What are your opinions about abortion? Is it ever right?
There is a trap in the question here! There is a hidden assumption that you either have to be on the side of a woman's right to choose or a foetus's right to life. That is an oversimplification. There is a world of difference between, at one extreme, a single cell zygote and at the other a baby on the point of birth. And there are great differences in circumstances: a socialite having a termination because a child would be inconvenient is 1,000 miles away from a frightened, raped, girl of 12, or a woman in sub-Saharan Africa, with 8 children, abandoned by their father, living in extreme poverty and suffering from AIDS which she will pass on to the child she is carrying.
The only way force a blanket decision is to ignore reality, and I am not very tolerant of either extreme because both are irrational.
I am against a "Right to Life" position taken up on the basis of an unproven and unprovable assumption that the zygote is a full human being with a soul. At least while it has no nervous system it is not a full human being. It's no good saying it is a potential human being either. An acorn is a potential oak tree, but it isn't an oak tree. My car is potential scrap, but you'd better not treat it as scrap just yet.
But the equally absolute "Woman's Right to Choose" position is just as weak. It has been said that a pregnant woman is in the same position as someone who wakes up to find someone else plugged in to their body, dependant on it. How far, and at what point, is it right for her to say "I am not prepared to accept this person being dependent on me"? What we do with our bodies is limited in some way by the effects on other people.
It's also important to note that the majority of pregnancies are never discovered by the women themselves. A lot of the time a fertilised ovum fails to implant and leaves the body at the next period. This indicates, does it not, that nature has little regard for a fertilised ovum. Or put it another way, most abortions are brought about either by nature or by God.
While there is no nervous system I don't see how we can talk about a human being. While there is no consciousness I don't see how we can talk about a human being. But it is very difficult to tell, if possible, where the boundary of consciousness is. So it is much easier to argue in favour of an early abortion than a late one. The question I am addressing here is "who suffers?". We have to answer the question "what harm am I going to cause?". Who is being asked to pay the price of my clean conscience? When we pontificate about ethics we are often laying the burden for our ethical purity on someone else.
This is particularly critical in the case of some genetic disease. If there is a test that can be done that will reveal a disease and much consequent suffering that can be avoided, should it be done? If the disease is shown to be present should there be a termination? There is no one single answer. Many people have found that living with a severely disabled child proves life enhancing. But just because that is true for some does not make it true for all and other people may find that same circumstance life destroying.
I am not in favour of trivialising abortion. I'd much rather that every child was wanted & loved. But that isn't the case. Granted that a proposed abortion is before the foetus has a nervous system of any consequence, the prime consideration must be the well-being of the parent. I certainly don't agree with Mother Teresa who said, when she was receiving her Nobel Prize, that abortion was the worst evil imaginable. I'll tell you one evil I can think of that is not imagined but real and that I consider a great deal worse. We know what human birth rates are and we know that there should be a slight preponderance of adult women over adult men. It has been shown that there are 100 million less women than there ought to be from birth statistics. Of that 100 million, 81 million are accounted for by India and China alone. There are three possible causes: girl children are not so well nourished and therefore suffer higher than expected mortality, or they receive less good medical care, with the same effect, or plain simple infanticide of girl babies. That is not murder of the unborn, it's murder of the born and living, and to date I have not seen a single soul campaign against it. We need to get our priorities right.
