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
