Times Article accepts abortion kills a human being but justifies it

The frank admission by a Times columist of her acceptance that abortion is the killing of a human being but that in her view this is a less important than a woman’s right to control her fertility is shocking to say the least.

Antonia Senior in an article in the Times on Wednesday June 30th concedes that life begins at conception but believes that killing of unborn babies is secondary to the right of a woman to control her fertility .

"What seems increasingly clear to me is that, in the absence of an objective definition, a foetus is a life by any subjective measure. My daughter was formed at conception, and all the barely understood alchemy that turned the happy accident of that particular sperm meeting that particular egg into my darling, personality-packed toddler took place at that moment. She is so unmistakably herself, her own person — forged in my womb, not by my mothering.

"Any other conclusion is a convenient lie that we on the pro-choice side of the debate tell ourselves to make us feel better about the action of taking a life. That little seahorse shape floating in a willing womb is a growing miracle of life. In a resentful womb it is not a life, but a foetus — and thus killable."

Despite the fact that she accepts that abortion is killing she describes it as the lesser evil. In other words a woman’s so called right to choose trumps the right to life,you cannot separate women’s rights from their right to fertility control. The single biggest factor in women’s liberation according to Ms Senior

was our newly found ability to impose our will on our biology. Abortion would have been legal for millennia had it been men whose prospects and careers were put on sudden hold by an unexpected pregnancy. The mystery pondered on many a girls’ night out is how on earth men, bless them, managed to hang on to political and cultural hegemony for so long. The only answer is that they are not in hock to their biology as much as we are. Look at a map of the world and the right to abortion on request correlates pretty exactly with the expectation of a life unburdened by misogyny.

Chillingly Ms Senior says she would stake her life on a woman’s so called right over the right to life of the unborn : “If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too.” She says

See comment by SPUC Director John Smeaton and comment by the Christian Institute