Not beguiled by the hedgehog in the title
'One of the greatest legal and moral philosophers of the postwar era, Ronald Dworkin' has a new book out called Justice for Hedgehogs.
And while I am all for erinacean equality before the law, I think that someone who is a great L&M philosopher has some responsibility to apply his great philosophical mind to not disseminating dubious tropes whose veracity is about there with the average urban myth.
Viz:
He believes that "in many circumstances abortion is an act of self-contempt": "A woman betrays her own dignity when she aborts for frivolous reasons: to avoid rescheduling a holiday, for instance.
Even if he does concede that there may be good ethical reasons in some (other, desperate) cases, this is a very, very dubious thing to be saying.
I daresay, being a philosopher, he is used to making thought experiments that bear only a passing relationship, if that, to the world of real events.
However, he might consider that women are being denied the exercise of their choice whether or not to bear a child far too much and too often precisely on the basis that there might be some women, out there, somewhere, who are making this decision on entirely frivolous grounds.
(So, you will make these feckless frivols bear the child instead, is that really a sound decision, really?)
Has any woman, anywhere, ever, decided to have an abortion rather than give up a holiday, without there being other factors in the frame?
Okay, I have read a short story (i.e., it's fictional) by Penelope Mortimer, about two women in an upmarket nursing home, both of them threatened with miscarriage and having enforced bedrest. And one of them pleads with her husband that she's supposed to be going to see her mother abroad, and he more or less pats her on the head and says 'but you don't want to risk the baby', and the subtext is rather clearly that it's not just about missing a Fun Holiday on the Med. After visiting hours, the other women covertly observes her doing exercises, and she does, indeed, lose the baby.
But I have never, in fiction or anywhere, come across this mythical woman so oft cited in the anti-choice rhetoric, who frivolously undertakes to get herself an abortion.
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