Abortion has moved away from being a faith issue. It is a human rights issue. Some people believe that aborting a child should not be the right of any person – not even the mother of the child. They feel that the child in question essentially has no say and therefore its rights are ignored. They think that it is all very well to say that women should be able to choose what happens to their body and that is true until it infringe on the rights of someone else. This is the dilemma facing politicians, medical practitioners and the legal fraternity.
The Christian standpoint is that life – or the birth of a soul – occurs at the moment of conception. Therefore if humanity, or life, is recognised within this context, then aborting a week-old foetus or the pre-meditated murder of an adult person should be considered the same within a moral framework.
Christians believe that one may argue that an embryo is smaller than an infant but does that make a difference? If the argument of size prevails, we will be accepting that the life of an adult is worth more than the life of a child. They feel that no parent would ever consider the life of their teenage child to be more precious than the life of their 6 month old infant.
People who are pro-choice argue that an unborn child is less developed than when it emerges from the womb. The pro-choicers also argue that because a child has not yet been born, it essentially does not exist. In effect they are saying that because a child is resident in the womb it has no right to life. From this standpoint the child only becomes human once it completes the journey from the womb to the outside world.
Another argument for abortion is that an unborn child has no viability in terms of its level of dependence. Christians would argue that if this argument is used to condone abortion then adults who are severely brain-damaged and older people who are senile could also be terminated, simply because they cannot add value to society.
The debate is a complex one, but every woman who is contemplating abortion needs to do the necessary research and then be prepared to live with her decision either way.