Pro-choice activists assemble in downtown Memphis, Tenn., May 21, 2019. (Karen Pulfer Focht/Reuters)

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:

LD: The doctors have said they could take your baby out of your tummy. AB: No. LD: How would you feel if they did that? AB: Save it Save it, the baby.

Justice Lieven then gives examples of AB’s behavioral problems which have included her “smashing a TV and breaking other things,” and adds that “AB’s behavioral problems are highly relevant to my decision, because they go to the question of what would happen to AB and the baby, if the termination did not happen.”


But what does Justice Lieven mean by this? Is she implying that AB may also smash her child or accidentally break herself as she does household objects? And if so, why not involve social workers as happens with other volatile expectant mothers? The same questions arise when Justice Lieven discusses AB’s “history of self-harm.”

Indeed: Why does Justice Lieven think that the best option is a forced dilatation and evacuation (D&E) — the NHS’s normal method of a late second-trimester abortion — which would see the mother sedated against her will and the fetus plucked from her womb, limb by limb?

This is especially gratuitous given that AB’s mother has insisted that she would take responsibility for raising and caring for the child. Of course, because of her impaired mental capacity, AB is unable to consent to sex and so the circumstances of her impregnation (which remain largely unknown) must legally constitute rape. But again, in this case, the rationale for abortion as the remedy for this pregnancy is neither the “choice” of the mother nor of her legal guardian.


Fortunately, the injustice of this decision was corrected on appeal. But the cultural significance remains. The pro-life movement is sometimes criticized for being “pro-birth” — for being too single-minded and not sufficiently invested in children after they leave the womb. There is some truth in this. But in a case like this one, I wonder who, exactly, is making the “choice.”