ABORTION, GENDERCIDE AND WHAT WE'RE WORTH

October 6, 2012

When, yesterday, I wrote that Women on Waves should concentrate on the abortion issues closer to home, I did not expect that Jeremy Hunt, the new Health Secretary, would ignite the issue with his comments about favouring a reduction in the time limit for abortions from 24 weeks to 12. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists called his proposal "insulting to women".

The only thing that can beat the self-righteousness of the anti-abortion lobby is the pro-abortion one. One of the criticisms to the reduction in weeks is that it would make testing for conditions like Down's Syndrome difficult. Interesting. Since when has eugenics been one of the pillars of the argument for abortion? Of course we all know that it happens; not only eugenics, but gender selection too. Countless female foetuses are aborted, not only in China where the one-child policy exacerbates the situation, or India, where poverty and prejudice may, but also in places like Great Britain. I would have thought that if anything were insulting to women, it would have been this massacre of millions of terminated females.

Caitlin Morgan is quite blasé about the whole thing in her book: How To Be A Woman. She states that she deliberated a lot longer when choosing the worktops for her kitchen than whether to abort what would have been her third child. At least she's honest about it and surprisingly she hit the nail on the head:

"I cannot understand arguments that centre on the sanctity of life. As a species, we've fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don't believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain and life-long, grinding poverty show us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we've made only the most feeble efforts to really treat human life as sacred."

Sad, but true. And we can take the argument even further if we consider how we abuse animals. If the argument against abortion is to make any sense, it can only do so in the context of the value or sacredness of life. So until we get that right the controversy over abortion will just keep on going...