ABORTION
[To the Editor Of THE SPECTATOR.] Sia.—Mrs. Geraldine Mozley writes in your issue of last week : " Christians have always held that the deliberate destruction of life, however embryonic, is a form of murder" (my italics). Is this true ? If so, it is strange that our earliest laws, derived from the Church, only condemned abortion after animation. Bracton (1268) wrote that abortion was homicide " if the factors be already formed and animated." Other early writers could be quoted.
For a long time I have tried to fathom the conventional Christian attitude to abortion. Lawyers of Stuart times explained our law by the fact that the law of Moses was to the same effect. But Exodus xxi, 22 and 23, deal primarily with a man's proprietary rights over his wife, and, besides, this whole chapter contains a mass of sayings which Our Lord overruled. Another explanation (given by Lecky in Vol. II, pp. 24-25 of the History of European Morals), is that abortion is evil in that it involves " the damnation of an immortal soul " because the embryonic life dies unbaptized. But few Christians today believe that absence of baptism involves damnation. If it does, what of the embryonic life that dies at a miscarriage ?
It is time that Christians set about the task of facing the problem of abortion. Generalities will no longer suffice. Abortion exists wholesale today and it may be that the only way to check it is to withdraw the legal taboo, for then women will go to respectable doctors who in most cases will success- fully dissuade them. Personally I have difficulty in regarding as Christian the compelling of motherhood where there is every probability that the child will be either defective or
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