Pro-Choice: Whose Choice?

The credibility of the “pro-choice” argument relies heavily on the word choice. The mother’s choice. This is presumably why, in the U.K., a court decision to force a mentally handicapped 24-year-old Nigerian immigrant to have an abortion against her will was overturned on appeal.

The original judgment (recently made available here) is chilling. Some sections are strongly reminiscent of the Supreme Court of the United States’ 1927 decision in Buck v. Bell to forcibly sterilize “mental defectives,” since, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put it “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

First, we learn that the pregnant woman, named as AB, is 22-weeks pregnant and that medical authorities have decided that it is in her “best interests it [to] have a termination of pregnancy.”

Under the U.K. Abortion Act of 1967, abortion after 24 weeks is only permitted in cases of fetal abnormality or if the mother’s life is at risk. But two weeks before this cut-off, this decision was made due to the mother having “a diagnosis of moderate learning disability and challenging behavior,” and the mental level of someone in six-to-nine-year age range.

Justice Lieven writes, “I have not met AB or heard her speak, but it is clear from the notes of her conversation with the Official Solicitor’s agent, which I will refer to below, that her language and communication abilities are significantly impaired.” This conversation included the following excerpt: