I don't believe anyone or any institution has the right to kill a human being.
There was a time in our history when this was harder to justify. Over the centuries, particularly since the publishing of the Magna Carta, when individual rights were enshrined in law, we have come to recognise the fundamental human right to life regardless of a persons circumstances.
These days we still have the death penalty in many parts of the world. Governments struggle with it though, even if the person to be killed has done something awful. The in-canting of the phrase ‘Dead man walking’ as the prisoner begins their last walk on death row has always struck me as a chilling way of reminding us of both the horror and the lack of choice on the prisoners part with what is about to happen. I want this article (hence the title) to serve a similar purpose.
Everybody that knows me, knows that I fundamentally disagree with abortion. I consider the industrialised abortion years (particularly since the Roe-Wade decision in the US, in the 70’s) to be one of the gravest and most shameful periods of human history.
And we have had some grim periods over the centuries. Witch hunting, slavery, gas chambers, chemical warfare, suicide bombings in public places and so on.
Nothing compares though to the current systematic killing of our unborn - human beings in their most fragile stage of growth. A period where they are voiceless, completely helpless, and entirely dependent on the whim of their ‘nurturers’. We are supposed to be mammals after all, that nurture and protect our young.
We have globally aborted more human beings in the last few decades than were actually alive on the planet in the mid 1800s. Nobody will convince me that this represents human progress.
Abortion, unless the life of the mother is in danger, is illegal in Ireland. The laws in Ireland give equal right to the life of the mother and to the unborn child except in the case where the mothers life is in danger.
So if you are in Ireland and you decide you want to abort your unborn child for other reasons, you travel to the UK (or beyond).
Very recently some women have decided to make this journey whilst tweeting updates on their experiences to the social media world.
This is part of a growing movement in Ireland to ‘Repeal the 8th’ amendment - that part of our constitution that gives equal rights to mother and unborn child.
When I heard about this ‘stunt’ something deep and angry welled up in me. To reduce the decision to kill your unborn child to a series of tweets over the course of a couple of days, in an effort to convince people that it would be far better to have the unborn child killed in Ireland, shows utter contempt for life and for all the decent people on the side of protecting the unborn.
And shame on anybody that thinks this is somehow a brave and courageous act and something that will make Irish society a better place because of it.
Here is a simple thought experiment. Its twenty years from now and a young vibrant human being being is beginning their first foray into traveling the world. They are on a train to London (after getting off a ferry from Ireland) to catch a plane to somewhere warm and exotic. They have time to think and so they start writing a diary about all the amazing circumstances of their lives that have brought them to this point. They reflect on all the wonderful people in their lives, the teachers, the friends and most importantly their family, who have supported them all along the way. They give silent thanks to all that love and support that has made them who they are today. They look forward confidently to taking on the world and making their mark in whatever wondrous ways their DNA enables them to do, via those mysterious helix mechanisms binding their truly unique cell structure together. In all of history, nobody has ever had this DNA structure before and nobody is likely to ever have it again. In that uniqueness they stand alone, in the vastness of the Universe, as a singular, exceptional being of extraordinary untapped potential.
This does not tweet very well. And besides, for the unborn child in the womb of the women tweeting about their ‘journey’, this thought experiment is a moot point. They will soon be ‘terminated’ in a procedure as grim as the burning of a human being at the stake.
As it was for the 1.3 billion people plus that we have aborted in my lifetime. That would be greater than the current population of China to be clear.
Dead Baby, tweeting
A crisis pregnancy is a very difficult situation. There is no denying that. Its particularly challenging if fetal scans show that the growing baby is not well. There is nothing easy about bringing a child into the world if it is not wanted for whatever reason.
Why is it though that we go to extraordinary efforts to protect our children once they leave the womb? There are countless examples of parents going to the ends of the Earth to try to help children with life threatening illnesses like rare cancers and degenerative diseases. This is our humanity in its greatest form, a combination of courage, compassion and conviction.
Protecting our children, caring for children and growing and enabling our children is at the heart of everything that defines us as a species.
And this essential truth is known to all.
Think of the recent picture of the traumatised 5 year old, Omran Daqneesh, pulled from the bombing of Allepo or the picture of 3 year old, Aylan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach when his family was fleeing the Syrian war. These pictures evoke a deep compassionate response in us all. These horrors should not be happening to children. We know that and viscerally feel their pain at the deepest core of our being.
So why have we lost this response when it comes to our unborn children?
I’ll tell you why.
We are being told that unborn children are not children.
Tell that to the premature children that survive outside the womb at 21 weeks - 3 weeks earlier than the current 24 week abortion limit in many countries (there are also many countries where there is no upper limit).
We are being told that the unborn child cannot feel anything.
Scientific evidence is now showing that this is untrue. The Neural tube (the building blocks of the nervous system) closes about 3 weeks after conception marking a key stage in the embryonic phase of development of the child. Doctors that perform abortions now routinely anesthetise the unborn child because they simply are not sure when the unborn child feels pain.
We are being told that unborn children are not viable and so cannot be considered human.
This is the weakest argument of them all. We are mammals. We have developed that way so that our offspring require nurturing before they are able to live independently. There is no such thing as a viable baby. Once outside the womb, a baby requires help or it will die.
The fact that the unborn child requires placenta nourishment before 20 weeks is because the lungs of the child are one of the last parts of their physiology to develop. This happens because the unborn child does not breathe air whilst in the womb.
It should not be necessary, but science is proving more and more that the unborn child is simply a human being in a very vulnerable state of growth. New 4D ultrasonic imaging techniques are showing us unborn children sucking their thumb and reacting to stimulus outside the womb even early on in the second trimester.
We are being told that we need abortion to deal with difficult cases like incest, rape and fatal fetal abnormality.
Nobody is denying that these are difficult situations to deal with. Compassion, support, proper long-term care and resources, and providing the best neonatal and post natal care for all, is a far better solution than killing the unborn child. For one, it would make for better services for those people who actually want to have children.
There is also completely ethical justification for using contraceptive methods to avoid the implantation phase of pregnancy which happens about 10 days after conception.
The problem we have however, is that we do not provide the long-term support and resources to help women in crisis pregnancies. We have actually created a society where it is difficult to bring a child into the world and so the option to have an abortion seems now to be an appropriate option when faced with a crisis pregnancy.
We should be throwing our effort and attention into providing those long-term support structures so that we have a society that celebrates the birth of a child (irrespective of the circumstances) rather than the one we have now.
We have created a society which now weighs up taking responsibility for the life of a child versus taking the life of that child and is presenting this as a human right.
An oxymoron if ever there was one.
I hold people like Amnesty International (an organisation I used to have huge respect for) in contempt for perpetuating this sophism.
However, the real problem we have is the following. The difficult cases mentioned above are being used by people who truly believe in mainstream abortion. They see abortion as nothing more than a tool and a resource of convenience that can used at a whim.
They are using these straw-man arguments, to support their main cause, because they are easy emotive problems to raise, they create doubt around the core argument against abortion, which is essentially to respect and trust in the mystery of life, but crucially the arguments deflect people from thinking about the true agenda behind their cause.
Pro-abortionists want what the current system in many States in the United States allows - the right to abort your unborn child at any time during a pregnancy, in any medical facility and for any reason.
So if you really want to know where ‘Repealing the 8th’ ultimately leads, go and research what a ‘Partial Birth’ abortion is.
If you already know what it is and still support mainstream abortion then I respectfully challenge you to question your value system.
GMcD 21/8/16
