Abortion is a Binary Issue
Abortion is a binary issue. One group of people believes it’s utterly wrong to kill unborn children and this should be prohibited (as it once was), and another group of people who think it’s completely acceptable to kill the unborn and the legal right to do so needs to be upheld. This is such a revealing topic for us as a society, maybe the most revealing.
When we talk about it, there are some common hurdles at the start of the discussion. Usually, we will need to talk about what life is and what a human is in biological terms, and these are not seriously disputable. Science offers nothing but the facts here so it’s interesting that I could not find the terms “human” or “life” defined in any of the written law, but from a legal standpoint both were assumed in the 1929 Infant Life Preservation Act. This Act created the offence of Child Destruction. Self-explanatory, but with the major defining caveat that the child must have been capable of being born alive.
When the 1967 Abortion Act was passed, the Infant Life Preservation was (and is still) in effect but nobody is guilty of an offence under it if a child is killed within the parameters of the 1967 Abortion Act. The point is that the lawmakers understood that they were legislating against living human beings and so the arguments from the abortion supporters that unborn children are not alive or not human are already debunked in the very law they champion. Most of us know (on both sides) that the unborn are alive and human, the argument is not to be had there.
It’s worth noting many women are coerced into decisions they do not wish to take, but that notwithstanding, the question is why a mother has up to twenty-four weeks to decide if her child gets to continue living? The basis for the law proves the law’s own absurdity by placing a time limit on the right to kill the child in the first place. The reasons a mother might have to choose to kill her child do not diminish after twenty-four weeks, so now we have a real problem and one that makes frightening logical sense. To make it clear, if a mother can cite her mental health being affected as a reason to abort her child at twenty-four weeks, why can the same reasoning not apply at thirty-five weeks, or a round fifty-two weeks? One year olds can be challenging.
The clarifying Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 (to be used in conjunction with the Abortion Act) allows abortion on at least seven separate grounds and if the genuine aim of the law has the mother’s health at its heart, or even quality of life for the child under Ground E, (Ground E focuses on the quality of life for the child, so not the mother’s mental or physical health) what is the reason it is capped at twenty-four weeks? The law has already recognised as a living human that to whom it does not offer protection but then steps in to protect the child at an arbitrary moment to do the opposite. Killing the child at twenty-four weeks and a day is an offence under the same law, unless certain stricter conditions are met. The existence of children a mother has outside the womb can also affect her mental health, would she be allowed to harm them on the same grounds? How about if the child had a disability of some kind and she thought they were better off dead, would the law accept that? Of course not, yet on the law’s own recognition that the child inside the womb is a living human being, why is there a difference between it and a mother’s other living human beings?
It’s arbitrary and it’s absurd and I have to wonder why it was legislated in the first place and wonder further why it was legislated in that way. Far brighter people than I have pointed this illogical reasoning out before, because once you have a living human in the law, you have a living human. Living human at twenty-four weeks, living human at 99 weeks, living human at 416 weeks, and so on.
Despite the propaganda one hears from abortion supporters I don’t think anyone is trying to convict people for natural miscarriages, or the treatment of ectopic pregnancies where unborn children perish unavoidably. These won’t be the reasons. Sometimes we know we’re wrong and we keep going because the thought of confronting ourselves and the mess we’re in is terrifying. I am certain this is a significant reason we struggle on this issue, to talk about it and to see it for what it is.
But however far we walk down dark paths we can always look up, turn around and start walking the other way. We can do this as a nation, and it will take courage individually and as a group. The fact that there still is a time limit, whilst absurd, is also a source of hope that we still know this is wrong.
Daniel: March for Life UK Content Creator
