WHEN IS A FOETUS DISPOSABLE?
The press: Paul Johnson
surveys the debate on the Alton Bill
NO recent issue has produced so much passion in the press as David Alton's Bill, presented to Parliament on 28 October, to cut the time-limit on abortions from 28 to 18 weeks. A few days before the Bill was tab- led, Today set the tone by devoting its front page to a striking photograph of an 18- week-old baby, still in the womb but unquestionably a human being, under the headline: '5,000 like him are killed each year'. This picture has undoubtedly done the abortionists' case a lot of damage and they are furious about it, In the Sunday Times, Simon Jenkins asserted that the image was 'being peddled round the picture desks of Fleet Street'. Its `true purpose', he complained, was to 'use sentiment and horror' to secure 'the even- tual repeal of the 1967 Act'. I would have thought the object was rather different: to bring home to people exactly what abor- tion involves, the killing of a living person. Jenkins claimed on behalf of the Act that it `has sent perinatal mortality plummeting'. It has also disposed of more than three million foetuses, the vast majority of whom would otherwise now be alive.
Jenkins, incidentally, disproves the com- mon view that this is a male-female argu- ment. The abortionist lobby is getting a lot of support in the press from men. Clement Freud (also in the Sunday Times) called the Alton Bill 'astonishingly foolish', an aban- donment of 'the fundamental principles of liberalism'. He added: 'I can think of no more illiberal, illogical act than to legislate for the sanctity of the unborn child', when an MP gets the chance, by coming near the top in the private members' ballot, `to do something constructive'. In the News of the World, Woodrow Wyatt insisted that whether or not to kill the foetus 'must be a matter for the doctors and women con- cerned', not 'for 36-year-old Mr Alton, who isn't even married'.
Do I detect a smear there? The fact of Alton's unmarried status has been a recur- rent theme of the pro-abortionists. In an interview with Alton in the Guardian, Polly Toynbee brought the smear into the open. Having worked herself up by dwell- mg on 'the disgusting spectacle of the virtually all-male House of Commons pon- tificating sanctimoniously on when and how women must or must not give birth to children', she went on: 'I thought long and hard before I asked [Alton] the next question but it seems to me that in this matter it is relevant as in few others. I asked if he was a homosexual.' The reason she felt it was relevant was that 'within all churches there has always been the strongest streak of misogyny', which springs from 'a fount of woman-hating passion that begins with the first chapter of Genesis and Eve in the Garden of Eden. For that reason I regard both his re- ligion and his own sexuality as a relevant issue.'
Writing in the Daily Express, 'as a mother of three', Harriet Harman MP denounced Alton as a Catholic, 'single' and, even worse, as someone 'who has had no involvement with the children's lobby'. Julia Langdon, in the Daily Mirror, also pitched into Alton's sex. He was, she wrote, 'the latest in the long and weari- some line of MPs who are attempting to amend the abortion law. Men, of course, every one of them, and men who describe themselves, curiously in my view, as "Pro- life".'
Why curiously? Surely the essence of the anti-abortion case is that you cannot make an artificial distinction between the sancti- ty of life just before, and just after, birth. Julia Langdon evidently thinks you can. In her article she described how she had a late abortion to rid herself of a foetus which tests showed would become a Down's Syndrome baby. She added: 'Not for a single moment have I ever regretted that decision', and she is 'suffused with resent- ment and anger' at people who would have denied her 'that choice'. She says she now has a five-month-old daughter and her 'joy in my newly-achieved motherhood is im- measurably increased by the fact that upstairs, or in a special hospital some- where, she does not have a disabled three-year-old elder sister'. But what if a baby with Down's Syndrome is actually born? Would a mother be justified in having it killed then? Julia Langdon does not discuss the key moral issue: the precise point at which, in the opinion of the pro-abortionists, it ceases to be right to kill. Is it the moment of birth?
In an article in this journal on 17 October, Mary Kenny quoted the pro- feminist gynaecologist, Dr Peter Hunting- ford, as giving a straight answer to the question, or at least setting out the moral alternatives plainly. According to him, `There are only two logical positions on abortion. One is that you favour the woman's right to choose at any stage in the pregnancy. The other is that you maintain the child's right to life from the start.' That is fair enough, except that I would replace `the woman's right to choose' with the more honest and accurate words 'right to kill or have killed'.
The 'right to choose' phrase, beloved of fierce women journalists and feminists generally, is peculiarly obnoxious because it associates having children (or not) with the notion of shopping and 'consumer choice'; a child in the womb is 'disposable', like panty-hose or plastic cartons. In an article in the Guardian, Dr Pamela Sims objected to this 'consumer-orientated atti- tude' to unborn life. She included in this approach the increasing use of what she termed 'quality-control' tests `to detect genetic abnormalities at an early stage of pregnancy', with the implication that it is necessary to destroy the abnormal, — that is, the sub-standard. Yet, she adds, 'civil- ised societies have always tried to protect the weak and care for the sick'. She suggests that what is wrong with our society today is 'an abortion mentality'.
Pamela Sims and Mary Kenny are not the only women advocates of the anti- abortion case. There are many others, though they tend to be ambivalent or to impose conditions. Thus Fay Weldon, writ- ing in the Evening Standard, insisted changes in the adoption laws should accompany the Alton Bill: 'Pass your bloody Bill, Mr Alton, and with my bles- sing, but look to the consequences or you'll go to Hell.' Indeed the claim that the right to abortion is a woman's issue is not backed by such evidence as we possess. A recent Guardian survey showed that a substantial majority of women, young and old alike, favoured changes on the lines of the Alton Bill. In any case, the feminist notion that only women should determine this issue is easily refuted. Writing in the Daily Mail, George Gale pointed out: `Men are as entitled as women to argue the matter, not because as fathers they have property rights in the foetus — the child is no more the property of the father than it is of the mother — but because it is a moral issue.' According to Gale, the notion of the mother's right to kill is 'a modern obscen- ity'. He added: 'The very last thing a woman has the right to kill is the child she carries in her womb. But that child has a right, a very natural right, to enjoy the care and protection of its mother. It is the duty of men, as well as women, to assert that right.'
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