Making the Ethical Case Against Abortion

THE campaign to reform abortion laws in the U.S. has made the justifications for abortion well known. There are the dramatic cases: pregnancies through rape or incest, the potentially deformed child, the mother whose mental health is seriously endangered. The Women's Liberation movement has made the confrontation total by declaring the absolute right of women over their own bodies. To them and to others, the right of abortion is simply the right to assert an order of values: their own lives and well-being over the lives of the unborn.

Now the forces opposing abortion are developing their own battery of sophisticated ethical arguments. Some are old theological positions updated; others borrow from Western legal tradition; still others offer modern sociological, medical and scientific evidence. All of those arguments are examined in three solidly reasoned books that share one bias: a pronounced concern for human life, including fetal life.

The most single-minded and conservative of the three is the work of a modern Thomistic philosopher, Georgetown University's Germain Grisez. His hefty book, Abortion: The Myths, the Realities, and the Arguments (Corpus, $12.50; paperback, $6.95), is chiefly valuable as a contemporary exposition of the traditional Roman Catholic stand against all abortions. Grisez concedes only that the law need not forbid abortion in the classic case of saving a mother's life (even the strictest U.S. laws have generally allowed that exception) and possibly in a pregnancy due to rape. Where liberalization is inevitable, he suggests that legislators work to hedge it with restrictive amendments.

No such unyielding orthodoxy runs through the seven essays in John T. Noonan Jr.'s ecumenical collection. The Morality of Abortion: Legal and Historical Perspectives (Harvard, $8.95). Noonan, a canon law expert, was widely praised for a historical study of contraception that demonstrated how Catholic teaching on the subject could change. But Catholic teaching on abortion, he insists, is far less flexible. His contributors offer a broad front in favor of the unborn.

Perhaps the most crucial problem dealt with in the essays is whether the young fetus is "tissue," as is often argued by those favoring abortion, or "human life," as abortion foes contend. One line of reasoning offered by Princeton Ethicist Paul Ramsey, a Methodist, is pointedly modern. Ramsey contends that science itself now offers evidence of very early "human" characteristics in the fetus, such as discernible brain waves at eight weeks. The findings of genetics, says Ramsey, suggest a much earlier date. Since the individual's unique genetic code, or genotype, is established at the moment of fertilization, the zygote itself--the fertilized egg--should be considered "human."

Hard Cases. Other theories place "humanness" at the time of implantation of the zygote in the uterus, or even later in the fetal development. It is a question critical to the general debate. If ethicists establish humanness at fertilization, then birth control methods that prevent implantation, such as the intrauterine device or "morning-after" pill, would be considered methods of abortion rather than contraception.

Another of Noonan's contributors, German Redemptorist Father Bernard Haring, a moral theologian at Rome's Accademia Alfonsiana, urges Catholics to avoid squabbling with others over such "hard cases" as the victim of rape or the endangered mother and concentrate on the "large areas of agreement" they share with less dogmatic foes of abortion. Many who would permit abortion in exceptional cases would agree, for instance, on the immorality of abortion for mere convenience.

Permissive Code. In his disciplined, balanced study, Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality (Macmillan, $14.95), Daniel Callahan strives to preserve the ideal of the sanctity of life within a permissive legal framework. Dispassionately examining all the arguments and options, the Roman Catholic intellectual and former editor of Commonweal tries to avoid what he calls "the mentality of the crusader." The problem, he argues, is priorities: the church's heart is in the right place in defending the sanctity of human life, but the bias too heavily favors fetal life alone. Yet he rejects abortion-on-request because it is based on women's rights alone.

Callahan accepts the morality of contraception and urges that a cheap and easy method be found to obviate the resort to abortion. As an interim solution, he proposes a legal code permitting relatively easy abortion: on request up to twelve weeks, thereafter only for "serious" reasons. He would also provide extensive counseling and a "conscience clause" for medical personnel who do not want to take part in abortions. Paralleling the permissive law, on the other hand, Callahan proposes a vigorous public campaign encouraging contraception and discouraging abortion and a social program offering alternatives such as maternal care and child support. Callahan argues persuasively that the fetus' right to its "human life" must be defended and contends that his "middle way" is its best defense.

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