Sir, – Abortion is a moral/ethical issue and science alone cannot adjudicate on such matters, although science can illuminate certain facts that provide valuable assistance when one is formulating a moral position on abortion.
However, I cannot see how the science quoted by Emer O'Toole helps the pro-choice argument ("Science and sociology are on the side of pro-choice", July 27th).
Her main point is that the scientific evidence indicates that the foetus is incapable of feeling pain during the first 24 weeks of life. I do not dispute this.
But she is missing the basic point of the abortion debate here. The basic sticking point in the abortion debate for the pro-life side is the deliberate killing of the human foetus, not whether the foetus feels pain or not.
Emer 0’Toole also argues that because there is a significant incidence of natural wastage of zygotes, for example some fail to implant in the womb, this excuses artificial termination of pregnancies in certain circumstances.
However, this is to equate the unintentional, natural and random circumstances that can prevent or frustrate a pregnancy in its very earliest stages with a later deliberate and artificial termination of an established pregnancy.
It is a biological fact that every individual human life begins at conception when a sperm and an egg unite to form a zygote.
The zygote is the start of a continuum of human life that naturally and automatically unfolds under its own internal genetic instructions and that ends eventually in death in, one would hope, advanced old age.
At each point along the continuum this human life has the properties and capacities appropriate to that particular point.
This is as far as science can take us – science alone cannot tell us what moral value to place on the human life at any stage along the continuum.
To decide this, we must turn to ethics.
In the ethical domain, few would argue that it is ever acceptable to deliberately interrupt this continuum after birth and very many people also extend this reservation back before birth to conception, except in circumstances where the pregnancy puts the mother’s life at risk.
The fact that abortion is the deliberate killing of human life is a bedrock difficulty that will not go away in the abortion debate and Emer O’Toole does not squarely address this central difficulty.
I am not convinced by Emer O’Toole’s arguments but I welcome her article.
It is healthy to lay one’s cards on the table and to honestly discuss and debate these issues. – Yours, etc,
WILLIAM REVILLE,
Emeritus Professor
of Biochemistry,UCC,
Waterfall
Cork.