"Where's your evidence?" - what science can and can't tell us in the abortion debate (part 2)

A reverential attitude to “the facts” and “the science” pervades modern policy debates, reflecting the technocratic and utilitarian spirit of the age. In the Labour manifesto for the 1997 General Election, the party insisted that “what counts is what works”, and the phrase was frequently heard in the early years of the Blair government. On one level this desire to base policy on hard facts is commendable. A lot of damage can be – and has been – done by wishful thinking and the widespread human tendency to distort the facts to suit ourselves rather than letting our views be strictly rational. A good example of this can be seen in the government’s recent changes to the law on the provision of IVF to lesbian couples, whereby clinics no longer need to consider the child’s need for a father in deciding whether or not to offer treatment. The driving force behind this legislation is not the hard sociological evidence about the role of fathers in a child’s development – which overwhelmingly points to the conclusion that fathers have a unique and distinctive role in children’s upbringing – but rather the government’s ideological commitment to gay equality. We may or may not agree with this commitment (it is not part of LIFE’s remit to comment on these issues), but that is beside the point.

Anyway, when it comes to abortion, what I really want to suggest is that a strictly scientific approach, that is to say an approach that focuses exclusively on quantifiable data and proven material facts, is incapable of providing a satisfactory final answer as to whether abortion is right or just. In matters of morality, there are limits to what a science-based approach can tell us. The scientific method is good for discovering truths about the material world around us. What it is not so good at is helping us to understand what, and why, we ought to value. Evolutionary psychology, for example, can tell us a great deal about why certain human beings act in certain ways. What it can’t do is provide a coherent explanation of the goodness and badness of individual actions. That requires serious philosophical reflection.

Abortion is not ultimately a question of simple material facts. We cannot prove that abortion is wrong in the same way we can prove that sound cannot travel in a vacuum. That is definitely not to say that the debate is rationally irresolvable, or that reason or objectivity cannot inform the debate. Ultimately, abortion is either permissible or it is not. But we cannot escape the conclusion that the question is, in the final analysis, one of conflicting values. We do, of course, use data to inform this decision, but there is no trump card, no killer fact, no single piece of information that can provide a definitive answer to the dilemma.

The debate really hinges on a particular question: what is it about human beings that makes killing wrong? The genetic data informs us that whatever it is in the womb is a human being, in the most basic sense: it is a single unique organism with human DNA, immunologically and genetically distinct from its parents, self-directed, organised. That is scientific fact. But what does this factual information tell us about how we ought to treat that individual? Again, we come back to a question of ethics, specifically a debate about how very young humans achieve “personhood”, the state in which they are protected by law.

Broadly speaking, there are two schools of thought regarding the value of human life and the relationship between humanity and personhood: functionalists and essentialists. Functionalists tend to emphasise that it is what humans can do that is important; i.e. to be a full person, an individual must be able to think and feel for themselves, to form relationships, to make genuinely autonomous decisions and so on. Functionalism is in one sense intuitive. Most people, when asked about what constitutes individual identity, mention factors such as relationships, memories, interests, and intellectual pursuits.

Nevertheless, essentialists are wary of such judgments, seeing them as not only wrong in principle but also dangerous, as they involve a logical slippery slope that endangers many human beings. They see all human beings as uniquely valuable, regardless of age, status or any other factor. For essentialists, the achievement of “personhood” by acquiring certain characteristics is not particularly significant. All human beings are entitled to respect and protection simply because they are human. The embryo; the foetus; the child; the comatose or terminally ill patient; the dementia sufferer – all are valuable.