Abortion is the killing of a human being but this is less important than a woman’s right to control her own life, according to a national newspaper commentator.
In a shocking comment piece for The Times newspaper Antonia Senior explains how, despite her belief that life begins at conception, she is still a firm believer in abortion.
And chillingly Ms Senior, who claims she would stake her life on women’s rights, says: “If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too.”
Life
Writing in Wednesday’s edition of The Times she said: “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.”
The commentator goes on to describe the pro-choice movement’s denial of the essential humanity of unborn children as a “convenient lie”.
Women
However, despite this conviction Ms Senior remains adamant that women must have control of their fertility, and expresses alarm at the rise of pro-life feminism in the US.
In her comment piece Ms Senior claims that “you cannot separate women’s rights from their right to fertility control.
“The single biggest factor in women’s liberation was our newly found ability to impose our will on our biology. Abortion would have been legal for millennia had it been men whose prospects and careers were put on sudden hold by an unexpected pregnancy”, she continued.
Aborted
She adds: “As ever, when an issue we thought was black and white becomes more nuanced, 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.”
In 2008 the head of a leading abortion provider admitted that the embryo is a human life, but claimed that its value is “relative” to the wishes of its mother.
Human
Ann Furedi, Chief Executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), made her comments during a debate in Oxford.
The question, Mrs Furedi argued, was “not, when does human life begin? but, when does it really begin to matter?”.
This, she said, could only be weighed up “as being relative to the woman who is carrying it”.
She admitted that “the embryo is a living thing”, and that it “is clearly human in the sense that it’s not a gerbil”, but stopped short of according it the same status as “a born person”.
