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“I was born of honest parents in one of the humbler walks of life, my father being a manufacturer of dog-oil and my mother having a small studio in the shadow of the village church, where she disposed of unwelcome babes. In my boyhood I was trained to habits of industry; I not only assisted my father in procuring dogs for his vats, but was frequently employed by my mother to carry away the debris of her work in the studio. In performance of this duty I sometimes had need of all my natural intelligence for all the law officers of the vicinity were opposed to my mother’s business. They were not elected on an opposition ticket, and the matter had never been made a political issue; it just happened so.”
This incredible paragraph opens Ambrose Bierce’s Oil of Dog. Bierce (1842-1914?) is possibly not too well known in Malta, although his The Devil’s Dictionary is one of the sharper and more bitter satires of humanity one could come across in any decent library.
The situation has changed somewhat since Bierce’s time. The matter has been made a political issue, particularly in the wake of radical feminism, which views motherhood as a threat to women, rather than as a joyful experience – the view held by the other brand of feminist thinking. Abortion has been legalised in many countries, and in many quarters is considered as a family planning tool and one of the solutions for global overpopulation problems.
I must admit my admiration for the Pro-Life Movement. It is waging a laudable war against the legalisation of abortion in Malta. Why now strikes one as a very interesting question, but I will refrain from venturing an answer. Rather, I will state from the outset that I have signed their petition. Some years ago, an Italian friend of mine told me his girlfriend was pregnant and they were undecided whether to abort. I spent some four or five hours on an international call, trying to dissuade him from embarking upon the project. I must confess my complete failure. Eight years ago, my friend and his partner gave their consent to the termination of their unborn child’s existence. Shortly afterwards they terminated their relationship as well. He is now married to another woman.
As a consequence of that incident, I have very strong feelings on the subject. It was only natural, then, that I should read A Defense of Abortion, a University of Cambridge publication hailed as the ultimate pro-abortion philosophical argument. It is the work of a distinguished American ethics professor. Possibly due to my incomplete philosophical preparation, I found the author’s logic hard to dispute. He defeats the sanctity of life argument on its own terms. He defeats all other arguments, and ultimately claims that while abortion is not morally advisable, it is still morally permissible. This he bases on the premise that the foetus lacks cortical activity in the brain until a certain stage of the pregnancy. In a nutshell, the thesis proposed here is that prior to the beginning of cortical activity, abortion, although not something to be encouraged, is permissible.
This argument sounded vaguely familiar. It then occurred to me I had once read an interview with an Italian pro-abortionist who reminded one and all that St Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest doctors of the Catholic Church, had claimed that the foetus had no soul until its 40th day in the case of males and its 90th in the case of females! How the saint managed to reach such precision considering the level of medieval knowledge remains one of the great unresolved mysteries of moral history! Be it as it may, the point is that the learned American professor was recycling a medieval argument by giving it a modern trapping. Whereas theology defined the Middle Ages, science defines our times. So, the argument which employed the concept of soul in those days, now employs the concept of cortical activity in ours. Ultimately, it boils down to the same reasoning. Two human beings produce an entity which is not entirely human until a certain point in its development.
Despite his great scholarly reputation St Thomas Aquinas was wrong. St Basil the Great who – already in the early centuries of Christian thought – had declared arguments similar to St Thomas’s as nothing short of a sophisticated exercise in splitting hairs. A human being is a human being from the beginning. Period. One would be tempted to ask when the “beginning” actually begins, but Dr Michael Axiaq is already doing a fine job on this theme.
Another question could be: what proof is there that a human being is a human being from the beginning? But this can only be a rhetorical question. It reminds one of the cat-ness argument: a quality called “cat-ness”, which is very difficult to define, is what makes a cat a cat. Likewise, “human-ness” is what makes a human being a human being. Under another aspect one could quote, though very cautiously, from Jung’s Synchronicity, where the great psychoanalyst hints at the possibility of consciousness deriving not only from the cortex but also from the sympathetic system, which is distinct from the cerebrospinal system.
The question of whether a being is human or not is, of course, of the essence. It has been asked throughout the history of humankind. There were times when black Africans, for instance, were considered to be less than human. It is, evidently, a matter of classification: what qualities must a being possess in order to qualify as human? A University of London professor, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, wrote a book to answer this question, So You Think You’re Human? It is a great book; its author has been described by the New Statesman as “one of the most formidable political explicators of our time.”
Fernández-Armesto writes: “Social pressure to license abortion has created a new, effectively sub-human category: the unborn baby (formerly assumed to be fully human and to participate fully in human rights). In consequence, a new quality called ‘personhood’ has now been invoked to justify the reclassification of the unborn, and the old question of how far humanhood is a biological or a cultural status has acquired a new focus of interest.”
This interest is present even here in Malta, and to my mind the endeavours of the Pro-Life Movement are to be viewed in this perspective. What puzzles me, for one, about the Movement is why it should doubt the position of the Malta Labour Party. Alfred Sant published a collection of short stories some years back called Kwart ta’ Mija. One of the short stories deals with an abortion case. The narrator meets a respectable Maltese family at the airport, they are going abroad, with their teenage daughter, and the procuring of an abortion is alluded to throughout. From the way the story unfolds I reached the conclusion that the Labour leader opposes abortion.
Why the Pro-Life Movement should tinge its laudable mission with partisan political prejudice is absolutely beyond my comprehension.
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