A Student Party | Three Cases of Abortion

Emma aged 19 was at a second year party with a couple of friends. Many people at the party she hadn’t met before and she was drinking heavily.

After midnight people started pairing up and she found herself with a fellow student she quite liked. Things went further and she remembers waking up in his room but not much else. It was clear they’d had sex during the night but she doesn’t remember anything about it and she certainly had no recollection of giving her consent.

“As far as I’m concerned, he raped me” she told the university welfare services and was advised to go to the police. She also went straight round to the chemist for a morning after pill.

Hint: How important is consent in natural law sexual ethics? And would consenting to be with someone (in their room, drunk) be considered sufficient consent? Sexual intercourse according to natural law has a two-fold natural law purpose that must be respected — the purpose of bringing into being new life and the purpose of uniting men and women together: whoever participates in sexual activity must do so to protect these natural goods of sexual intercourse. But reason is also important as Aquinas stresses that secondary precepts such as ‘do not abort’ are the applications of reason. Clearly in this case there is neither a procreative nor a unitive intention in this action – it was a case of casual sex with no consent. But rape breaks the fundamental goal (telos) of natural law – human welfare, the welfare of the victim. So the fundamental goal of natural law seems to be at odds here with the more general primary precept that human beings are so ordered by our natures to seek always to preserve life. There would seem to be a case for allowing abortion in cases of rape because the overall telos of natural law is the welfare of all.

This is one interpretation of what Natural Law might suggest is right in this scenario, but can you think of alternatives ?"

Back