Some of you may have seen that Labour, today, decided to make abortion legal up until birth (women won’t get prosecuted, but doctors might).
For one, the idea that we look at a 39-week-old baby in the womb and call it anything other than a human is abhorrent to me. The boundary of leaving the womb for an abortion also seems arbitrary. Imagine you go into labour and as long as the head has not emerged from the woman vagina, she can still kill the baby and it isn’t murder.
To me, all abortions should be illegal except in cases where it is to save the mother’s life. I get that there are questions about rape, and I feel somewhat sympathetic to them, but in all other cases, I feel like the only just line for human life is conception.
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I disagree. While this suggestion of a 39-week-old fetus being aborted is wrong, if for no other reason than it is unnecessary, I would suggest that this has to be a question largely led by women and not men. And not just middle-class women with a strong support network.
I used to take this view, but I don’t see how we can live in a society which holds that people can only opine about things that directly affect them. Such a society would have to accept the existence of parallel legal and social structures for different communities because “their legal structure doesn’t affect you”, yet I would suggest that we all agree here that the existence of Sharia courts in the UK is wrong.
I think that there are only two morally consistent positions. Either humanhood is attained at conception, or it is attained at consciousness. I present the latter because, whilst I disagree, I can accept the argument that a baby is identical to a pet hamster until it becomes conscious (generally, this is thought to be the age of 2). Anything else is arbitrary line drawing.
To put it another way, would you accept a mother smothering her 2-week-old child to death because she can’t handle it or because she has lost her freedom to the child? What, metaphysically, is the difference between that 2-week-old child and a 24-week-old fetus? What about a 20-week-old fetus and a 24-week-old one? All of this is arbitrarily drawing a line in the sand in order to let men and women escape the consequences of not being able to keep it in their pants.
There are no wins here. Few would argue against people having sovereignty over their own bodies, but there are limits. Strangely many of the people who side aggressively in the pro-choice camp were equally vociferous about forcing others to be vaccinated against Covid during the “crisis”. I tend to be a libertarian, and think we should err towards freedom as a default, but there is something deeply dehumanising about late term abortion. Human life needs to be treated as sacred. Abortion should be a last result used in extreme circumstances and should not be a form of casual birth control. It should not be legal to terminate a baby who could potentially survive outside the womb, unless that baby had serious health issues which would lead to short and unpleasant life. The older law dealt with this better than the new one and it should be reverted back.
