Abortion

Part of the debate – in the Northern Ireland Assembly at 2:45 pm on 20 June 2000.

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Photo of Seamus Close Seamus Close Alliance 2:45, 20 June 2000

There are few issues that will be debated in the House about which I will feel more strongly or passionately than the issue that we are discussing this afternoon. Abortion strikes at the heart of society. It deals with the beginning of human life, but tragically it is also about the snuffing out of human life, even before birth. Abortion kills human beings. Abortion kills the unborn child. It does not matter whether it is six days, six hours, six minutes, or six seconds after conception. In my book, human life begins at conception. That human life which began then — not one hour, two hours, or a week later, but at the moment of conception — is killed by abortion. There is nothing arbitrary about that; it is a fact. It is a fact of life but, tragically, it is also a fact of death.

The tragedy in society today is that abortion has become almost respectable in some people’s eyes. It is accepted in many circles and demanded by those who ought to know better. In Northern Ireland we have the crazy situation of people fighting for limited hours of work, shorter working weeks, the right to work, the equality agenda, and so on, but also fighting for the right to abortion. They would deny the greatest right of all — the right of life to the unborn child. They are either misguided or hypocrites. They would not give the unborn child the opportunity of life. They spew forth their murderous arguments without a care in the world for the lives that they would destroy. Worst of all, there are members of the medical profession who advocate and pontificate about this form of killing. They are a disgrace to their profession, a profession that is supposed to cherish life and heal it, not kill it.

Strong and emotional arguments are advanced to justify abortion. There often seem to be strong reasons for such justification, for example, in cases of rape, or when the father is not the husband, when the girl is unmarried or when the parents do not have the emotional, physical or material resources to cope with another child.

I am the first to concede that anyone who has not faced these problems personally cannot begin to appreciate the intensity of the human dilemma that an unwanted pregnancy can generate. However, strong reasons are not necessarily good reasons. Strong reasons could be given to mitigate virtually every crime that is committed, but that does not make the crime right or justify it. In Northern Ireland, terrorists are threatening to go back to their murderous ways, and they advance arguments to justify that, but murder and butchery are always wrong.

No human problem in society, whether in Northern Ireland or anywhere else, can be solved by killing another human being. Abortion is violent. Abortion is negative. It rests on the dangerous principle that the small and the weak are inferior and that some human beings are disposable. In a society that has made great steps in coping with both physically and mentally handicapped people, the demand for abortion runs in parallel.

There is blatant abuse of ultrasonic scanning by the medical profession to pinpoint babies suffering from spina bifida, mongolism and other disorders. Aborted babies are killed before advantage can be taken of the advances made by medical science. Many people in our so-called compassionate society now regard these handicaps as unacceptable. What is the cure? The cure is disposal. The cure is murder. In what other circumstances do doctors prescribe death as the treatment and murder as the cure? It is another tragic example of man’s inhumanity to man.

What about the pro-abortion lobby? What are the arguments? How does it justify these demands? The most common argument is that it is the mother’s right to choose. The unborn child is, after all, part of her body. However, as Dr Hendron said, that argument fails to recognise that the unborn child is genetically distinct from its mother. It has its own sets of limbs and organs. Its mother’s blood does not circulate through the child as it does through her hand, foot, liver or any other part of her body. The mother and the child can die independently of the other. Therefore, the child is not part of her in the strict sense of the word. If the unborn child were part of the mother, the mother would be incomplete before conception and she would be incomplete after the child’s birth, which is clearly nonsense.

Simply because the child is defenceless and depends on the mother’s womb for security and protection does not make the unborn child any less human. It does not make it any less wrong to kill that unborn child. A woman has as little right to kill an unborn child as she has to kill a one or two-year-old child. No such right exists. She has rights over her own body, but the unborn child is another body.

The pro-abortion lobby argues that an unborn child is not a child but a foetus. That lobby obscures truth and reality with medical terms and fancy language. It avoids calling a spade a spade. A foetus is seen as less human and less real than an "unborn child".