Who confers value?

...The Kantian one is that it violates the person's autonomy, "perhaps the most extreme violation possible," and the other two involve' 'the loss of the years of life that persons would otherwise have enjoyed" and the "effects on other persons than the one killed...

...The pro-lifers have always said that even early abortion is morally like killing babies," Glover says...

...The first of the utilitarian arguments suffers from the same defect as the "how would you like to be aborted...

...Glover rejects the Kantian argument on the grounds that infants lack the self-consciousness necessary for autonomy to mean much...

...Glover goes on to point out that the problem of distinguishing between abortion and infanticide remains central to the argument, and that it "can only be dealt with by examining the moral justifications for taking life...

...in any society, particularly a pluralistic one, it is essential...

...THE CONTINUING ABORTION DEBATE THE ISSUE of abortion either arouses extreme passions or leads to boredom, or a form of numbness which is very much like boredom...

...This is a problem both for religious people and for a society which can allow, as Glover does, only intellectual and emotional argument...

...He respects much that he finds in pro-life arguments, though his respect is a little condescending...

...this must, as Glover says, be shown to be a greater evil than forcing women to bear children they don't want...

...I am glad I was not aborted, since I should not be here if I had been...

...JOHN GARVEY Commonweal: 424...

...If the issue is a lost cause it may not be because we have failed to advance better arguments, or because the arguments of the other side were superior, but because we have allowed religion to degenerate into churchiness, and have not understood it as something which is worthless if it is not a transforming reality...

...But he is convinced that even after people on both sides of the issue are made aware that their opponents "are not moral monsters," there remains "the difference between a morality of absolute commands and prohibitions, set in a scheme of religious belief, and the more secular approach of the pro-choice activists, who are motivated by the bad consequences of denying abortion, both for women and for the quality of parenthood...

...have been ruled out of court...

...Even this seems to me unlikely, and would not satisfy most pro-life or any pro-choice people...

...Throughout his argument Glover raises sensitive qualifications, difficult questions for both sides, and reveals a respect for his opponents in the pro-life/ pro-choice debate which is exemplary, something rare on either side of the debate...

...For reasons that have to do with much more than the abortion issue, believers must show in the way they regard others (including their opponents in this and other areas) that humanity has a divine vocation...

...Glover takes a number of common pro-choice and pro-life arguments and shows their shortcomings...

...It could only be justified by showing that it averts a greater evil...

...Having nodded at the fact that the life of the unborn child is not nothing, that life is again consigned to the realm of nothingness for purposes of argument...

...argument...

...If in fact no appeals to common belief can lead to a movement away from a climate in which abortion is for all practical purposes simply another form of contraception, those who oppose it must begin to argue on grounds which the secular society finds uncomfortable...

...Unless we accept that we ought to produce as many children as possible, the argument seems to prove too much...

...Perhaps some common ground can be found...

...At one point in a discussion of fetal research Glover says, "We remember the experiments Nazi doctors were prepared to do on human beings, and wonder about the strength of the barriers that prevent us from performing atrocities...

...Questions such as "What is life for...

...What are we about...

...If value is something that only human beings confer, then the pro-choice point of view must ultimately prevail...

...The argument does come down, in the end, to values, even religious ones: if life is inherently of value, that value must have been conferred by something or someone other than the human beings who welcome it or fail to be welcoming...

...But law is limited to the realm of the socially possible, and what is socially possible is in part the product of a climate of opinion and shared values, and this is a realm which is larger and more difficult than the one with which law can deal...

...It is precisely within this vital space that the debate has been most cloudy, and it is for this reason an article in the May 30 issue of the New York Review of Books strikes me as an important one...

...On the one hand you have rigid dogmas, on the other compassion...

...Yet, as Glover points out, to argue that the right of a woman to control her own life makes any action acceptable can lead to such an argument...

...He is willing to say that there are some instances in which even infanticide might be justified (for example, the case of a baby born with terrible and tormenting abnormalities), but points out that people who argue the case for abortion on the grounds of the relative lack of self-consciousness to be found in the fetus or the newborn may have to argue that there is little moral difference between infanticide and abortion...

...These barriers must be at least as much emotional as intellectual...

...Glover is clearly not uncompassion-ate...

...The article—very much worth reading—is called "Matters of Life and Death," and was written by Jonathan Glover, the author of Causing Death and Saving Lives and What Sort of People Should There Be...

...I do not want to reduce his argument to a point which could lead to distortion, but it reveals both the difficulties which we face in finding a common language, and a problem which underlies those difficulties: the fact that the argument which pro-life and pro-choice people are engaged in involves issues which are finally philosophical and religious...

...This way of putting things pretty much stacks the deck...

...perhaps it may be possible to limit abortions to cases involving at least some difficulty beyond the desire not to have a child...

...The emotional and the intellectual seem to be the only categories which exist...

...The reply that they are indeed the same, and that both are acceptable, is not an attractive one...

...He does, however, raise some good objections to common pro-life arguments...

...This is not a stupid argument in itself...

...But for the same reasons, I am glad that my parents did not use a contraceptive, or practice chastity...

...The argument too often degenerates into an argument over what the law should permit...

...his final pro-choice argument is one with which pro-life people must contend: "The policy of forcing women to bear and rear unwanted children involves a degree of misery and servitude that is an obvious moral evil...

...Thepro-life position either involves a direct appeal to religious authority, or else appeals to common beliefs about the right to life.'' I am not sure what he means by a "direct appeal to religious authority...

...In arguing for abortion as a means of bringing only wanted children to birth, and infanticide in extreme cases as a means of preventing the afflicted child from suffering, Glover speaks of "the conflict between such claims and the defense of our emotional responses to babies...

...I believe that his argument is more vulnerable than he thinks it is, or at least that there are even more difficult questions to be raised than the already difficult questions he raises...

...Finally it involves much more than argument...

...It is written from a pro-choice point of view, one which may make some pro-choice and pro-life people uncomfortable...

...He quotes one: " 'If you were glad you were not aborted yourself, how can you justify aborting someone else?' . . . The premise of the argument is quite correct...

...They are, however, essential to such life and death issues as abortion, euthanasia, and the taking of civilian lives during wartime...

...If this means that one can turn only to the specific dogmas of a specific religious denomination, I disagree...

...We are deeply divided," Glover says, "between religious and secular views, and also between absolutist and con-sequentialistmoralities...

...The second he finds central: late abortion and fetal research raise painful questions about the dehumanizing act of killing the unborn child, and even more difficult ones about the infanticide which Glover finds acceptable, if tragic...

...But if he means that appeals to common beliefs about the right to life are the only alternatives to an insistence that life is inherently sacred, he has a point, and he has gone a long way towards clarifying the difficulty involved in finding common beliefs...

...As it stands, there is a determination to stare past the shoulder of the opponent, never meeting the eye, with one side accusing the other of a lack of compassion for (choose one) the mother or the unborn child...

...The objections to killing someone, he says, come down to three, one of them Kantian, the other two utilitarian...

...Sidney and Daniel Callahan have made a good beginning, as readers of Commonweal [October 5, 1984] may remember...

...But unless the goal of people on both sides of the debate is to feel an obscene and futile satisfaction, some common ground of discussion must be found if only to clarify the points at which agreement really is impossible...

...It seems to me that a secular case against abortion can be made only by demonstrating the callousness of abortion and its effect on a society...

...It is, I'd guess, a beginning which many people on both sides of the issue don't want to see made at all...

...Our reasons for opposing abortion are in fact religious, but we are not allowed, under the rules of a secular and pluralistic society, to advance this fact as a compelling one...

...I haven't read either book, but the latter title is one I envy...

...But those of us who make this argument are convinced that even if abortion did not have a negative social effect it would be wrong, because human life in all of its stages is sacred...

...It seems impossible to find any point at which those who oppose permissive abortion laws and those who believe them necessary can agree...

...Glover argues that a degree of self-consciousness and an answering welcome from the human community have a major part in the definition of humanity, and from his point of view this means a major part of the argument in favor of the right to life of the child in the womb...