The Crown Prosecution Office has refused to prosecute doctors who authorise abortion on the basis of the foetus’s sex.
That the expected child is female is accepted as sufficient grounds for an abortion. And our post-Christian subversives don’t even realise that they are being torn apart by conflicting pieties.
On the one hand feminists insist on a woman’s sovereignty over her own body – hence abortion on demand. But then they undermine their own feminism by implicitly acknowledging that women are inferior to men.
Of course opposing abortion on any grounds whatsoever is so uncool that such sentiments can’t even be voiced in polite company.
Yet, though it helps, one doesn’t have to be a Christian to oppose infanticide. After all, for old times’ sake if for no other reason, Western countries are committed to regard human life as sacred.
Does abortion constitute the taking of a human life? Is the foetus a part of a woman’s body over which she has sovereignty or is it an independent human being over whom she has the duty of care?
The latter, has to be the answer based on any considerations one cares to name: physiological, medical, philosophical, moral – never mind religious.
At what point in the pregnancy should abortion be banned? This argument is waged with much arm-flapping passion but without much logic. Swift’s big-enders and little-enders must have provided the inspiration.
For example, reducing the allowable limit from 24 to 12 weeks is seen as a significant achievement. In some ways it is, for the number of abortions will probably go down. But the logic of the argument defeats me.
On the 24-week side, I can’t see any moral or rational difference between killing a child three months before birth or three months after. Babies born prematurely were able to survive even before the introduction of modern technology, and scans show that a six-month-old foetus is a fully formed person.
What about three months then? Here we must answer the critical question: at what exact point does a human life begin? The logic followed by the 12-week little-enders has to be that it begins at 12 weeks plus one day. In other words, a foetus is but a part of a woman’s body at 84 days but an autonomous person at 85. Sounds absurd, doesn’t it?
No one endowed with intellectual honesty can argue that human life begins at exactly 84 days and not a day earlier. Could it be 83 days perhaps? Or, at a pinch, 82?
The only logically defensible, morally indisputable and scientifically verifiable point at which human life begins is the moment of conception. Therefore abortion constitutes the taking of a human life, otherwise known as homicide.
Now, as in any homicide, there may be mitigating or even exculpating circumstances, such as the likelihood that the woman won’t survive childbirth. However, such cases must be considered individually, and they don’t justify abortion on demand.
As to pushing girls to the front of the abortion queue, this practice lacks even novelty appeal. Its roots go back to the pre-Christian world of Hellenic antiquity.
In those days, as Plato explained in his Republic and especially Laws, the polis was next to everything and the individual next to nothing. In Rome too, res publica rode roughshod over res privata. There was no res privata worth speaking of – the value of a human being was determined on the basis of state interests.
As a predictable fallout from that utilitarian ethos, unwanted children, mostly girls, were often dumped to die by the roadside. Wild animals provided the service nowadays delivered by abortion clinics.
Christianity changed all that. Every human being came to be cherished not because of any towering achievement or superior character but simply because he was indeed human.
In fact, people incapable of achievement, like those frail boys routinely drowned by the Spartans or unwanted baby girls left to die in the woods by the Romans, began to be seen as God’s creatures to be loved before all others.
Though some people may have been wicked, some weak, some moribund, none was useless. They all had redeeming qualities because they had all been redeemed.
Therein resides the only meaningful equality – this is the only sense in which ‘all men are created equal’. And in this context, as in the amorous one, man embraces woman.
It is noticeable in every walk of life how dispensing with Christianity has pushed us back to Hellenic times rather than driving us forward. Except that neither a Plato nor a Praxiteles nor a Sophocles is anywhere in evidence. Nor, more to the point, is a Pericles.
The state again claims primacy over the individual who is supposed to serve res publica, as personified by the Tonies and Daves of this world. And as the interests of a secular state aren’t threatened by millions of aborted babies, why not allow abortion on demand? Why not leave the decision of which babies to abort and which to keep strictly to the parents’ and doctors’ discretion? No reason at all.
Except the one mentioned by Hilaire Belloc: “‘We are tickled by [the Barbarian’s] irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces there is no smile.”