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Particularly when it comes to abortion, the words we use in public debate matter

Particularly when it comes to abortion, the words we use in public debate matter

Abortion has once again become a political issue in Australia. South Australians narrowly avoided a proposal at the upper house to amend abortion laws. Queenslanders are being encouraged to think about where they stand on the issue come this weekend’s state election. Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has said she wants abortion to figure prominently in the national political agenda.

It is no exaggeration to say that abortion is one of the most emotive and complex issues that citizens must grapple with in public life. But just because we find a practice morally unsettling, does not give us licence to employ harmful moral terminology.

When we refer to late-term abortion as “infanticide”, as politicians and advocates have done in recent days, we wrong the women who had to have an abortion because of risk to their lives, or because continuing with a pregnancy was simply not in the best future interest of the foetus.

Any quick dictionary check will tell you that “infanticide” is the crime of killing a child, usually specified as within one year since birth. To accuse women who have had an abortion of infanticide is to accuse them of one of the most horrendous crimes a human being can commit against another. It is also to ignore the fact that when women terminate pregnancies in the second and third trimesters, they tend to have acted out of self-respect and compassion.

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Those who throw the charge of infanticide around will claim that we don’t allow parents to kill their children to save their own lives or to end the suffering associated, for instance, with a severe disability. So why should mothers get away with doing that before birth? The only difference between the cases is the location of the child, right?

Wrong. A foetus is not a child floating inside a woman’s body, and birth is not merely a change of location.

Work in the philosophy of pregnancy tells us that the foetus is best described as a body part, because it relies on the pregnant woman for all its important physiological functions — extraction of oxygen, digestion, temperature regulation and waste disposal. Foetuses are also best described as body parts because of how the placenta and umbilical cord connect the gestator and foetus, rendering them intimately intertwined.

Further testament that the foetus is best conceived as a body part comes from the bloodbath that typically follows the detachment of the placenta after birth. Despite being a natural biological event, and despite the wide availability of blood transfusion, the loss of blood that follows placenta detachment is still one of the main causes of maternal death.

This is why birth is much more than a change of location. It is a point where one organism transforms into another. The foetus starts as part of someone else’s body, and then at birth it becomes a child who is her own being and can perform her own physiological functions.

Calling late-term abortion “infanticide” is wrong on many counts: it is deeply unsympathetic to the women who have had to make agonising and often devastating decisions at a moment of profound vulnerability, and it is frankly ignorant of the biological facts.

That is not to say, however, that we as a liberal society shouldn’t have mature and good faith conversations about the ethics and law of late term abortion. I, for one, believe that when the foetus can both survive and thrive outside the womb, and there is no risk of harm to the pregnant woman, we are navigating a very different moral terrain than when we are engaging with the ethics of early abortion.

Having said that, we must also acknowledge that the law is a blunt tool, and that we can never capture all the moral complexities and hardships of human life in our laws. Sometimes we have to stick with laws that achieve the best balance between all the rights and liberties with care about — including rights to life, bodily integrity, health care and privacy.

If we hope to make any progress on this very difficult issue, we better start by employing accurate and helpful moral terminology. The term “infanticide” obscures more than it reveals, and risks further victimising a group of women who have gone though one of the most harrowing events of their lives.

Luara Ferracioli is Associate Professor in Political Philosophy at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Liberal Self-Determination in a World of Migration and Parenting and the Goods of Childhood.

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