"After-birth abortion"

The recent furore over the publication by a reputable medical ethics journal of an article arguing that infanticide should be permitted because there is no moral difference between an embryo and a newborn, and the other fuss about the discovery that women in the UK are regularly given abortions on the NHS simply because they don't like the gender of the child ("gendercide"), have caused a certain amount of consternation in the minds of the British public.

If we are on a slippery slope to barbarism, it started earlier than the 1967 Abortion Act. It can be traced back at least to the 14th-century Oxford philosopher William of Ockham, and to other nominalist and voluntarist philosophers of the Middle Ages. Abortion is a social justice issue, and a moral issue, but more than that, it is an ontological and epistemological one. What is a "person", and what is a "right"? Modern dilemmas over abortion stem from the widespread assumption – derived from these philosophers – that the word "person" is merely a label that we choose to apply to some group of individuals we choose to relate to as equals. It does not, that is, have a deeper

The secret of life

Goya, "The French Penalty", c. 1824

One of the important themes in Pope Benedict's social encyclical is the so-called "right to life", which has become a bone of contention in modern society. "When a society moves towards the denial or suppression of life, it ends up no longer finding the necessary motivation and energy to strive for man's true good" (28). The reason is simple. Man is not "merely the fruit of either chance or necessity" (as the Pope puts it in the section of the right to religious freedom, 29). He is made in God's image, and his life belongs to God. We must not treat it as something over which we have dominion, either to manufacture or destroy, as he discusses in Chapter 6 on technology. Both abortion and euthanasia are fostered by a "materialistic and mechanistic understanding of human life" (75).

Yet the pressures towards both cannot be overestimated. As we have seen with recent changes in sexual ethics, without a firm understanding of why these things are wrong, they soon become socially acceptable and then commonplace. Chesterton once joked that one might overcome the need for birth control by letting all the babies be born and then killing those one didn't like. He was attempting a reductio ad absurdum, but today influential philosophers are advocating infanticide in all seriousness.

So, what is intrinsically wrong with abortion and the "mercy killing" of human beings? We cannot understand this without some appreciation of the notion