Atomised individualism or social solidarity? – Michael Asciak
The saga brought about by the recent case of a threatened miscarriage in a 16-week-old pregnancy belonging to a North American couple is obviously being used by some to push forward a pro-abortion agenda. However, if we examine the rationale behind the reasoning being used, we find the fundamental concept in American jurisprudence (which has now been overturned) where one considers human relations and law from a simply atomised individualist perspective. ‘Roe v Wade’ had been decided by Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun et al as embodying the American concept of individual choice and freedom and likened a pregnancy to a thief entering a house in the middle of the night, with the individual owner retaining the right to self-defence with respect to his/her individual body. Rationality has seen the reversal of this concept in the US because one cannot really think of the relationship between the mother/father and their developing child in the womb in this atomised way. There is in this development of pregnancy a relational entity between the child and the parents and it would be rational to develop jurisprudence along this line of thinking. The developing embryo, foetus,...