So when is a person a person?

When a friend and I went up to take part in the 40 Days for Life prayer vigil recently we ended up having a very interesting conversation with a pro-choice advocate in which we had a short debate about when precisely life began. It's a question that divides many but, from what I have experienced, no two people who maintain that life begins at any moment other than conception can agree on when precisely it starts. Some say it's when all the organs develop, some when there is a heartbeat, some say it's during the third trimester, some when the baby is actually born. And the thing is their understanding, their opinion will change depending upon the circumstances. To the woman considering aborting a child at, say, 20 weeks its "just a clump of cells", to the woman excitedly announcing she's 5 months pregnant its time for congratulations as she's carrying a baby. And now, alas, there is this from Planned Parenthood in the US.



I think the bit that highlights the utter hypocrisy, utter lunacy of this organisation's endorsement of post-birth abortion is when Ms. Snow (Planned Parenthood's representative) is asked;

Representative: "Along the same lines you stated that a baby born on a table as a result of a botched abortion that that decision should be left to the doctor and the family? Is that what you're saying?"

Ms Snow: "That decision should be between the patient and the health care provider."

Representative: "I think that at that point that the patient would be the child struggling on the table. Wouldn't you agree?"

Ms Snow: "That's a very good question, I really don't know how to answer that. ..."

Her response sums up the whole debate on abortion; when is a life a life? When is it 'acceptable' to take a life? At what point is a baby a baby? Under these circumstances a child is not even a child when born alive; his or her heart is beating, he or she is breathing, he or she is probably crying but it's not a baby and it's 'acceptable' for that life to be ended if the woman, the doctor and the family say so.

Life begins at the moment the egg is fertilised; that fertilised ovum will continue to divide and grow, it has human DNA and, all being well, it will continue to grow and thrive and be born. He or she is a person at the second they are born, he or she is a person five minutes before they were born, he or she is a person at every point in the pregnancy. All of us were created equal, all of us have equal dignity. One thing that really hits home writing this post today; Good Friday is that we are powerfully reminded that Christ came to restore this fundamental dignity as children of God. No one can strip us of that. It is never right to take a life.

Praying for an end to abortion

Today we have our first blog post by group member Chris (but due to technical issues it has my name at the bottom!!!)

40 Days For Life is an international campaign that, usually, runs twice a year and hold a peaceful vigil of prayer opposite the headquarters of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) in Bedord Square, London. Katherine and I went there on Sunday to show our support and also to see if it was something that the Parish might like to support in the future.

The vigil at the corner of Bedford Square, as you can see it
remained well attended after we retreated to find coffee!

We were booked into the 1pm to 2pm slot and arrived, much to our astonishment, at exactly the right time. We found three people at the vigil and in front of them were three boards, showing what the vigil was for and also a large sign with a passage from the Bible on it. The people were very welcoming and pleased to see us, especially the two Polish ladies, who had been standing there for two hours and we're rather cold! We took their place and had a chat with the man, Martin (who we assumed was one of the co-ordinators of the vigil), who was there.

He said that the Polish community had been very supportive of the vigil. He said that there was another vigil up the road and, between them, they had already saved 35 babies from being aborted. The other week, a Pro Choice group set up near them and began shouting abuse. A lady who works nearby came over to the Pro Life group and said that, although she didn't necessarily share their views, she was disgusted by the other group's behaviour. While we were there, only one person said a negative comment as he passed by. Most people looked and were respectful.

While we were there, we prayed as a group which was a beautiful and moving experience in itself as none of us knew each other but we had all been called there by our love for God and our neighbour. There was a blue book with various Scripture passages and prayers in it which we took turns to read aloud, we also said the Rosary. 

After an hour, we said our goodbyes and the man said that they'd be delighted if members from our Parish would be able to come to next year's vigil. Before heading home we stopped to light a couple of candles at the ever spectacular Westminster Cathedral. I'm really glad I went and I know Katherine feels the same. Please, please continue to pray for all those facing crisis pregnancies and for those helping with the vigil.

40 Days for Death

This is chilling.  I read today, via John Smeaton's blog, about a Planned Parenthood initiative in California in which pro-choicers are being asked to make a forty-day prayer campaign in support of what the organising group calls the "sacred care" of abortions.  LifeSiteNews carries a report on it here.

The organisers, Six Rivers Planned Parenthood of Eureka, California, have entitled their prayer campaign "Supporting Women Everywhere".  They are backed up by Humboldt County "Clergy for Choice" (please God these do not include any Catholic priests!) who apparently "value all human life" (as long, presumably, as it's not inside anyone's womb).  They have produced a brochure with a prayer for each of the forty days and something struck me very forcibly as I read through it.  Look at these two prayers:

Day 2: Today we pray for compassionate religious voices to speak out for the dignity and autonomy of women.

Day 12: Today we pray that women know the power of their own stories. May they find their voices and tell their truths.

Each prayer, in fact the whole campaign, revolves around "the autonomy of women... the power of their own stories... their voices... their truths".  The unborn children in the womb, of whichever gender, apparently have no voice or truth, no story beginning, because they are never mentioned.  It's all about the women.  I can only suppose that this is because the organisers do not consider the "clump of cells" growing in the womb to be a person.  I struggle to understand the Humboldt County Clergy for Life, though, who have explicitly stated that they "value all human life", because as I remarked above they evidently can't be including what's growing in the womb.  Only... it's alive... and it's not anything other than human by species... so, um?!  Humboldt clergy, please explain your logic.

On Day 36 participants are invited to pray for "the families we've chosen" and yet Day 39 asks that "a contagious love... overflow from our spirits".  Well, let's qualify: only to those we choose to infect.  That does sound like a contagious "love" and not one I'd care to contract or be contaminated by.

It is a sad day when a prayer campaign is not only launched against a prior prayer campaign, Christian up against Christian, but is launched in support of violating the Fifth Commandment, "Thou shalt not kill".  It is a sad day when a group of people claiming to have faith in God can absorb the individualistic, utilitarian ethics of the modern secular world so thoroughly, to the extent that they describe the dismembering of human foetuses not just as permissible but actually as "sacred care".  And perhaps the saddest thing of all is how misguided this all is.  Humboldt Clergy, this is not the way to support or value women.

Our right, their wrong

Never the twain shall meet?

'Twas not my intention to blog just now - sat down at the computer to do something completely different! - but I came across an exchange between the Guardian newspaper and SPUC which I thought threw up some good points about the whole debate between pro-choicers and pro-lifers, so decided to post it up.

You can read the exchange for yourself at Revealed: what children are being told about abortion (no hint of melodrama there) and here on John Smeaton's blogsite (where he reports that the Guardian has published SPUC's response to its article).  Essentially it centres around a presentation given by a SPUC speaker at a secondary school in Comberton, which I assume we can take to be fairly typical of the school talks generally given by SPUC.  This particular talk was disclosed to the Guardian by a group of ladies known as Feminist Action Cambridge who were so shocked by its contents that they nearly had to resort to their smelling salts, with Andrew Copson, Chief Executive of the British Humanist Association, galloping up on his charger to proclaim that "It is deeply disturbing that anti-choice groups are so easily able to enter schools and present these damaging fictions... the government should be more pro-active in preventing groups that persistently make false claims of this nature from having access to vulnerable children, especially in schools."

Let those of us who are not regular Guardian readers, with due fear and trembling, find out what those nasty black-cloaked people at SPUC have been peddling to our innocent youngsters.

Now to be fair, a major concern of the Guardian seems to be that SPUC's talk made a clear link between abortion and an increased risk of breast cancer.  Whilst carrying a first pregnancy to full term does seem to confer a protective effect against breast cancer, the link between abortion and an increased risk is much debated with various studies reaching different conclusions (although the Guardian only quotes one study, which reaches the conclusion that suits it, i.e. a study co-ordinated by Cancer Research UK and published in the Lancet which concludes that abortion does not increase the risk).  In this I think there is a lesson to be learned by pro-lifers.  We must be careful about the statistics we use and the claims we make.  The link between abortion and breast cancer may or may not have been made as clearly in SPUC's talk as the Guardian claims, but at the least the topic seems to have been presented in a way that begs a particular interpretation, whether or not this was the speaker's intention.

Whilst pro-lifers will have a passion for truth and love of life that they long to put across, it is important not to get carried away but to do so with calm rationality.  Being sure of the strict accuracy of one's facts is vital so that, in all justice, we can give a fair hearing to the opposition's point of view without distortion. I can remember myself being put off pro-life work at one stage because it seemed to be gushing with "rivers of blood", riddled with "anti-life conspiracies" and the like... Thankfully the language used seems to have moderated these days.

Of course we may not ourselves be treated with the same justice.  Emma-Rose Cornwall from Feminist Action Cambridge retorts in the Guardian's article, "SPUC's supposed concern for zygotes is a poorly concealed desire to see women forced back into their 'god-given' roles as mothers and housewives, and simultaneously to punish what they perceive as promiscuous sexuality."  Eh??!!  Oh well, maybe Emma-Rose had taken too big a whiff of those smelling-salts.

The fact is that between those who are "pro-choice" and "pro-life" there lies such a huge gulf that the former see statements as appalling which the latter would regard as true and self-evident.  The Guardian quotes a few shockers from SPUC's talk as the denouement of its article:

The 1967 Abortion Act
"What the [abortion] act did was effectively make unborn children a class of non-person. In other words, they didn't have a right to life."
Abortion and disability
"This was an act that gave greater rights to protect people with disabilities... and this is a good thing. But we have a strange situation where on the one hand we do everything we can to help people with disabilities after they're born but it is legal within the Abortion Act to do abortion for disability right up until the birth of the baby."
Women's reproductive rights
"There are certain things as a society we decide are unacceptable, we don't have a right to do. So for example, if somebody were to beat up an old lady, we wouldn't say that's their right to do that. I would say... I would say without the right to life all the other rights become irrelevant."

And the Guardian's problem is...?

OK, again, to be fair, the allusion to beating up old ladies was I think a misjudgment, because it leaves the speaker open to the accusation that he/she is comparing women who have abortions to muggers of old ladies. But other than that, these are statements with which I would wholeheartedly agree.

The Guardian also objected to the fact that children were told abortion can be harmful to women, either physically or mentally.  We cannot brush under the carpet the fact that it can - more often the latter than the former perhaps.  There are countless testimonies given by women who have had abortions which support the claim that after abortion many women do indeed experience trauma, and ongoing, even lifelong regret.  Whether this can be accurately described in psychiatric terms as "a form of post-traumatic stress disorder" (which SPUC's speaker did) I don't know; but there is no justification to complain when children are warned that yes, regret and depression do happen.  The Guardian also seemed to find it shocking that it was suggested to the young people that giving birth to a baby after rape might be allowing "something positive" to come out of the experience.

Enough.  As Anthony McCarthy of SPUC said in his reply to the Guardian, "Supporters of abortion may not like to hear such things, but do they have a right to stop schoolchildren hearing them?"  This incident is indicative of the huge gulf between the pro-life and pro-choice perspectives: we each call the other's right, wrong; and the other's black, white.  It will take calm, dignity, integrity and much prayer to bridge that gulf.

(SPUC have a briefing note about "Abortion and Women's health" which you can download here.)