1 - Abortion

Summary

A much discussed footnote to the first edition of Political Liberalism takes up the “troubled question of abortion” in order to illustrate how norms of reasonableness and public reasoning apply to comprehensive religious and philosophical doctrines (PL 243 n.32). Rawls suggests that because the equality of women is an “overriding” value in this case, “any reasonable balance” of the relevant political values – not only equality, but also respect for human life and the ordered reproduction of society and the family – is suficient to establish at least “a duly qualiied right” to irst-trimester abortion. According to Rawls, comprehensive doctrines that would deny such a right are “to that extent unreasonable” and citizens who vote on doctrinal grounds to effect this denial thereby violate requirements of public reason (PL 243–244 n.32).

Even shortly after the publication of Political Liberalism, this analysis had become something of a focal point for a variety of critical challenges to Rawls’s idea of public reason. Critics argue that public reason unfairly excludes religious believers and convictions from politics and that it remains far too incomplete to resolve especially dificult moral-political controversies like abortion.

In both the “Introduction to the Paperback Edition” of Political Liberalism and “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” Rawls clariies and in some ways corrects the analysis of the earlier footnote, which is said to have aimed mainly at “illustration” and to have expressed an “opinion” rather than an “argument” (PL liii–liv n.31; PL 479 n.80). He repeats an earlier claim that comprehensive doctrines may be reasonable on the whole even though they yield an unreasonable conclusion with respect to a particular issue.