Kathleen Stock's recent UnHerd piece exposes the intellectual sleight-of-hand behind efforts to fully decriminalise late-term abortion in Britain. By contrasting the "Victim Strategy" (women as traumatised and not truly responsible) with the "Omniscient Gambit" (women as perfectly rational agents whose choices must be trusted unconditionally), Stock reveals a fatal inconsistency in the pro-choice position. From a pro-life viewpoint, this isn't just sloppy argumentation — it's a symptom of a deeper moral failure: the elevation of "bodily autonomy" to an absolute that justifies ending an innocent human life.
The Core Issue: There Are Two Bodies Involved
Bodily autonomy is a powerful principle when properly applied — it rightly protects people from unwanted medical procedures, assault, or coercion. But pregnancy is unique. It involves two distinct human beings: the mother and her unborn child. The child is not an extension of the mother's body, like a kidney or a tumour. From the moment of fertilization, the embryo possesses its own unique DNA, distinct from the mother's. By around 6–8 weeks, it has a beating heart; by 20+ weeks (the focus of the recent UK reforms), it can feel pain, respond to stimuli, and in many cases survive outside the womb with medical support.
To treat the unborn as having no moral status — mere "tissue" or a "clump of cells" — requires denying basic biology. Pro-life advocates argue that human rights begin at conception because that is when a new human organism comes into existence. Granting absolute bodily autonomy to the mother at the expense of the child's right to life creates a hierarchy of persons: some humans are more equal than others based on location, size, or dependency.
The Incoherence Stock Highlights
Stock is right to mock the contradictory defences of decriminalising self-managed late-term abortions:
If these women are helpless victims of trauma and circumstance, why frame abortion as an empowering exercise of agency?
If they are clear-eyed decision-makers whose choices deserve unqualified respect, why shield them from any legal accountability while prosecuting providers?
This flip-flopping reveals that the real goal is not consistency or compassion, but removing any societal guardrails around the intentional ending of late-term pregnancies. Rising numbers of late abortions via pills-by-post (post-lockdown) already show how removing deterrents changes behaviour. Pro-life reasoning predicts this will continue: when the law treats the unborn as having zero rights, the weak and the vulnerable — including the unborn — pay the price.
Parallels to Other Life Issues
Stock draws smart connections to assisted dying. The same "freedom + kindness" rhetoric that expands abortion also pushes euthanasia: first for the terminally ill, then the disabled, then the mentally ill. In both cases, bodily autonomy is weaponised to override the fundamental duty to protect innocent life. Pro-life ethics rejects this slide: society has a legitimate interest in preventing the killing of the innocent, whether in the womb or at the end of life.
True compassion addresses the root causes driving women toward late abortions — poverty, lack of support, coercion, domestic abuse — without resorting to violence against the child. Countries with strong pro-life laws combined with robust family support (maternity leave, adoption services, financial aid) show better outcomes for both mothers and babies.
The Philosophical Stakes
The pro-choice insistence on unlimited bodily autonomy echoes Judith Jarvis Thomson's famous violinist analogy (you're not obligated to sustain another person with your body). But the analogy fails in pregnancy: unlike a stranger plugged into you, the child is there because of a natural biological process initiated (in almost all cases) by consensual acts. Parents have duties toward their dependent offspring that go beyond mere bodily donation.
Moreover, if bodily autonomy is absolute, it leads to absurdities: why not allow infanticide shortly after birth (as some philosophers have argued)? The newborn is still dependent. The consistent pro-life position draws a clear line at the beginning of a distinct human life. Once that line is blurred by appeals to autonomy, dependency, or "wantedness," no vulnerable group is safe.
A Better Way Forward
We should support women facing unplanned pregnancies with practical help, counselling, and resources — not by offering death as the solution. Most people intuitively recognize that a healthy, late-term unborn baby is a person deserving protection. The push to decriminalise abortion up to birth severs law from that moral intuition.
Kathleen Stock's critique stops short of a full pro-life conclusion, but it powerfully demonstrates the limits of bodily autonomy absolutism. When autonomy collides with the right to life of another innocent human, the latter must prevail. Society's role is not to enable the destruction of the vulnerable under the banner of "choice," but to uphold the dignity of every human being — born and unborn.
The recent UK moves represent a step backward, not progress. True feminism and compassion protect both mother and child.