A Prudent Habit of Speech

In 1959, at a symposium run jointly by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Population Council, a scientist named Bent Boving made a proposal. He suggested the medical profession quietly shift what “conception” meant.

His stated reason was not scientific. It was strategic. Whether a method was regarded as preventing conception or as destroying an established pregnancy, he observed, could depend on “something so simple as a prudent habit of speech”.[1]

Read that again. Not a discovery about the child. A habit of speech.

Six years later the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists adopted the redefinition. Its 1965 terminology bulletin ruled: “Conception is the implantation of a fertilized ovum.” Its 1972 update went further: “Conception is the implantation of the blastocyst. It is not synonymous with fertilization.”[2] No new embryology forced the change. The child at day one was exactly what he had always been. Only the label moved, and with it the reach of two words all of medicine and law depended on: pregnancy, and abortion.

The effect was immediate and permanent. Anything that ends a life in the first week can now be called contraceptive rather than abortifacient. Not because no child dies, but because the death happens inside the week that was defined away.

Britain took a different road to the same place

No committee redefined the word here. A courtroom did.

No UK statute has ever defined “pregnancy” or “conception”. The old law against abortion, the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, criminalised procuring a “miscarriage” but never said what a miscarriage was. The meaning was left to the judges.

In 2000 a health minister told Parliament in a written answer that “emergency contraception pills work before implantation and so before a pregnancy has been established”.[3] In 2002 the High Court settled the legal position in R (Smeaton) v Secretary of State for Health: miscarriage means the termination of an established pregnancy, and there is no established pregnancy before implantation.[4]

Follow the consequence. In UK law, a child lost before implantation is not a lost pregnancy. So his loss is not an abortion. So it is legally the loss of nothing that any statute requires to be counted, recorded, or disclosed. Even the modern duty of informed consent cannot reach it: since Montgomery v Lanarkshire (2015), a doctor must disclose the material risks to a pregnancy, but in law there is no pregnancy yet, and so no risk to disclose.[5]

Why this matters

We have seen this pattern before. Lines drawn inside undisputed humanity, by definition rather than by discovery, so that a class of human beings falls outside the law’s protection. The child did not change in 1965 or 2002. Only the words around him did. And a wrong done by definition can only be undone by refusing the definition.

The child in the first week of life is a human being. He was one before the committee met and after the judgment was handed down. What he is owed does not depend on a habit of speech.

Sources

1. Bent Boving, in Mechanisms Concerned with Conception, ed. C. G. Hartman (Pergamon Press, 1963), 386; symposium of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Population Council, 1959.
2. ACOG Terminology Bulletins 1965 and 1972, documented in American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology (2012). https://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(11)02223-X/fulltext
3. Hansard, House of Commons written answer, 19 July 2000. https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2000-07-19/debates/3654034a-014e-4ccf-921b-fef2a919d49a/EmergencyContraception
4. R (Smeaton) v Secretary of State for Health [2002] EWHC 610 (Admin). https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2002/610.html
5. Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board [2015] UKSC 11. https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKSC/2015/11.html