Abortion is a Moral Issue: The Immorality of Anti-Abortion Laws and the Case of Bill 323

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The enactment of Bill 323 would mark South Carolina as the thirteenth state in the United States to enact a near-total abortion ban, functionally delegalizing abortion. This is significant, as its language closely mirrors Texas’s abortion restrictions, where the maternal mortality rate rose by 56% between 2019 and 2022, following their enactment in 2021. Perhaps most pivotally, the Bill redefines the “human embryo” as “a human being that begins as a fertilized egg or zygote,” and blanketly characterizes contraception as the “prevention of fertilization.” Advocates warn that this language would set a precedent that endangers the legality of in vitro fertilization. Other aspects of the Bill threaten the integrity of the First Amendment, with provisions criminalizing not just abortion, but also the exchange of information via the phone or internet regarding reproductive care related to abortion.

The delegalization of abortion carries not only criminal and public health implications, but moral implications as well. Although the question of personhood is at the forefront of current discussion surrounding the morality of abortion, autonomy may be more relevant and significant to how abortion should be treated by the law. By examining related philosophical thought and comparing legal theories, the role of autonomy as it relates to the morality of legislation banning abortion can be determined. 

Classical liberalism underpins the philosophy of U.S. political and governmental structure. As conceived by this school of thought, ‘respect’ is defined as allowing other individuals the freedom and license to pursue their own objectives and purposes. This definition directly informs our notion of justice: we as individuals have a responsibility to respect the individual rights of others, both between neighbors and between government and the individual. Further, freedom is not the absence of rule or law, but instead the right to autonomy, or, more simply, the freedom to make decisions about one’s own life based on one’s own beliefs regarding how one should live. From a practical governmental perspective, classical liberalism suggests that liberty, our right to be free from governmental constraints, is policy’s central objective in the United States. Here, the individual holds foremost importance over all else; the individual must not be sacrificed in pursuit of the common good. 

 It follows from this philosophy that the individual has the right to pursue objectives of their choosing, and the freedom to make decisions in that interest. Pregnancy is one such purpose, and by legalizing mandatory childbearing, the state assumes a decision-making role in the individual’s life, effectively voiding autonomy. It is then understood that under the tenets of classical liberalism, Bill 323 and similar legislation is unjust and authoritarian on the grounds that its provisions weaponize a woman’s body as an instrument of state policy. 

Thus, the right to abortion is akin to the right to self-defense, particularly against the non-consensual use of a pregnant person’s body by a fetus. This, and the right to privacy, form the constitutional foundation upon which Roe v. Wade stood.

Classical liberalism falters in its ability to consider the individual as a person in the world. Paradigms that reflect this perspective while maintaining classical liberal values of respect, justice, and freedom, include relational and feminist revisions. 

The relational revision affords that an individual’s autonomy is socially embedded, derived, and developed from the relationship between the individual and their social relationships, health, and economic circumstances. The choices of the individual are thus influenced greatly by social conditions, norms, and expectations. The relational revision agrees with classical liberalism in that forced pregnancy is an exercise of government control, and reinforces that it also violates the social preconditions of autonomy. This understanding of relational necessity affords that delegalizing abortion restricts women’s ability to exist within the same free and autonomous framework that their male counterparts do. 

The feminist revision also addresses social structures within its schema, focusing specifically on the patriarchy’s impact on the individual. The ‘neutral’ liberal subject is inherently masculine, as it describes an individual unburdened by dependency, care, and reproduction. This is in stark contrast to a woman’s experience, where the patriarchal social order takes advantage of embodied experiences such as pregnancy and caregiving, utilizing these polarizing experiences as vessels of justification to limit women’s autonomy. The aim of feminist philosophy is to incorporate embodied agency into the definition of autonomy instead of othering it. In this interest, the feminist revision measures the motherhood penalty, which considers how having a child changes the course of a woman’s career, income, mobility, health, and mortality. This is combined with legal threats to autonomy, choice, and informed consent in labor and childbirth, exemplified in Bill 323. Giving birth, at the very least, changes practical obligations and occasionally societal expectations (not moral value, but duties and liabilities).

The evaluation of the patient in a medical setting is an exemplar of relational and feminist revisions in action; the patient is not simply an individual entity with symptoms to treat in an echo chamber; rather, they are a person in-the-world who must be considered wholly in accordance with their life history, alongside present circumstances. The pregnant individual may be vulnerable to factors such as sexual and physical violence, inaccess to resources, increased risk of illness and complications, and much more. When making bodily decisions, the pregnant individual would undoubtedly consider all of these issues; but, complete abortion bans specifically deny them this possibility. 

Biomedical ethics offers another relevant viewpoint on autonomy. By medical definition, an ‘abortion’ is the termination of a pregnancy before the fetus can survive outside the uterus. According to this approach, two of the four primary functions are beneficence and autonomy, which go hand in hand. The greatest source of respect is informed consent, which reflects a person's autonomy over their body. Therefore, forcing an individual to carry a pregnancy to term is a great transgression of medical ethics, as it wholly strips away choice and thereby, autonomy. Medical practice operates through the biomedical ethic, and therefore denying an individual the agency of choice in a medical environment is in direct violation of the principles of biomedical ethics. Thus, the ethical boundary separating care and coercion would essentially be dissipated through the approval of Bill 323. 

Across philosophical frameworks, autonomy emerges as the most fundamental measure of justice. To deny bodily autonomy is to profoundly infringe upon an individual’s liberty and moral agency, ultimately transferring control from the person to the state and reducing women to instruments of policy rather than autonomous actors. 

Bill 323, in claiming to defend life, directly undermines the agency and personhood of those it governs, violating the social, ethical, and relational preconditions necessary for true autonomy. From both a moral and constitutional theoretical perspective, the Bill is unjustifiable and constitutionally impermissible. In claiming to defend life, Bill 323 stands to undermine the agency of personhood of women and pregnant individuals. Bill 323 contravenes the legal and intellectual foundation upon which the Constitution and our country were constructed.

Isabella Grande is a graduate student at Brown University, concentrating in Biotechnology. She is a staff writer for the Brown University Undergraduate Law Review and can be contacted at isabella_grande@brown.edu. 

Priyanka Nambiar is a sophomore concentrating in Cognitive Neuroscience. She is a blog editor for the Brown Undergraduate Law Review and can be contacted at priyanka_nambiar@brown.edu.

Emily Walsh is a sophomore from Minnesota studying Philosophy and International & Public Affairs. She is a staff editor for the Brown Undergraduate Law Review and can be contacted at emily_m_walsh@brown.edu