I find it difficult to put into words how I feel watching the news reports regarding the current debates in Spain on abortion. I feel the same kind of anger and disgust as I do when I hear reports about so-called “paedophiles” (I don’t like this term, since they are not “lovers of children”, as suggested by the etymology of the word) violating young infants.
Today, the news showed a protest with people demanding the right to abort up until 24 weeks of pregnancy. According to the Wikipedia, the most premature birth ever was James Elgin Gill, born after just 21 weeks and five days of pregnancy. Would the people campaigning for open abortion up until 24 weeks of pregnancy say that James Elgin Gill was not a child when he was born? Was he still just a foetus? If they had seen him in the hospital, in the incubator, would they have said to the mother, “your foetus is so cute”? I think not.
Yet these people want it to be legal to kill babies at this stage of pregnancy. I find it sickening. Everybody talks about the right of the woman to decide, but I hear nothing of the right of the child, which surely is more important. Nor, for that matter, is there any talk of the right of the father: if somebody were able to kill my child without my permission, I would be absolutely devastated.
I know there will be people reading this who completely disagree with me. If you are one of these, and you decide to leave a comment, I would ask you to answer the following questions.
- Would you agree that, given that babies born after 22 weeks of pregnancy can survive, it would be wrong to allow abortion on demand up to 24 weeks?
- If so, where should the limit be? On what basis should we set that limit? How can we decide, in an non-arbitrary way, what the limit should be?