The Lesser Evil?
Antonia Senior has been a prominent spokesperson for feminism over many years. She has traditionally argued that an unborn child is not a baby but a foetus. But then she gave birth to her own baby and as she says “everything changed”.
In an article in the Times on Wednesday of last week she argues that an unborn child is always a human life at every stage. But then she goes on to argue that a woman’s right to choose is more important than life. She recounts that when she was visiting the Tower of London she observed an exhibit “that asked visitors to vote on whether they would die for a cause”. She writes, “Standing where religious martyrs were held and tortured in Britain’s turbulent reformation I could think of one cause I would stake my life on: a woman’s right to be educated, to have a life beyond the home and to be allowed by law and custom to order her own life as she chooses. And that includes complete control over her own fertility.”
Her argument then goes on to argue, “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. If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too.” This last statement constitutes the most staggering argument. Abortion is murder but it is a lesser crime than robbing a woman of her individual rights. So human autonomy and the exaltation of the self are the primary considerations in our society.
The implications of this for the whole argument about abortion are dramatic. In response to the recent report by the British Medical Association that claimed that foetuses feel no pain before 24 weeks of gestation, Senior actually states that it has nothing to do with the fundamental issue at stake. She is completely correct in this. What she then says is fascinating, “Either a foetus is life from conception, or it is not, ability to feel pain is not, in itself, a defining factor.”
There are other implications that are even more serious and need to be noted. The fundamental assumption that Senior is making is that the disposal of life is a right that men have. The grounds for taking life are not just the issues of justice or war but those things which promote self-interest. A woman has the right to take the life of her unborn child because she must be allowed to “order her own life as she chooses”. The only limitation is that law and custom must acknowledge that right. So the denial of any absolute authority is totally replaced by the absolute authority of the state, and that is to be guided by the simple principle of individual rights and choices.
The denial of the value of life implicit in Senior’s argument, the exaltation of individual rights and the rejection of any authority beyond that of the state mark an even more explicit statement about the triumph of relativism. There are no absolute values and it is surely only a matter of time before we see the evil of abortion being matched by the evil of euthanasia, and then maybe the removal of people with disability and who knows what else? The Third Reich under Hitler pursued similar logic.
Why has this come about? “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”1 When men deny God and remove His laws from their thinking they do not become more enlightened; they become more confused. They chase after values which when pursued to their logical conclusions, as Senior does, produce the most horrifying arguments and justify the most heinous wickedness. There is no wisdom in her position nor in the underlying assumptions of her relativistic mindset. There cannot be because it is “the fear of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom”2. Sadly, Senior is not alone in holding such values, but she is the most honest as her articles show. Once again we see the validity of the Biblical argument being demonstrated by the foolish of men.
We may rejoice to see the truth vindicated, but there can be little satisfaction for Christians to see such godless and dangerous ideas being propagated in our leading newspaper and so receiving considerable credibility. Yet again it should awaken us to the moral decline of our society and the desperate need for prayer for God to intervene. In the light of these things why are we so prayerless?
Roger Hitchings
3rd July 2010
References:
1 Romans 3:18
2 Proverbs 9:10