A Bitter Pill for the Unborn
The Herald sun, July 13, 1990
Protesters picket an abortion clinic: abortion pill here soon? A simple pill will make abortion less traumatic. But LAUCHLAN CHIPMAN warns it could be too simple for our own good.
FOR many women who have no moral objections to an induced abortion, the very fact that it typically involves surgery is frightening enough to be a deterrent.
Therefore the prospect of popping a pill with a 96 per cent chance of bringing about an early miscarriage, without any surgery and negligible physiological side-effects, is extremely attractive.
Such a pill does exist. But it is not available to Australian women. The drug mifepristone, known as RU486, is being tested in 25 countries, and is already available as a matter of course In French abortion clinics.
But plans by manufacturer Roussel-Ulcaf to test the drug in Australia have been, well, aborted.
It’s all to do with pressure on the drug's manufacturers by the Australian anti-abortion lobby, according to a Canberra spokesman for the Therapeutic Goods Administration. The pressure has reportedly ranged from the conventional - a mass-mailing of politicians - to the criminal, including threats alleged to have been made against Roussel-Uclaf employees.
The availability of the pill, which has medical applications other than as an abortifacient, would also "privatise" abortion, according to Jo Wainer of the Abortion Providers Federation.
It would really do what the double gin and hot soapy bath was once reputed to do. In fact it’s even been claimed by its advocates that it will do for abortion what the oral contraceptive did for sex.
If this claim is even half true, it’s time to take stock. One of the great ironies of the last two and a half decades - the period during which the contraceptive pill has been generally available - is that the demand for abortion has gone up, rather than down.
In the 1960s, advocates of easy access to contraceptives argued that the widespread use of safe and effective contraceptives would slash the demand for abortion.
Even some of those opposed to what they foresaw as an increase in promiscuity, reluctantly accepting it as the lesser of two evils, the greater evil being abortion.
It was widely accepted that, thanks to the contraceptive pill, demand for abortion in the affluent West would in future be confined to rape victims, women who fell ill after conception, or had reason to fear the birth of a defective child.
How wrong we were!
Demand for abortion has rocketed, despite not only the ready availability of reliable contraceptives, but the growing social acceptability of single motherhood.
The liberal position has shifted from a limited defence of "justifiable feticide" - an analogy with justifiable homicide - to abortion on demand.
No longer do Liberals see an induced abortion as an evil which is justified only to prevent a greater evil.
More disturbing is the extent to which what are plainly very bad arguments have persuaded a whole generation of women that abortion is, in effect, just another option in managing fertility.
Some are simply question-begging, like those reducing it to "a woman’s right to choose". Others are flawed by irrelevance, like the claim that a woman’s body, and what goes on inside it, is her property.
The fallacious implication is that if something is your private property, you can do what you like with it. Try telling that one to environmental conservationists and historic building preservationists!
Too often it is assumed that opposition must be grounded in the dictates of a religion. Yet some of the most powerful moral arguments against abortion on demand can be stated in entirely secular terms.
For my money, the most fundamental question is, when did my identity, as a distinct individual, actually begin?
It was certainly long before I was born, and long before It developed even vaguely recognizable human attributes. If my mother had taken the Roussel Uclaf pill some eight months or so before I was born, it would have been me - not merely a mess of organic matter - that would have been destroyed.
While the retrospective contemplation of this hypothetical event may distract some readers with momentary pleasure, the point must not be lost. This argument has nothing to do with the creation of a soul, but everything to do with continuity as the underlying logical basis of all physical identity.
The real issue behind abortion is whether what is identifiable as the beginning of a distinct human individual, merits our respect - even our qualified respect.
If you think it does, then you too must have doubts about a pill that would make abortion an even easier option than it is already.
Lauchlan Chipman is professor of philosophy at Wollongong University.