A thought experiment to tease out religious attitudes to abortion

I was recently lucky enough to spend the night in a beautiful hotel in rural Ireland. It would have been very romantic if I didn't happen to be in a relationship with an amicable fellow who enjoys talking to strangers. At dinner he struck up a conversation with the couple at the next table, who happened to live near where I was born. They were warm and friendly, probably in their mid-50s, and talked proudly about their four children.

The woman – let's call her Eileen – stopped amid a glowing retelling of her son's entire amateur sporting career, and glowered. At the bar stood a girl wearing a Repeal jumper. The jumpers are sold to raise money for the campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which gives equal weight to the life of the foetus and the mother. I turned back to Eileen, who was staring at the girl with obvious disapproval.

I was curious. “You’re not a fan of the Repeal movement, then?” I asked.

“I certainly am not,” she said. I asked her why. Eileen bristled a bit, and said that she has a lovely nephew with Down syndrome, and that if abortion were legal, Down syndrome babies wouldn’t be born.

The experiment
Thought experiments are very helpful in philosophy for clarifying first principles and making complex issues easier to comprehend, so in an effort to better understand why Eileen was 'pro-life', I thought I would try one. She could always tell me to bugger off, and go back to her plate of lamb, if she wanted to.

“Let’s say there was a total guarantee that Down syndrome would never be grounds for abortion. Would you still be against it?”

She looked annoyed, but said yes.

“Okay, so you’re not pro-life because of the fear of Down syndrome foetuses being aborted, then. Because you’d be pro-life even if that weren’t an issue at all.”

She looked more annoyed, but said “I suppose”.

“So why are you against abortion?” I asked again.

“Women regret abortions and they cause terrible emotional distress,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “So imagine that we lived in a world where zero per cent of women reported distress or regret after abortion. Would you still be against legalising it?”

“But we don’t!” Eileen said, as though I were mad.

“I understand that,” I said. “But just say we did. Would you still be against repealing the Eighth Amendment?’

“Well, I suppose I still would,” she said.

“Alright, so if you’d be against abortion even if women didn’t regret it or feel distress, then that isn’t why you’re against abortion.”

She jabbed her lamb rather violently. “Sure if anyone could get an abortion whenever, they’d use it as contraception. There’d be no responsibility at all.”

“If we lived in a world where everyone used contraception, and the only unwanted pregnancies were through the occasional failures of that contraception, would you still be against abortion?” I asked.

She looked at me almost angrily now. “Yes, I would.”

It was clear that, although she used these objections to justify her 'pro-life' stance, they weren’t the reasons for it. Reluctantly, I said so to her.

“Life begins at conception, and you can’t remove the right to life in a vote.” She said this with utter conviction.

Belief in this statement is the real reason Eileen is 'pro-life'. It’s intrinsically tied up in Christian theology and, in this country, Catholicism. Can you be 'pro-life' and non-religious? Yes. But the idea that life begins at conception – which these days we consider to be when a sperm fertilises an egg – originates in and is inextricable from religious ideology. You can hold this view without religion, but in the vast majority of instances, its justification lies in religious thinking.

That’s okay. It’s legitimate to have a 'pro-life' stance because of religion, and people should be comfortable saying so publicly while respecting that appeals to religion might not interest people with a secular perspective. This debate is about religion, so religion should be front and centre, rather than talking points used by people who are actually religious but maintaining that their faith and their abortion stance are unconnected.