THE ABORTION DEBATE IN A SECULAR STATE
Philippe-Antoine Hoyeck explains why the two sides don’t share a common language.
Last month, Attorney General Yasir Naqvi promised a provincial law setting an anti-protest “bubble zone” around abortion clinics, to be passed in the fall. The announcement followed mounting controversy around regular protest activity outside Ottawa’s Morgentaler Clinic.
The predictable effect of Naqvi’s promise has been to reignite the perennial debate about abortion here in Ottawa. What is so striking about this debate, more than any other, is the extent to which each side almost invariably talks past the other.
The problem might be illuminated by considering the foundations of the liberal state. Since its beginnings in the 17th and 18th centuries, liberal political theory has held that the legitimacy of the state rests on the consent of the governed. More recently, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has argued that citizens must be able to agree on the reasons that underlie a piece of legislation.
Where no common religious or metaphysical world view exists to unite public opinion, this means that reasons must be neutral with respect to the various world views espoused by citizens. This is what grounds state secularism. Since the liberal state is supposed to allow citizens with different and incompatible world views to live together harmoniously, its authority cannot rest on a religious tradition only recognized by some.
This brings us back to the abortion debate. The pro-life argument in its most convincing form goes something like this. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms accords the right to life to all persons (Section 7) and forbids discrimination on any basis, including age (Section 15). Since the fetus is a human being (“a person”) and adult humans possess a right to life, it follows that abortion is unlawful.
The question we should be asking ourselves, however, is whether the reasons for which we, as Canadian citizens, endorse the right to life for adults are also ones that could extend to the fetus.
These reasons, presumably, have to do with our sense that our own lives and the lives of our friends, colleagues, loved ones and fellow citizens are important to us and to them. Put another way, our reasons for endorsing the right to life all have to do with our self-awareness. It is this self-awareness that makes it so tragic when life is cut short.
Now it is obvious enough that the fetus does not possess this quality. But at this point in the argument, opponents of abortion will appeal to the potential of the fetus to develop those qualities that make human life intrinsically worth living.
Since the fetus has this potential, the argument goes, we must give it the same protection that we would an adult human being. “POTENTIAL = LIFE DESTROYED,” proclaims a sandwich board worn by a protester outside the Morgentaler Clinic.
What is interesting about this notion of potential, however, is just how much it differs from our ordinary notion of potential. As human beings, each of us has the potential to eat, to move and eventually to die. But in this ordinary sense of the word, having a potential doesn’t lead us to act as we would if that potential were actualized. Though I have the potential to develop arthritis by virtue of my biological makeup, nobody thinks I should take pain relievers now to treat the arthritis I will develop later.
To treat a potential as if it were actual only makes sense if we harbour a religious world view according to which God has given each human being a purpose. It only makes sense if by “potential,” we actually mean “destiny.”
This should help to understand why the pro-life position is unconvincing to non-religious citizens. Habermas has recently suggested that religious perspectives can be integrated into democratic debate by finding appropriate secular translations for them. But in this case, the translation is incomplete: The notion of potential used by prolifers remains covertly religious and inadmissible in a secular state.