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No worries. With a bit more time to hand... I think you have three questions there. The first is a simple inquiry:
(An aside: If anyone with a law degree can come to the rescue here I would be grateful - what would the validity be of a contract which stipulates that a pregnancy must be terminated asap if either party says so?)
I'd say as a layperson that one could, like a pre-nup, have fun writing this, but it would have no force in law, not least because "we signed a contract" is not generally considered to be a good reason to procure an abortion - it would have to be demonstrated that the contract underwrote some deeper physical or psychological need. You might have better luck with a contract specifying that one partner would not have the rights or obligations of a parent, but the CSA or similar might not be up for that either.
Your second question appears to be about the history of abortion law in the UK:
Or put another way: How did GB get from the absolute illegality of abortion in the 19th century to the status quo, and what where the arguments that persuaded the lawmakers and the public?
I think in response to that that it's worth going back before the 19th century. Britain has historically managed unwanted pregnancy through abortifacients - under English common law, abortion before "quickening" was legal - basically, the point at which the foetus was considered alive. Scottish common law made abortion illegal unless there was a reputable medical reason, which covered enough ground to make abortion a pretty safe process, legally speaking.
Depending on your position either the village wise woman's role was then usurped by the a patriarchal medical establishment seeking to limit women's control over their fertility or humane doctors attempted to put a stop to dangerous and unhygienic practices by pushing for the prohibition of performing abortions in the Offences Against the Person Act 1803. I think trying to get, rather than perform, an abortion was still legal until the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861.
This was dodgy law, because unrealistic, and in 1929 the possibility of legal abortion for the physical safety of the mother was introduced. This was broadened in 1938 to the psychological health of the mother - specifically in a case of pregnancy resulting from rape, which I think is one of the more dramatic examples of a non-physical but transcendent-of-convenience situation; "for reasons not directly connected to the immediate physical welfare of mother and foetus but with consideration of longer-term consequences for either" might be better. And then we get to the Abortion Act of 1967. So, really, prohibition of abortion was a 19th-century spasm in a long tradition of British women having access to abortion. There's the Northern Ireland question as well, of course, but that's another matter.
However, this is not quite the same question as:
What makes the woman's decision more weighty than the man's in the matter of termination?
For a very long time, the simple answer to this has to be that the woman is certain and can assert without fear of contradiction that the child is hers. Since paternity can still only be established post partum, there is still a vestige of this, although the father can usually be identified at that point. Until really quite recently, a man who did not want to be involved in the raising of a child could simply not be involved in the raising of a child, unless compelled so to do by a preexisting arrangement - to wit, a marriage (presumption of rightful paternity). If you and I have been Paul Reiser and Greg Evigan, should one, both or neither of us have the right to terminate a pregnancy that is only certainly the pregnancy of Marcy Bradford (not portrayed)?
In the case of a pregnancy where paternity is certain and uncontested... well. I think this reminds me of an earlier discussion about abortion on Barbelith, where one member suggested that the issue would fairly shortly become moot, because technology would allow us to transplant and grow foetuses in test tubes from very early on in the process of gestation. It was then pointed out that the technology would also neeed to exist to remove the foetus from the womb in a non-intrusive fashion, which seems to be yet further beyond the bounds of science than the artifical womb in the first place. At the time, I asked:
if the child is outside the womb, and thus not the *responsibility* of the biological mother in the sense that she must deal with bearing it to term within her own body, does she lose any claim to be more intimately involved in the process than the father, who contributed half of the genetic material?
I think that's still quite a big question.
So, hypothesis. If, at the moment of conception, a pod materialised by means arcane in a warehouse somewhere with a tag naming the mother and father attached, in which pod the foetus was gestating, and if this pod had a big red button attached to it the pressing of which caused that foetus to vanish, would the man and the woman be equally entitled to press that red button, regardless of the wishes of the other party, and terminate the pregnancy?
Partly, that probably depends on whether or not you believe that a foetus has the same legal rights to life of a child - opinions will differ on whether either should be allowed to press the button, and for how long the option of pressing the button would be open to them. Personally, I'd probably agree at that point with SaintMae - that is, if either parent did not want the foetus to be gestating in the pod then they should have the right to press the button. Then you get onto weirdness involving grandparents, partners who did not provide the genetic information and so on - in a sense, the "contributed biological information" identifier for a parent can be a bit of an arbitrary delineator, So, maybe you would need some sort of arbitration - doctors or a judge or similar - to ensure that all interested parties had the option of being involved in the discussion about the foetus' future. Or you could just apply a hard rule - the two participants get the key to the warehouse, either can go in and press the red button, and that's that. No right of veto.
Now, you might say at this point, "But, Haus, you deluded virgin, such a situation is mere fantasy. The foetus is not in a pod in a warehouse, but inside the body of a woman". Which would be fair enough, and I think is kind of my point. When we talk about the "matter of termination", we're not talking about a process performed upon a separated third party. We are talking about a thing that is done to a collection of cells in a woman's body, which will involve the woman in question being given chemicals which alter the function of her body, quite possibly having a syringe or electric pump or curette placed inside her body, or in later stages being cut open, having a caustic solution injected into her amnion, or various other processes.
Now, these processes are often described in lurid detail by opponents of women's rights to choose abortion, but that's missing the point. Of course they are icky. Medical and surgical procedures are icky. The questions that seem uppermost to me are: a) should a woman have the right to make her body available to these processes in certain (I would say most) circumstances in response to a pregnancy and b) should a woman have the right not to make her body available to these processes as a result of her co-parent's response to her pregnancy.
I would say yes and yes to these questions. At this point, the foetus is inside her body, and her right to the sovereignty of her body is paramount unless there are really good reasons to violate it in this specific case. "There are too many children in the world", "I don't think I would be able to give this child a worthwhile life", or "the father cannot be trusted to provide meaningful emotional or financial support" are all, in my humble, perfectly good reasons for a woman to seek an abortion, but none of them are good reasons for anyone else to make the same woman have her body subjected to medical or surgical intervention against her will. |
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