In Britain abortions are running at 200,000 a year, more than a quarter of the number of live births.
Yet Dawn Primarolo, the Health Minister, told the select committee last week that the Government believed that the 1967 Abortion Act “works as intended and doesn’t require further amendment”.
Works as intended? Remember that there is no “social clause” in the Act.
Decisions are meant to be made on the grounds of the mother’s health or damage to the unborn child. In reality abortion is a back-up to contraception, and mothers may be left seriously depressed and anguished by it, their lives blighted for years.
How extraordinary it is that abortion on this huge scale has become a regular part of the British way of life, for the morality of abortion, one might think, was pretty obvious.
Here is a human being that is killed, either in the womb or after induced birth.
It sounds like murder. Of course, once a moral philosopher gets to work on any bad act, the grounds of its badness prove hard to establish.
The logic of abortion in the modern world is quite straight forward. It is intended to prevent the imposed obligation of parenthood. “Every child should be a wanted child” is a polite, repsectable way of saying “I won’t have the responsibility of parenthood imposed upon me against my will.” This idea has become the guiding ethical imperative of (what is left of) western civilization: “I will accept no obligation unless I willingly decide to pick it up, and I will carry it only until I decide to lay it down.” So whether or not an abortion kills a human being is quite beside the point. It is not the life of the child that is being considered – it is the autonomy of the adult. And in (what is left of) western civilization, there is no greater good then the autonomy of the adult.
carl
The British situation is not too dissimilar from the US in that, while 7 million babies have been aborted since 1967, the population thereby lost is now being replaced by immigrants from south Asia, Africa and eastern Europe. So, Britain’s historical, ethnic and religious character is being profoundly changed at a greater pace even than the Norman Conquest. Talk about the law of unintended consequences.