Abortion as The Fundamental Freedom

What constitutes a 'fundamental freedom'? That question struck me when reading this account of a query about whether or not to provide a religious exemption in abortion laws, e.g. one that would allow a surgeon to refuse to perform one for religious reasons. (Hat tip: D29)

NBC News Senior Washington Correspondent Hallie Jackson asked, “So, is a question of pragmatism then, what concessions would be on the table, religious exemptions, for example, is that something that you would consider if the Republicans control Congress?”

Harris answered, “I don’t think we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body.”

I think we may be approaching the point at which abortion is the only 'fundamental freedom' recognized by the one side of the debate: freedom of religion, for example, isn't 'fundamental' if it always and everywhere must give way to this other freedom. 

Yet if one of the things that one might make decisions about doing with one's own body is having an abortion, another such thing is performing an abortion. Surely if the fundamental freedom is the right to make decisions about one's own body, it is just as fundamental to will -- for any reason -- that your body not be involved in killing* (whether a fetus, a child, or anyone at all).

Another candidate for 'fundamental freedom' might be the freedom not to be forced to do such things against one's will and/or conscience. That seems inadmissable even if it's not religious, here: this sort of thing is why I say that the only 'fundamental' freedom must be abortion, because it not only mustn't be restricted by law, it mustn't admit of (say) some physician having the freedom not to participate. 

(Or else our physician must exercise that freedom very early, as for example by not choosing to become a physician but pursuing a different line of work. This is similar to how women's 'freedom of choice' here entails unrestricted abortion rights, but men's 'freedom of choice' entails only the right to choose not to have sex that might lead to a pregnancy in the first place -- and this from the party of equality.)

It is striking that this 'fundamental freedom' actually entails a power to compel others to be unfree in exactly the same way. That kind of logical contradiction in the will would offend Kant; if 'the maxim that could be willed as a universal law' is 'everyone should be free to make decisions about his/her own body' then the maxim entails a contradiction, and is thus fundamentally immoral on his model of ethics. Of course, Kant was already against abortion, so perhaps that's not very telling.**

Still, it is noteworthy that the 'fundamental' freedom they have adopted is one that requires other people to be unfree. But perhaps that too is nothing new: after all, abortion necessarily entails removing the child's freedom to make any decisions about what to do with his or her body.

* In fact this turns out to be physically impossible to universalize. One cannot avoid killing something with one's body: one has to eat, for example, and only living things can provide the advanced carbon chains like proteins that we need to survive. One could choose not to eat, but then one is still using one's body to kill something, i.e., one's self. A fact of the reality we inhabit is that killing is unavoidable, and one is simply making decisions about what to kill rather than whether to do so. You can certainly choose not to kill other human beings, but you cannot choose not to kill.

To continue with Kant, for example, he treats ethical maxims that cannot be universalized as inherently immoral because they are out of order with reason: this would be one of the lesser immoralities, one that cannot be universalized because of a practical fact rather than because logic itself entails a contradiction. Still, taken seriously this fact makes pacifism immoral on Kantian terms (and indeed Kant is pretty heavily in favor of killing, as long as the state does it according to its laws, as he explores at length in the Doctrine of Right of his Metaphysics of Morals).

On a natural theological approach, since God made the world and its fundamental laws, a religious reading of this problem strongly suggests that God wants us to kill -- and indeed, this is also supported in scripture in all the major monotheistic religions, which give instructions about how and what to kill and eat. Christianity has the scripture in which those sorts of rules are set aside as a dispensation, but that doesn't lead to a more general pacifism from the Prince of Peace, but a wider permission to kill and to eat. 

This is probably a bigger and more interesting problem than the one that was actually today's topic.

** Abortion and infanticide he condemns outright and absolutely, but he does suggest that in the case of the unborn child it is an immoral act that no one has a right to punish: the child was not yet a member of any legal community, on his conception, so no legal community could punish its murder. That is not obviously logical to me, but he clearly thought that whether 'personhood' or 'humanity' started at conception, 'membership in a polity' began at birth.