Responsibility of the mother

Responsibility of the mother

Most people think that human beings should take responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

And so they say that abortion is wrong where the mother willingly had sex, not because of the moral status of the foetus but because of the responsibilities of the mother.

To put it more formally:

So abortion is wrong where the mother had sex of her own free will.

The argument in steps

• a person should accept the consequences of risks that she knowingly and willingly takes
• a woman who willingly has sexual intercourse knows that she takes the risk of bringing a foetus/moral person into existence
• therefore a woman who becomes pregnant should accept the pregnancy as the consequence of taking the risk involved in sexual intercourse
• therefore the woman has a duty of care to the foetus/moral person
• therefore she should allow the resulting foetus/moral person to be born
• therefore she should not abort the foetus/moral person

This argument works well even if you don't accept that a foetus is a moral person, which is why both terms have been used.

Unwilling sex invalidates this argument

But suppose that a woman has not willingly taken the risk of getting pregnant and so did not have any choice in the conception (perhaps she has been raped, for example).

In this case the woman does not have any responsibility for the foetus and so it seems that abortion is not wrong.

This makes it clear that the vital plank of the argument is not the rights of the foetus, but the duties of the mother.

Contraception and responsibility

It might get trickier where the woman has been using a reliable contraceptive method. She could argue that it would not be wrong to abort the foetus because she did not willingly take the risk of getting pregnant: she took every possible precaution to avoid pregnancy.

The strict logic of the argument is that sometimes very remote possibilities do happen, they do have consequences, and people should take responsibility for them. The result in this case is that the mother is responsible for the foetus and should not abort it.

Diminished responsibility

The waters become even more muddied when the woman does not understand, or is incapable of understanding, that sexual intercourse leads to pregnancy. She may live in an area where sex education is inadequate, for example.

In such cases, the woman has not knowingly risked pregnancy and could be considered less responsible for the consequences of her actions.

Application to men

The power of the responsibility argument can be seen by changing genders. Most people would apply the argument that sex has consequences to men without any worries at all.

Once a man has parted with his sperm he is considered totally responsible for any pregnancy that results, and for the child thereafter. Few people would think it morally right for the man to demand an abortion in order to escape his responsibilities.