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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 22, 2012
Female foeticide
God works in mysterious ways. And so much in human life and politics falls out unpredictably, by wild paradox, that the religious learn to pray for such mysterious interventions. This is implicit in the second stanza of our old royal anthem: "Confound their politics, / Frustrate their knavish tricks! / On Thee our hopes we fix, / God save us all!""All" in this text has traditionally excluded the corgis, and refers only to the human population. This Christian notion of the sanctity of human life - shared by Jews and I would hope all other religious faithful - is at, or was long at, the very heart of the legal philosophy of (at least) the western world. "God save us" has many, many dimensions, from the most obvious material, to the most subtle spiritual. But throughout, it implies some kind of redemption. "Many dimensions," I wrote; but all one connected and ultimately comprehensible thought. I am stressing this because the post-modern mind (my own included) plays with disconnections. We live lives today so filled with distractions, and distractions to distractions, that it has become difficult for anyone to hold one single thought in mind for long enough to begin thinking through its implications. That is in turn why we come to feel comfortable only with scattered, empirical thoughts. It is why, when faced with a hard moral or philosophical question, almost everyone turns as if by instinct to "science" for hints to an answer. But empirical research will never give us answers to non-empirical questions. Nevertheless, things are connected, and in the end, even "science" will cast light on a truth that goes far beyond the empirical. My example will be the curious question of when human life begins - for legal or any other purposes. For people living in the Middle Ages, this might have presented a puzzle (though in practice it did not). A woman would become pregnant, but at first there was nothing to it but the lump. At some point this lump was thought to become "ensouled." This coincided, rationally, with her first sense of it moving in her womb. There was a "quickening." The foetus "had come to life." Do not despise nor condemn this as medieval "superstition," or credulity toward the "miraculous." It was after all founded on hard empirical observation. Especially do not despise them when, at this day, we are with far greater information about the continuous development of the foetus, from the very moment of conception, debating where to draw the line on abortions. And, most doctors draw it informally at about 20 weeks - a statistical correlate for the same moment of "quickening." Before, they will abort. After, they will usually refuse, law or no law, unless there are extraordinary circumstances. Modern technology, through sonograms and the like, can show us a foetus that is very obviously also a child, growing. This is why the state of Texas, and other "pro-life" jurisdictions, have passed laws to compel medical personnel to show the pregnant woman what is on the screen, and other things she "needs to know" before making a very final decision; including some plain epidemiological facts about the possible consequences of an abortion to her own future health and fertility. This reduces the abortion rate most effectively. It thereby also reduces instances of terrible regret, which many women have suffered after "going through with it" - perhaps hounded in a clinic that profits from the "procedure," or by some other external pressure, such as an angry boyfriend. Were the question not whether to have an abortion, but whether to remove some benign or malignant tumour, everyone would agree that the woman should be given as much information as possible. But here, where the issue includes another human life, we hear demands for ignorance. The tables suddenly turn, now that the issue-du-jour is sex-selective abortions. It has been seriously proposed that pregnant women be kept in the dark about the child's sex, in order to prevent women who want a boy, from aborting a girl. And yet in this case, the opposite tactic would be more effective. Let the mother not only see she is carrying a little girl, but who that little girl is. Let her decide at least temporarily away from a family which, for cultural or any other reasons, may be pressuring her to "get a boy." And if she still wants an abortion, after seeing what will be killed, God help her. This is one of many "breaking news" fronts between "pro-life" and "pro-choice" ideological armies. The wild paradox here is that abortion-supporting feminists have raised an issue to prominence which utterly sabotages all their previous arguments about "a woman's rights." God bless them for doing so. On other fronts, we find the whole range of "eugenic" issues raised by selective abortions; the horrible prospect of enabling people to do by "choice" what Hitler chose: to eliminate those groups he deemed to be "inferior." To order "designer babies" for a new master race. All this was implicit from the moment the legalization of abortion was conceived. And now, let us pray it is finally being confounded. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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