to see them suffer hardship or discrimination because of this, you accept the case for the benefits of civil partnership.

And it's difficult to deny that because of all these reasons, something has happened to our assumptions about marriage and family, just as something has happened to our assumptions about the life of the unborn child.

The history of the 1967 Act's implementation is an object lesson in how slippage can occur between thinking compassionately about exceptional cases and losing the sense of a normative position. . .

Read it all.