I was chatting about the ‘abortion debate’ with a friend who told me about a woman whose baby was terminally ill and in pain in her womb and how her doctors refused to abort and how the baby died within a few hours of being born. It reminded me of the essay I had to write about saving the mother or the baby and at twenty coming down on the side of saving the mother on the basis that she might be able to bear a healthy child later.
Couldn’t the baby grow up to have a healthy baby? I was asked.
It has struck me very forcibly over the last days of thinking that the abortion debate is not about the rights of life, which we in any case disparage when we have occasion. The issue arises because of the far more intractably question, about how we love. Ethics arises because human beings have to respond to the world around them and each other. A huge amount of our responses fall short of any ethical quality whatsoever because we sacrifice ethics for money, but on this issue we put a value on life as we love it. The mother is known, a daughter, wife,lover sister. the baby is not yet known – a potential love.
Even so the tears are the same. Ethics can often make cowards of us.