I saw someone on Twitter saying, "Given that most British conservatives, however defined, support the maintenance of an effective abortion on demand regime in this country, it ought to be easier to find someone who'll make the case for that. And, necessarily, against the bodies/cells/whatever being destroyed." But where, the writer went on to ask, do we see that case being made? Not just an anti-anti-abortion case, but a full-throated defence of abortion from a conservative perspective.
That struck me as an interesting observation. What, I wondered, would such a case look like? What could a conservative who accepts the (pretty obviously correct) biological premises of the pro-life case but who nonetheless endorses the continuing legality of the practice say without resorting to mere question-begging libertarianism or disguised left-wing slogans? Purely as an intellectual exercise, I set out to construct that argument - and I was interested in what I found.
What follows is in two parts. First, I set out what the truly conservative reasons for being pro-choice are, and after that I set out what conservatives can learn from such an argument. TL;DR - being pro-choice is not dissimilar to being a brutal but not wholly unsympathetic US Marine Colonel.
I. The Conservative Case for Abortion
Let's start with the obvious. No, not the obvious point that abortion is killing humans. Instead the even more obvious point that killing humans is something that goes on all the time, in all kinds of circumstances, across the world - and we don't bat an eyelid. Have you checked in on the Rohingyas recently? Syria? Yemen? DRC? Of course you haven't. I'm not accusing you of hypocrisy or being unfeeling; I'm simply making the point that, as conservatives, those whose lives we are obliged to protect and defend - those we have reason to care most about - are those who are members of our societies, those people bound to us by ties of nationality, friendship, culture, mutual support and all the rest of the well-known litany of reasons conservatives have for valuing the close, the familiar and the known over the distant, unfamiliar and unknown. In utopia, no one will kill anyone - neither in the DRC nor in England - but we're in the real world. Let's face facts.
And abortion is a fact. It's firmly established in the law and culture of this country, just as it is in all civilised and decent countries. I'm not merely making the point that outlawing abortion would cause civil disobedience on a massive scale (although no conservative should be reckless with a society's respect for the law); I'm pointing out that the law protects and privileges, as it should, those who are members of our society (our fellow female citizens) over those who are not (Rohingyas and embryos). Our soldiers are employed to protect us and our interests, not those of people in distant lands of whom we know little. Similarly, our doctors are employed to protect the interests of the women and girls who are already part of our society, who are studying in our educational institutions, working in our companies, caring for our children, or simply pursuing their lives in the way they see fit, not the interests of incapable balls of cells we have never met - tiny, unintending and uninvited potential immigrants to our society; and where those interests conflict then of course our fellow countrywomen should come first.
Besides, what are we really talking about? Late term abortions are rare and unpopular: we can rely on the law and medical progress to reduce and even eliminate them before too long. What we are really talking about, in the main, is the quiet and almost certainly painless death of pre-conscious entities. Humans, yes, but not people - not sentient beings like you and me. Perhaps it is a moral evil. Perhaps. But we can leave abstruse moral theorising to philosophers and the Pope. Even if it is a moral evil, it's surely well down the long list of moral evils we encounter in this messy old world - roughly comparable to certain kinds of meat-rearing, if we're honest with ourselves. We need to do certain things to animals in order to eat civilised meals; similarly, we need to do certain things to humans in order to maintain civilised society more generally. Let's bite the bullet on this, embrace what has to be done, and try to make the whole process as distress-free for the woman as possible.
Like you, I donate to charities that try to improve the welfare of various humans, of various ages, in various parts of the world. I sincerely hope that human societies will develop such that no one will want to carry out an abortion, commit a murder or launch an armed attack on civilians. But, in the meantime, we need to defend the valuable things that are ours against threats that arise, and pay the price of doing so. Just as we protect our chickens from foxes and our public gatherings from terrorists - even though we know that there will be collateral damage along the way - we need to protect women's lives, livelihoods and bodies from unplanned or unwanted pregnancies. The true conservative will conserve: he will surely gaze upon the ramparts that the legislature and custom have erected in defence of women of reproductive age with admiration, and he will defend them.
II. What can we learn?
The case set out above does not strike me as unarguable. Conservatives pride themselves on looking the bleak realities of life in the face and not hiding behind the kumbaya fairytales of progressives: fighting wars, locking up offenders, supporting capital punishment - there is an unsqueamishness there that is sometimes rather too obviously relished.
But it's clearly not a terribly attractive argument. And the manner in which it is unattractive tells us something about the differences about left and right-wingers. I think we get to the nub of it via one word in the case I set out above: "immigrants".
There is a famous thought experiment that you will have come across in abortion debates. Imagine that humans came to be not through sexual reproduction by rather by spores (people-seeds) that are blown on the wind, occasionally entering someone's house and rooting themselves on the carpet. People who don't want children lock their doors and windows to try to keep the spores out, but no anti-spore barriers are entirely perfect and so, from time to time, a spore will land in even the best-protected home, and a little human will start to grow. Are you obliged to allow that human to keep growing? Surely you are entitled to sweep your house clean of spores? Must you ensure that your house has no carpet in order to avoid hosting people spores?
Now let's take that thought experiment in a different direction. A country does not wish to have immigrants. It erects walls, moats and other defences, but of course no anti-immigrant barrier is entirely perfect and so, from time to time, an immigrant will get in. The immigrants can be deported, but the necessary legal proceedings take 9 months. Is the country entitled to kill such immigrants?
Of course not! Nor can the country allow the immigrants to starve: any decent country has to extend to these illegal and unwanted immigrants the kinds of minimal standards extended to, say, common criminals in prison. It's not a lot, but it means some food, protection from the elements appropriate to the climate, emergency medical care. Enough to make sure they aren't bound to die.
In some ways, my immigrant-unfriendly country is a more useful analogy for abortion than the spores. For one thing, it's much less sci-fi than "people-seeds" and therefore more likely to reflect genuine moral intuitions. For another, there are various considerations that weigh in favour of the country that don't apply in abortion, e.g., incentives: immigrants might know which countries are receptive to them and which are not (and adjust their behaviour accordingly) but zygotes can't tell the difference between friendly and unfriendly mothers.
But there is clearly a difference of scale between a country and a woman. So let's bring the analogy closer. Take a small town asked to house and feed a homeless man for 9 months: again, it seems wrong to let him die. Or a household, finding itself with an intruder who will die if evicted? If he's not a threat to you then he has to stay, at least for bit.
Recall that, in each case, in order for the analogy to make sense, the alternative to putting up with this tiresome indigent is causing his death. You mustn't think of an intruder in a temperate climate in summer, think rather of a stowaway on a ship (you can shove him off at the next port, but surely you can't throw him overboard?) or an interloper in an igloo in a blizzard (you surely have to wait until the weather changes such that leaving the igloo does not mean certain death before kicking him out?).
Or think of the steps you can take to keep intruders off your property. I'm a big fan of property rights, but surely no one thinks it's ok to go around placing fatal mantraps in their garden of the kind used to kill vermin, only bigger? "I put up a sign, plus they shouldn't have been there!" hardly excuses the situation. And of course you can't put up signs for zygotes to read.
As the scale gets smaller and smaller, we get closer and closer to the case of abortion. Eventually we reach the other famous thought-experiment in the paper that gave us people-spores: the person who wakes up to find that she has been surgically connected to a famous violinist who needs her blood for the next 9 months.
My general take on all of these cases is that you need a pretty good reason to do something that you know will result in the death of a human, and the fact that that person has been a right bloody nuisance and committed some act of trespass, even trespass to your body, is not a good enough reason. Sometimes, people just are your problem and you have to put up with them: in modern societies that rarely happens except in the case of pregnancy, hence the slightly odd flavour of our thought experiments. But we can think of the traditions of hospitality and so on that apply in older societies or harsher climates: if refusing to feed the unexpected traveller who arrives at your door means his certain death in the desert beyond then no wonder the obligation to feed him is felt strongly.
Of course, the hardest cases given in the pro-abortion argument (life of the mother is at risk, child condemned to a life of pain) are the kinds of cases where you might well feel that you have a good reason for causing someone's death. But you can't get a general right to abortion from those examples any more than the fact that it is sometimes necessary to shoot terrorists means that there is a general right to carry guns and shoot young men.
But I don't want to get sucked into the object level of the abortion debate, but rather to concentrate on what this kind of discussion tells us about conservative thought and its opposite. Thinking of foetuses and embryos as unwanted immigrants highlights the differences. For a certain kind of left-liberal, the idea of keeping any immigrants out of a country is anathema: the idea of a country so girt about with protections that only the occasional immigrant gets through, and only then for 9 months, must seem obscene. When presented with pictures of sad (or, especially, dead) intending immigrants, these people cry "something must be done - this country must bear the burden of homing these people!"
It is not a new observation but it is perenially striking how much more sympathetic these people are towards foreigners seeking admittance to our societies than they are towards perfectly blameless embryos unconsciously trying to do the same. Are there no embryos it is impermissible to kill? Even we conservatives don't think that a country has an absolute right to prohibit entry to everyone: there are genuine asylum seekers who have to be admitted, whether we like it or not - because otherwise they will die. Is there no embryo out there that the left-liberal considers to be a genuine asylum seeker? Is a woman's right to choose so much more absolute than a country's right to restrict immigration?
All of that is a familiar attack on the double-standards of the Left. But I want to look a little more carefully at what it says about the Right. Just imagine what it would be like if we really treated embryos in the way that everyone agrees we have to treat deserving immigrants, i.e. genuine asylum seekers and similar. We've got a good example to hand, namely the welcome that has been extended to the c.40,000 Ukrainians who have arrived in the UK. We see the steps taken by the Government and society at large: cake sales and fundraising, people finding room in their homes and flying flags, schools making new spaces, greeters standing at stations, large expenditures of taxpayers' money, and all the rest of it.
But there are over 200,000 abortions a year in the UK. Imagine multiplying the effort made for Ukrainians by a factor of 5 - and not just for a one-off awful event, but every year in perpetuity. That is what it would take. And, biology being what it is (until people spores are invented), supporting those innocent embryos means supporting a large number of women who are perhaps not such sympathetic characters as Ukrainian refugees: some are pretty well-off, some are stupid, forgetful or have changed their minds, some have 'brought it on themselves' and so on. But treating their offspring as being equally as deserving of help as Ukrainian refugees would mean all sorts of things: people taking women fleeing abusive boyfriends, husbands or parents into their homes; people making deliveries of clothes and food to pregnant women; schools, universities and employers bending over backwards to accommodate pregnant women; adoption services being scaled up massively; social and cultural change to make such babies (and their mothers) as warmly welcomed as people fleeing Russian tanks; and plenty of taxpayers' money being spent (and wasted).
It would be a lot. Taking the pro-life position seriously means making changes of a kind proposed by those who whole-heartedly advocate mass immigration. The consequences would be different, but the effort would comparable. And suggesting that kind of effort is not popular.
All of which makes me think that what's really going on in the heart of the abortion-tolerating ordinary individual, firmly attached to neither the Left nor the Right, must be something similar to the conservative case for abortion set out above. We find ourselves thinking that sometimes there are situations where it is, well, the best thing all round, the kindest thing, really, if a baby just goes away, rather than ruining some girl's life. Or maybe it is just too much for that poor mother because she's got enough on her plate already. Or we ask, what would a child grow up to be like, with a father like that? Or, what sort of a life can she provide for a child, living in care and flitting from boyfriend to boyfriend? Or she's got her whole life ahead of her, such a promising academic career and it was just one mistake and, besides, they're far too young to be parents. That's the kind of thing that widespread abortion allows us to think. These kinds of phrases give us glimpses of the secure and comfortable life that is maintained, in part, by abortion; dealing with these objections - none of which is a silly one - in order to make unwanted children into wanted ones, feted in the manner of Ukrainian refugees (but more of them, year after year and forever), would require uncomfortable and unwelcome changes, both legal and social, to everyday life. By way of example, think of what it would take to make early pregnancy the kind of thing that doesn't ruin a life or an academic career. Abortion or the best alternative to widespread abortion? Best not to think about it too much. Live and let live. We've got a comfortable compromise here - not like those crazy Americans - so let's just let sleeping dogs lie - and put them to sleep if necessary.
I am reminded of Colonel Jessep, the man who famously said that we "can't handle the truth", namely the truth that ensuring the ordered peace of civilisation entails allowing some tough men to do unpleasant things out of sight. When I last wrote about him, I said that if Jessep were right in what he said then I suspect we could handle that truth: people are prepared to swallow a certain amout of brutality on the part of those who guard their way of life. Thinking about abortion confirms my opinion. The unattractive unsqueamishness of conservative thought is something that extends more widely than those of us who are not gung-ho conservatives might like to think.
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