A couple of weeks ago I used to be giving a morning’s teaching on the subject of human rights and in the middle of the morning I sought to get across three fundamental points. The first point was that the breakthrough achieved by the issuing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 was the formal recognition that everybody, whoever they’re, and wherever they live, have certain basic rights just because they’re human beings.
The second point was that the concept of rights is inextricably certain up with the concept of obligations. As the Christian theologian Nicholas Wolterstorff argues in his book Justice rights and wrongs, we cannot talk in regards to the one without talking in regards to the other. The language of rights, he argues, gives voice to the reality that human beings have an obligation to treat other human beings in certain morally good ways, and that those other human beings are wronged in the event that they are usually not treated in this fashion. In his words, ‘One is guilty if one has did not do what one was obligated to do; one is wronged if one has not been treated as one had a right to be treated.’
What this implies is that the criticism that is typically made in regards to the notion of human rights, that it’s all about rights and says nothing about duties, is misplaced. Obligation and duty mean the identical thing, the way in which one must behave, and as now we have just seen, rights and obligations necessarily go together. I cannot coherently insist that my rights must be observed, without also accepting that I actually have an obligation to look at the rights of others.
The third point was that human rights need to be grounded in an understanding of natural rights. Human rights, strictly so called, are those rights which have been recognised in national and international law. This fact begs the query which rights must be so recognised and the reply to this query can only be based on the concept that there may be an ethical order inside which human beings have a right to be treated in certain ways. When Christian theologians have talked about ‘natural rights’ that is what they’ve meant.
Such rights are ‘natural’ because throughout the moral order that God established at creation those creatures possessed of a human nature must be treated in certain ways and are wronged if this just isn’t the case. For example, the thought of a natural ‘right to life’ implies that the lifetime of a human being must be respected and never delivered to an end without good cause, and that a human being is wronged when this just isn’t the case (as when someone is murdered, or executed for a criminal offense they didn’t commit).
I used to be stimulated to take into consideration these three points again this week due to a report from the Christian Institute about criticism of the Republic of Ireland by the human rights campaign group Amnesty International for allowing medical staff to refuse to perform abortions.
The report stated: ‘Medics within the Republic of Ireland shouldn’t be allowed to refuse to perform abortions on religious or ethical grounds, Amnesty International has said. The organisation’s Executive Director in Ireland, Stephen Bowen, claimed pro-life medics were “failing” pregnant women by causing them to travel overseas for an abortion. Amnesty, which advocates for the decriminalisation of abortion, says human rights protections only “start at birth” and labels laws limiting access to abortion as “human rights violations.”‘
What really interested me about this report was the last sentence with its insistence that human rights only start at birth. I wondered if Amnesty International had really said this and, if that’s the case, how they justified saying it, and so I looked up what Amnesty International themselves actually said.
When I checked out their documents on the matter online, I discovered that their document Amnesty International’s policy on abortion key messages does indeed declare that: ‘Human rights start at birth. The updated abortion policy recognises that human rights protections start at birth. In other words, international human rights law and standards don’t recognize so-called foetal rights or human rights applications to foetuses, embryos, zygotes or gametes. While Amnesty doesn’t take a position on when human life begins, as this can be a ethical and moral query for people to come to a decision for themselves, its policy is aligned with international human rights law and standards that confirm that human rights protections start at birth, not before.’
This claim is difficult to defend on two grounds. The first is that while international human rights standards do indeed state positively that human beings have rights from birth (thus Article I of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’), none that I’m aware of deny that the unborn child has rights before that time.
Secondly, unless human rights laws and standards are to be totally arbitrary in what they declare, any claim that an unborn child doesn’t have rights would need to be based on a natural law understanding of when human life begins.
Amnesty International’s professed agnosticism on this point (‘Amnesty doesn’t take a position on when human life begins’) doesn’t make any judgment of right and wrong. This is because if God has so created the world that human life begins at conception (as biology tells us that it does) then the lifetime of an unborn child from that time onwards is a human life and may thus be argued to have the protection that’s resulting from all human life (because the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights puts it ‘Every human being has the inherent right to life’).
Furthermore, even when one held that human life might begin at conception then what’s often called the ‘precautionary principle’ in ethics would mean that one would have an obligation to take this possibility into consideration and treat life within the womb as human life and due to this fact entitled to have its life protected. The point here is that if one concludes that life within the womb is human life after one has killed it, then it is just too late to return and rectify the error. Barring a miracle, we cannot resurrect the dead.
The only secure moral ground for allowing abortion could be the knowledge that human life begins at birth and Amnesty International offers no grounds for believing that such certainty exists.
If we go on to search for a positive reason why Amnesty International supports abortion, the rationale that it puts forward is the principle of ‘reproductive autonomy.’ As its website on ‘Abortion rights’ puts it: ‘International human rights law clearly spells out that decisions about your body are yours alone – that is what’s often called bodily autonomy. The right to make autonomous decisions about one’s reproductive life is often called reproductive autonomy.’
The condensed argument that’s being offered here is that human rights law says that human beings have the appropriate to come to a decision what to do with their body and a subset of this general right is the liberty to make decisions ‘about one’s reproductive life’ (hence ‘reproductive autonomy’).
What this argument ignores is the undeniable fact that human rights law, and the principle of human rights usually, doesn’t say that I actually have absolute freedom to do what I like with my body. As I noted in the beginning of this text, rights and obligations go together. Thus, if I as a human being have a right to education, then this comes with a corresponding obligation to recognise that each one other human beings have a right to education (and to act accordingly). In similar fashion, if I as a human being have the appropriate to have my right to life protected, then this comes with the duty to respect the appropriate to lifetime of all other human beings.
Applying this argument to the claim that human beings must be recognised as having ‘reproductive autonomy’, we will acknowledge that there isn’t a absolute moral obligation to have children. In Christian terms the command to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ in Genesis 1:28 applies to human beings usually, not to each human being particularly. It follows from this that human beings must have the liberty to come to a decision whether to have children. Forcing a lady to change into pregnant (or a person to father a baby) would thus be morally unsuitable. In this sense the thought of a right to ‘reproductive autonomy’ is sensible.
However, if a baby has been conceived then the image changes. This is because if human life starts at conception, then what exists in a lady’s womb just isn’t a part of her body but one other human being, and neither her right to bodily autonomy nor anyone else’s desire to bring the pregnancy to an end (equivalent to a father wanting to ‘eliminate that baby’) can override that human being’s right to life and the moral obligation to respect this. The basic ethical principle here is the one previously noted, namely that somebody’s life could only be delivered to an end if there may be a excellent cause for doing so, and the mere undeniable fact that one other person (or individuals) don’t desire someone to live doesn’t count as a excellent cause – otherwise it could be open season for murder.
At this point someone might bring up the difficulty of what should occur if a pregnancy threatens the lifetime of a mother. Is it legitimate to terminate the pregnancy to avoid wasting the lifetime of the mother on this circumstance? Here the moral principle often called ‘double effect’ comes into play. This says that it could not be legitimate to mean to kill an unborn child, but it surely could possibly be legitimate to avoid wasting the mother in a way that had the tragic but undesired effect of killing the kid. For example, suppose a pregnant woman has a cancerous uterus which if left in place will kill her (and thereby her unborn child). In this example it’s inconceivable to avoid wasting each the mother and the kid, however the mother’s life may be saved if the uterus is removed. In this case although removing the uterus will kill the unborn child this could possibly be seen because the least-worst moral option.
We must acknowledge that such cases can occur (though thankfully they’re rare), but we cannot then make them the premise for an unrestricted right to abortion.
