MUCH of the Christian debate about the ethics of induced/elective (terms vary) abortion has been conducted by men, me included. It is a great relief, at last, to find this well-informed and readable book by a respected Anglican priest and mother, who has experienced a distressing spontaneous abortion/miscarriage between the birth of her two children. She writes wisely and eirenically from direct experience.
She is also a pragmatist, recognising that modern contraception has changed sexual behaviour — now seen more as “strengthening intimacy” than just a means to pregnancy. She concludes that, if contraception fails, “and an ‘accident’ cannot be embraced, then an abortion may be the appropriate response”.
This frank conclusion acknowledges that, in one form or another, elective abortions have been ubiquitous across cultures and different legal systems: “Abortions happen, and thinking pastorally about them means understanding that this is not a modern phenomenon. . . Legislating to prevent abortions [in the United States or the UK] did not stop abortions in the past and does not stop them in the present. It may deter some women from seeking an abortion, or make it impossible for them to end the pregnancy, but for many it means accessing illegal abortions, risking serious complications and possible death.”
Christians implacably opposed to elective abortions will not be persuaded by such pragmatism and may be unmoved by horrific accounts of illegal septic abortions two generations ago. Nor will they be persuaded by the fact that spontaneous human abortions happen frequently within nature. Yet her reflection on miscarriage seems persuasive to me: “The frequency of pregnancy loss challenges the presumption that it is God who ordains each conception. Human frailty appears to be fickler and more random than is often portrayed.”
Having carefully outlined the polarised abortion debate in the UK and the US, she stands within the Anglican tradition championed by the late Archbishop John Habgood, known as the gradualist position. It holds that our moral concerns about abortion rightly increase in proportion to the development of the foetus. To this she adds a “social-nature” understanding of personhood: “While the developing life of the early foetus can be acknowledged, the sense of personhood needs the recognition of another person in relationship. It is for the mother to begin to recognize the otherness developing within and contingent on her.”
Alasdair Macintyre famously regarded sharp divisions about abortion as incommensurable, since rational argument rather than rhetoric cannot conclusively resolve them. While implicitly acknowledging this, Emma Percy may also fear the vitriol of some of her (and my) critics. This is treacherous territory. Yet she is driven by a concern for many a married or unmarried woman who worries whether she “has the capacity to commit herself to gestating this child [especially when seriously disabled or the result of rape] and caring for it in the years to come”. As a priest, she aims to help these women. I hope that they read her eminently pastoral book.
Canon Robin Gill is Emeritus Professor of Applied Theology at the University of Kent.
How Do We Talk About Abortion? A feminist pastoral theology
Emma Percy
SCM Press £19.99
(978-0-334-06570-8)
Church Times Bookshop £15.99