WHERE SOME GUIDANCE WOULD BE 01) WELCOMED

By
PAULA DAVIES PROCURING an abortion is a horrible phrase for a horrible deed. Termination of pregnancy is the more comfortable phrase used throughout Lord Silkin's Bill which is to provide further and wider grounds for legal abortion. Summarised, these are:
(a) Grave risk of patient's death or of serious injury to her physical or mental health resulting either from giving birth to the child or from the strain of caring for it.
(b) Gross deformity; serious physical or mental abnormality.
(c) . social conditions which make her unsuitable to assume legal and moral responsibility for the child.
(d) rape or insanity.
Since this Bill, likely to be altered by a few amendments, will probably become law, I thought it as well to try to find out how Christians should stand on 'this all important question.
The Church's view is well known. She regards abortion as murder — nothing less. Most Christians, when forced to give a straight answer, win agree with this view but there is a steadily increasing movement of public opinion towards easier grounds for legal abortion, based, supposedly, on humanitarian grounds. The facts are certainly frightening enough to enlist the utmost in human sympathy. Over 100,000 illegal abortions take place under shocking conditions in this country every year. The proponents of legal abortion claim that by allowing every woman access to registered practitioners, the number of deaths and the sterility which often results from the work of backstreet abortionists, would cease.
If anyone has seen, as I have, the physical and mental state of a woman who has had an abortion performed in this way, they would feel, not only compassion
and sorrow, but also an angry desire to do something to get rid of the back-street abortionist. But the argument for legal abortion based on sympathy is just not good enough.
Like the humanitarians, I felt saddened and angry at the state
of this woman but, unlike them, I was forced to remind myself of the undeniable fact that the child she was carrying was dead. No argument, however heart-rending, can deny that a being, once alive is now dead.
Doctors who support abortion say that it cannot be murder since the baby is incapable of living a separate existence in the early stages of pregnancy. Lord Silkin's Bill follows this idea. It will not allow an abortion to be carried out after the 16th week of pregnancy for the reasons listed under the last two headings.
But, through Some strange logic which I am unable to comprehend, the Bill allows for an abortion any time during the pregnancy for the reasons listed under the first two headings, which includes the physical and mental strain of caring for the baby.
Who is to decide on the amount of strain? The mother? Her doctors? Her husband? Her friends? It seems to me that to kill an unborn child for fear that it would otherwise be a burden to its mother or the State cannot be anything but wrong.
The trouble is that there are people who do not consider this to be wrong and who obviously, by pressing for reform in the law, would like to see legal abortion availeble on demand.
What should we do about it? As Christians we are bound to look deeply into the matter for it seems uncharitable just to cry out that abortion is wrong without doing anything 'to help those fur whom it seems the only answer.
The fact remains that thousands of women will go on having abortions, illegally or otherwise, for all kinds of reasons. These range from the genuine suffering that would result from another baby (nine out of 10 women seeking abortions arc married with families) to the inconvenience of having a holiday spoilt by being pregnant.
A number of Catholics have raised these questions. "There is no escaping the fact", writes one, "that countless women simply do not regard their unborn foetus as a human soul. "Is it right." he asks, "to go on imposing Christian belief by force of law on an unbelieving majority?"
There must be many Catholics who would welcome guidance on this conflict between charity and the moral law.