Some people understand the need to determine how best to protect the innocent and the vulnerable. Babies and children are deemed worthy of special legal protection because it is ethical for mature, responsible people, to guard them against exploitation and harm.
This is illustrated by a recent development in Britain. The head of the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) pledged the union's support for a campaign to change the law on abortion. This would be to allow abortion up to birth for ANY reason. Large numbers of Midwives were outraged at her presumption. Almost 60% of women in Britain favor a reduction in the time-limit for abortion, not an increase in it!
Medical ethics expert Dr Peter Saunders said, "It is bitterly ironic that the RCM, the supposed champion of safe childbirth and antenatal care, should be backing a campaign seeking to legalise the killing of unborn children up until birth. It is even more extraordinary that their chief executive, who also chairs British Pregnancy Advisory Service [which is campaigning for this change], should be spearheading this initiative without apparently even consulting her membership. It is an extraordinary abuse of power."
More than 8 million abortions were performed in Britain since 1967, till 2011. Less than 2% were to save the mother’s life. 98% were for social reasons. It is estimated that 30% of pregnancies in Europe end in abortion, only a tiny fraction being to save the mother's life. Then we get billions spent in Europe trying to help women conceive! Abortion is an issue gone ethically mad.
Christians are deeply concerned at the erosion of ethics in modern society; with regard to abortion, that took off shortly after abortion legislation loopholes were used to 'deal with' unwanted pregnancies (from the 1960s). Now we see abortion used by very many people as merely another form of contraception - except that another human life has already been conceived. Nowadays, around 1 in 5 pregnancies ends in abortion.
To deliberately kill a helpless, innocent life-form raises the question of murder. The baby, once born, can be adopted. Why should it die because its mother was raped? That means the rapist has almost destroyed one life and the damaged person has then absolutely destroyed another innocent life.
24 hours after fertilization, that human egg cell is biologically genetically complete as a human being in embryo form! This is a living organism which is biologically considered as a 'whole', with all the philosophical and theological meaning that this entails. It is biologically defined as a living organism that is 'whole'. A biological organism entails an organization of the participant, cooperative and interdependent elements in an overarching unity which forms a harmonious whole. This means that a living biological organism is an entity with an integrated, self-developing and self-maintaining organized communion which retains in both space and time a wholeness which precedes and produces its organic parts. A biological living organism is not merely a sum of biochemical reactions; it is a dynamic and organized collection of interdependent, coherent functional cells and structures which coordinate all their integrated functions for the sake of, and from within, this whole organism.
'Wholeness' in this sense represents the totality of the person; that nothing from within has been taken out and that nothing is missing from an inherent or intrinsic perspective. A 'wholeness' cannot be reduced to mere biology and it relates, as well, to the notion of individuality and 'oneness'. Already from the one-cell stage (24 hours after fertilization), the early human embryo shows all the properties of an organism. We are talking about a whole and living member of the species, Homo sapiens. It is a being that never loses its wholeness throughout its life. Science confirms that a one-celled embryo is already an organism and continues as an organism in its subsequent development.
