Friday 29 February 2008

The UK's moral confusion

On the BBC news website today:

"Abortion tablets in wife's food: A baker put abortion tablets into his wife's breakfast to try to make her lose their baby, a court has heard."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/7271546.stm

Quote: "Mrs Abraham suffered pain and bleeding but the child survived unharmed. ... Magira, 36, of Holmebrook Drive, Hendon, north London, admitted 'using an instrument to procure a miscarriage' - the first such charge in 30 years."

According to the story, Mr. Magira's wife was 11 weeks pregnant at the time. What's wrong with this picture?

What's wrong with this picture is that the only reason this was a criminal offence, and the only reason the young one was considered a "baby" or a "child" whose life needed protecting, was because the wrong person administered the tablets. Had his wife administered the tablets to herself, then instead of "baby", "child", "baby", "child, the little one would have just been identified as a non-entity - an impersonal mass of tissue - and there would have been no question of any prosecution. The young life would have been defined out of existence, the courts and the BBC would have cared nothing for it, and the professionals involved in killing it would have used the politically correct terminology of "foetus" or "foetal tissue", or the like to make it sound like nothing notable happened.

Did you get that? Whether the baby was a real person, and whether artificially ending its life would constitute a crime or a non-event, was decided by who put the tablets in the food.

Welcome to the UK!

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