BOOK REVIEW / The termination of wrongs and rights: 'Life's Dominion' - Ronald Dworkin: HarperCollins, 17.50 pounds

THIS BOOK is subtitled 'An Argument about Abortion and Euthanasia', and the promise of rational argument is richly fulfilled. As Ronald Dworkin observes, fights about abortion are worldwide, and nowhere more bitter than in the United States: 'Opposing armies march down streets or pack themselves into protests at abortion clinics, courthouses and the White House screaming at and spitting on and loathing one another. Abortion is tearing America apart. It is also distorting its politics, and confounding its constitutional law.'

Dworkin believes that a responsible legal settlement of the question is available, but that some careful distinctions need to be made. People are inconsistent about abortion, and he offers a diagnosis of the confusion which he then modulates into a positive suggestion about the correct legal approach to the question.

There are absolutists who say that a foetus is a person with rights and interests from the moment of conception, and that abortion is therefore always murder (Dworkin uses 'foetus' to cover all stages of pregnancy). These absolutists are few in number, however, for nearly everyone is prepared to admit that there are cases in which abortion is possible (for the rape victim, for example, or the pregnant woman whose life is in serious danger). Articulate Roman Catholics have led the absolutist wing, but many of their co-religionists desert them in practice. Catholic women in the US are 30 per cent more likely to have an abortion than Protestant women.

Dworkin notes the possibility of absolutism but addresses himself to the vast majority. If you think that abortion is wrong but permissible in some cases, you cannot think that it is wrong because a foetus is a person with rights and interests. For if you thought that, abortion would be as wrong in the case of rape victim as in any other case. One could no more abort a foetus when the mother's life was at risk than one could kill any one innocent adult person to save another. There would be no difference at all between these cases.

Having argued that the language of rights and interests is misapplied (a foetus is not sentient in any way before at least 24 weeks, and in Dworkin's view nothing that is not sentient can have rights and interests), he goes on to suggest that it fails in any case to capture most people's intuitions about what is wrong or regrettable about abortion. He thinks, plausibly, that we can make better sense of opposition to abortion if we trace it instead to the conviction that human life is intrinsically valuable or 'sacred', in some sense of the word that allows for entirely secular as well as religious conceptions of the sacred. This immediately allows us to understand how people can be strongly against abortion, and can wish it to be restricted by the law in certain ways, without wishing to ban it altogether.

The 'idea of the sacred' is very hard to characterise, and I do not think Dworkin fully succeeds. He expresses the belief that human life is sacred or 'inviolable' by reference to the notion of an intrinsically valuable natural 'investment' which is 'wasted' in the case of abortion, this waste being a 'shame'. This is only one central element in an intricate discussion, but the words waste, shame and investment seem to have the wrong sort of force. Even the words respect and dignity fail to capture the gut-based way in which we care about human life independently of religious belief. Seeking to be as neutral as possible, and to cancel afflatus by bluntness, one might simply say that we rate existing human life in a unique way. We rate it deeply and viscerally, and no more needs to be said.

Nearly all those who disagree about abortion are united by this belief - or emotion - about the special importance of human life, and Dworkin argues, with unassuming power, and with special reference to the First, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States' Constitution, that a government which respects freedom of religion, and which wishes to take full account of our shared belief in the importance of human life, must guarantee the pregnant woman's right to choose even while taking other steps to preserve a social context that supports and expresses the force of our shared belief. In order to understand what we find important in human life, it is instructive to consider the differences in our feelings about the death of a baby, a three-year-old, a 10-year-old, a 25-year-old, a 50-year-old, an 80-year-old. A human life is not just a pumping heart. To go deep is to see that to be 'pro-life' is to be 'pro-choice'.

In his last two chapters, Dworkin considers other, related problems - those raised by euthanasia, and by people who are in the late stages of Alzheimer's disease. What does our belief in the special importance of human life require of us in these cases? Dworkin proposes that it cannot require us to try to keep everyone alive as long as possible, and that it should lead us to put in place some mechanism that allows people to choose, in certain circumstances, whether or not to go on living. Here his discussion is subtle and largely persuasive.

Life's Dominion is not an easy book, and is open to various objections, but it should be read carefully by anyone who wants to participate responsibly in the continuing debate on these matters. It is profoundly informed by, and is indeed a part of, the great American tradition of legal thought which, structured by the Bill of Rights, so conspicuously outshines the British tradition from which it derives.