An article about abortion in the Times has caused something of a storm.Antonia Senior, who wrote it, was once out-and-out for abortion rights. A woman's body, her choice, end of story.
While pro-lifers, she says, insisted that a baby is a life, with rights, from the moment of conception, people in the pro-choice camp, like her, insisted that an embryo is not a person: we were talking only about a potential life, with no rights.
Then something happened to Antonia: a baby came along. And her moral certainty about abortion began to waver. Her absolutist position came under siege. "Having a baby," she says, "paints the world an entirely different hue. Black and white no longer quite cut it.
"What seems increasingly clear to me is that, in the absence of an objective definition, a foetus is a life by any subjective measure. My daughter was formed at conception, and all the barely understood alchemy that turned the happy accident of that particular sperm meeting that particular egg into my darling, personality-packed toddler took place at that moment. She is so unmistakably herself, her own person - forged in my womb, not by my mothering.
"Any other conclusion is a convenient lie that we on the pro-choice side of the debate tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better about the action of taking a life. That little seahorse shape floating in a willing womb is a growing miracle of life."
So far, so good. But then comes the shocking bit.
Antonia came to consider if there was any cause she was prepared to die for. She decided there was one: a woman's right to be educated, to have a life beyond the home and to be allowed by law and custom to order her own life as she chooses - and that included control over her own fertility.
"The answer lies in choosing the lesser evil. The nearly 200,000 aborted babies in the UK each year are the lesser evil, no matter how you define life, or death, for that matter. If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it too."*
In other words, even if you believe the baby within you is a living human being, you ought to be prepared to kill it if convenience demands.
The article caused a stir because people are asking if this signals a change in the abortion debate. Are people who are in favour of abortion going to admit freely that the baby is a human person but that the woman has a perfect right to kill it anyway?
If this is the case, what, then, will be response of the pro-life community?
*There are in fact more than 200,000 abortions in the UK each year. The figure of nearly 200,000 is for England and Wales only.
