If a pun is the lowest form of humour, then a pun on a person’s name is the lowest form of a pun. My only excuse is that sometimes I just can’t help myself.
In this case, my lapse into the lowest of the low was prompted by Sarah Vine, a Mail columnist with learning difficulties.
Miss Vine wrote an article about a woman sent to prison for aborting her foetus a couple of weeks before birth. (She, that woman, not Miss Vine, lied about the term of her pregnancy to get an abortion pill.)
The subject of abortion invites muddled, illogical thinking like few others, but Miss Vine, poor Michael Gove’s ex, has found a new depth possible to plumb. To begin with, she tries to find a balance where none exists.
“Abortion is a deeply complex issue,” she writes. It isn’t. It’s only made complex by modern barbarians. In fact, the issue is beautifully black or white. Either the foetus is a human being en route to becoming a person or it’s merely a part of a woman’s body.
If it’s the latter, then the woman can do to it whatever she likes. If it’s the former, then it should be protected like any human life. There is really no middle ground between these two postulates.
Miss Vine is aware of this dichotomy, but she applies her formidable intellect to finding a compromise that can’t exist.
“On the one hand it’s right that a woman should be able to control her fertility…” Right how? Morally? Philosophically? But never mind: “On the other, there must be limits. A foetus is not just a bit of extra tissue; it is a growing human and there comes a point where that human’s right to life becomes as inalienable as the mother’s.”
Then comes a sentence that, for me, should have ended the discussion right there: “Exactly when that turning point occurs is a debate that will likely never be resolved.”
Precisely. The only indisputable “turning point” is that of conception. Any other point is open to debate, and surely any doubt must be resolved in favour of protecting human life. You know, the sort of thing that’s supposed to be sacred?
Hence Miss Vine’s subsequent support for the 12-week limit is a logical non sequitur: “… morally I’m as comfortable with 12 weeks as I’ll be with any other limit.” As comfortable as with any other limit? Surely Miss Vine means she is more comfortable with 12 weeks than with any other limit? Don’t keep us guessing, love.
She then gets to the core of the argument: “But it seems to me that at the heart of this issue is the disagreement between those who like to frame abortion as purely a healthcare issue; and those who believe it’s a moral choice between right and wrong. Neither are strictly correct.”
This sitting on the fence may adversely affect Miss Vine’s own fertility. She really ought to come down before it does. Either abortion is free of moral considerations or it isn’t. A woman can’t be a little bit pregnant, and human life can’t almost exist. “Either/or”, as Kierkegaard would put it.
This isn’t to say there can be marginal cases, such as a high likelihood that a woman won’t survive childbirth. But for Miss Vine any case seems to be marginal.
Witness the fact that she chose the imprisoned woman as proof of how ambiguous the issue can be. Once again, the woman “eventually obtained an abortion pill by lying to a nurse practitioner who provided the drug remotely under the ‘pills by post’ scheme instituted during Covid, which allows medication to be supplied after a remote consultation for pregnancies of up to ten weeks.”
In fact, the woman was 32 to 34 weeks pregnant, which is to say about to give birth. “A heinous crime – or the actions of a troubled, desperate woman?” asks Miss Vine and then answers her own question: “The answer, I fear, is probably a bit of both.”
According to her, what made that woman “troubled and desperate” was that she kept two men on the go and hence was unsure which one was the father. Oh well, such uncertainty can drive anyone round the bend.
Since Miss Vine likes to dip into the troubled waters of morality, I wonder if she discerns a valid moral difference between aborting a child a week before birth and a week after. The latter is unquestionably infanticide. But can the former be just an action of “a troubled, desperate woman”?
In pronouncing the derisory custodial sentence of two years and four months, Mr Justice Pepperall implicitly agreed that the case wasn’t clear-cut. After all, the poor woman was “plagued by nightmares and flashbacks to her dead child’s face.”
SS executioners were also sometimes pursued by similar nightmares. Some even went mad recalling the ravines full of blood. That, incidentally, was one of the reasons the Nazis went to gas, thereby sparing the delicate sensibilities of the murderers. Should they have been exculpated then? Or given reduced sentences?
No wonder His Honour came under savage criticism. I would have treated the case as manslaughter punishable by life in prison… Sorry, it’s not his inordinate leniency that exposed Judge Pepperall to hysterical criticsm. It’s the fact that he passed down a custodial sentence at all.
He came under fire from all the predictable quarters: the Royal College of Midwives, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, assorted feminist and pro-abortion campaigners and some of our venerable MPs.
How dare he criminalise abortions at any point, even minutes before birth, tweeted Labour MP Stella Creasy: “No other healthcare procedure has such a status. No other patient group would be treated this way.”
Here Miss Creasy is guilty of committing a rhetorical fallacy known as petitio principii (begging the question): using the desired conclusion of an argument as its premise. The whole issue is that some of us argue, persuasively, that abortion isn’t a “healthcare procedure”.
Why, even Miss Vine detects possible nuances there. Hers is a different fallacy: argumentum ad temperantiam – belief that a compromise between two positions is always correct. Still, at least she acknowledges that two positions exist. That’s more than most other modern barbarians do.
So perhaps I’ve been too hard on Miss Vine. If we met socially, I’m sure we could get on just fine. I only wonder how someone so manifestly incapable of either moral or intellectual judgement finds herself a wide audience.
A foetus is never part of a woman’s body as such. It’s a seperate living entity which requires the mother’s intra-uterine environment for survival. It is genetically distinct from the mother. The notion that a foetus, or embryo, is part of a woman’s body is an obviously unsupportable abortionist trope.
Of course it is. Their alternative argument is that a foetus isn’t a person. But that’s illiterate: it has what philosophers calle the potentiality of becoming a person. By the same logic, a newborn baby isn’t a person either. So how about aborting him?
Yes. Truly absurd. I had a patient recently who had an abortion several years ago. She’s become suicidal since understanding the gravity of her misguided decision, which was heavily promoted by her husband out of ‘convenience’. She’s become a shell of a human being.
The “troubled and desperate” defense is used over and over to rationalize violent behavior. In most cases I find it to be a poor excuse. What other avenues did the afflicted pursue prior to resorting to violence?
I know that many schools start indoctrinating children as young as six in the joys of all sorts of physical pleasure, but do they mention the ultimate end and purpose of sexual intercourse? Any woman who finds herself “troubled” by pregnancy after entertaining multiple men should, instead of killing her baby, sue her parents and school for failing to properly educate her on the process of human reproduction.
“Abortion is healthcare” is a phrase often shouted at anti-abortion demonstrators or those practicing Christian apologetics. No explanation is ever given, the phrase is just repeated at higher and higher volume, often punctuated with a single finger salute. This is what modern man considers an argument.
Which leads into my final point, the reason that Miss Vine finds herself a wide audience is precisely because she is “manifestly incapable of either moral or intellectual judgement”. Most people suffer the same problem. The intellectual failing is due to our poor schools. The moral failing is due to our Catholic bishops, who have failed to stand up for Christian morality for many decades now.
Catholic bishops haven’t had much influence in Britain since the 16th century. But you could say exactly the same things (and worse) about the Anglican bishops, starting with several consecutive Archbishops of Canterbury. A couple of years, one of the few good ones, my friend Michael Nazir-Ali, ex-Bishop of Rochester, converted to Catholicism.
Brian, one of the things I try to demonstrate is that it’s possible to put together a strong logical argument against abortion without relying on Christian dogma. That this possibility exists in all sorts of areas where the logical case also happens to be Christian is indirect proof that the dogma is rational, not just fideistic.
That is certainly an important point, as abortionists are want to yell “Don’t force your religion on me!” I have a document full of quotes from these pages that I have filed away for use in my own conversations. But I still think that if The Dicastery of Family or The Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith or the USCCB held press conferences and issued strong statements in opposition of these many scandalous “life choices”, it would help many people on the peripheries. Of course, the zealots are still going to have their say, but strong Christian leadership could have had a much larger platform than the man on the street protesting at an abortion clinic or refuting their arguments on his blog. They have squandered their moral capital. How we miss a strong and charismatic leader like Bishop Sheen. Of course the good Bishop also stated, “Who is going to save our Church? Not our bishops, not our priests and religious. It is up to you, the people. You have the minds, the eyes, and the ears to save the Church. Your mission is to see that your priests act like priests, your bishops act like bishops.” We have failed as well.
Is there any religion, or any philosophy before the middle 20th Century, that would endorse abortion? Until quite recently, did any human being exist who would regard abortion with any emotion but horror?
Meanwhile, I learn from the BBC that scientists have found a way of creating human embryos from stem cells. In the language of the great Christian prophet J R R Tolkien, Morgoth has found a way of creating Orcs. Or if you prefer the language of Aldous Huxley, Our Ford has found a way of creating Epsilons. Either way, it looks as if a devilry even worse than abortion is planned.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-65914934