h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

How is abortion any better than cold-blooded murder? Is a baby any less human or with less rights?

As you can probably tell, I am anti-murder.

How is it different?

From a purely technical standpoint, the aborted foetus is not capable of independent life. Significant numbers of foetuses are spontaneously aborted with no medical intervention.

Interesting note: most campaigners against abortion are men, most campaigners for abortion are women. And guess which sex gets the pain of childbirth and the lion's share of the drudgery bringing the child up?

Well, just because the woman carries the child for nine months doesn't mean they have judgement over the child's life. Guess what adoption is for, to give the children to people who care, not the people who don't want the child they conceived.

No, adoption is not an alternative to making abortion available - just as availability of abortion is not an alternative to responsibility or using contraception.

Abortion is in many cases fundamentally less damaging to individuals and society than forcing a girl or a woman to carry a child to term.

I think Alton got it right i his Bill: abortion should be legal up to about two or three weeks before the point at which it becomes medically possible to keep the child alive ex utero. Before that point the foetus is incapable of independent life.

The real reason for making abortion available legally, though, is that whe it's illegal it still happens - and under dangerous and unhygienic conditions. In countries such as the Republic of Ireland (an advanced Western democracy, I think you'll agree) women still die following botched back-street abortions.

Public opinion falls along a spectrum from "abortion on demand up to the moment of birth" to "taking the contraceptive pill should be illegal because it's the same as abortion." Religious zealots tend to the latter while feminist activists tend to the former. And most people fall somewhere in the middle: as long as the baby is too young to be conscious and too young top be save dif it were born prematurely, then it's none of our business what the mother decides.

I am a practising Christian and regular Churchgoer, I am on the Parochial Church Council, have been elected an Elder of a Methodist church, and am a governer of a church-aided school. And my view is that it's none of my business what an individual woman decides, but that the limits should be clear and rational.