IS there a more misleading moral argument than the title of the pro abortion lobby, ProChoice? That one word, choice, short circuits all arguments. After all, is adulthood not about choice? Does it not define our status as free individuals, able to assert our will over our own bodies and lives? Are men not able to make such choices?
What fundamental differences between the sexes permit one sex to enjoy autonomy, to make decisions about how its body may progress in life until nature commandeers it in death, and the other body to be condemned to the ineluctable servitude of motherhood, merely because, it has been impregnated by tissue from the autonomous one?
Is this not grossly unfair? Does it not define gender injustice at its most anachronistically absurd? Is it not a relic of an ancient patriarchy that women should be obliged to endure pregnancy, and the physical and emotional turmoil that it creates, merely because reactionaries - usually men - say so?
Deep breath. Yes.
This world is full of unsolvable moral dilemmas. It is brimming over with unfairness and injustice, and much of that unfairness is so integral to what we are that it is ineradicable. But the equality fallacy which has dominated Western intellectual thought for most of this century has refused to accept this simple truth.
Western societies, and anglophone ones in particular, have been busy reordering themselves so that the appearance of equality is achieved throughout. The very reasons for the difference between the sexes, the physical truths about men and women, have been occluded or denied simply because we have been chasing the chimera of equality.
False equality
Women are equal to men, goes this argument, and therefore must have equal rights, including the right not to have children. But this argument is tillacious because the primary inequality precedes that right; it is the right to have children, and nature has denied men that right. We are built unequal. Men are stronger, harder, bigger, more violent, more singleminded, more determined women are more compassionate, more enduring of hardship, more patient and, most unfairly of all, more orgasmic.
The equality heresy has obliged us to avoid the evidence of our own eyes, our own ears: five minutes eavesdropping on all male conversations and all female conversations would convince a Martian of the profound differences between the sexes. Observe women talking in a supermarket; observe women driving; observe women disagreeing; is their behaviour not radically different from that of men doing the same thing?
Pro Choice avoids the argument and gets to the kernel. Choice is that not an adult's prerogative? And when the choice touches upon the contents of an adult's body, is it not reasonable for the adult to decide upon the future of the contents?
Deep breath. No. Why? Simply because. That's why. I became fully aware of this only recently when I read of the Swedish hospital which scrapes the living cell tissue from the surface of the eyeball of recently aborted, still living foetuses, to implant in the failing eyes of the old. Is that Pro Choice? And is partial birth abortion, which Bill Clinton recently allowed continue, also Pro Choice?
Partial birth abortion
Partial birth abortion consists of half pulling the baby from the womb, legs first and normally kicking. The doctor then inserts a pair of scissors through the base of the baby's skull to create a hole into which a suction catheter is inserted. The brain is vacuumed out so that the cranium can then be collapsed. The dead baby is then delivered, aborted, born. What you will.
Why this? Why? Because other forms of late term abortion can lead to the baby being born alive - apparently, some 400 to 500 babies a year are aborted into protected American citizenhood every year; partial birth abortion avoids this pesky problem by ensuring the contents of the womb are bumped off internally. Partial birth abortion had been outlawed in a Bill passed by the American Congress, for reasons you might possibly guess; President Clinton vetoed the Bill in a gallant attempt to placate the feminist Left alliance.
And as the term Pro Choice evades logic, so does the term feminist left alliance. Those who defend such treatment of an infant in the womb, an infant which with modern medicine could possibly survive - cannot be feminist, cannot, be left. Does not feminism defend the integrity of the female body? And are not half the butchered, beheaded infants female? Does not the Left traditionally defend the helpless, the weak, the underprivileged, against those who enjoy inherited privilege? Does not a baby, midway between womb and the world define helplessness?
Does not the US surgeon earning $500,000 a year define privilege?
Contaminated argument
The argument in Ireland has been contaminated by bigotry and cowardice. Many of those who opposed abortion were also opposed to all expressions of sexuality, probably because they were sexually deprived or disordered themselves. Our posturing piety caused us to make a legislative nightmare from which we have still not escaped. Only a heartless diehard would deny a woman with cervical cancer the opportunity to terminate the pregnancy; yet our laws deny our doctors the right to take that sensible step as a pretide to the chemotherapy the mother must get to survive and which will, in all certainty, do terrible damage to the foetus.
In law it is difficult to provide an avenue of escape for the seriously ill woman, or the raped girl, without creating a motor way which exists virtually everywhere in the West - for abortion and little foetuses squeaking in kidney dishes. I haven't got a clue how such laws could be devised, not least because I'm completely opposed to a woman being punished for having an abortion. Inconsistent, I know. But so is life. So is nature. Which is why will never get pregnant.