Occasionally, a news story will stop me in my tracks. The Guardian newspaper carried one such story a month or two ago. It was about a woman in Britain who aborted her foetus at somewhere between 32 and 34 weeks – in the eighth month of her pregnancy.
Her case came to trial and she was given a 28-month sentence, serving half of that time in custody and the remainder under licence. The judge in the case told her: “You knew full well your pregnancy was beyond the limit of 24 weeks and you deliberately lied to gain access to telemedical services." Had she pleaded guilty at an earlier stage, he said, her custodial sentence could have been suspended.
The limit for legal abortion in Britain is 24 weeks. The judge sympathised with the woman: “I accept that you had a very deep emotional attachment to your unborn child." The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, along with the Royal College of Midwives, wrote to the judge urging him not to impose a custodial sentence.
This is all rather odd. Nobody seems to dispute that the pregnant woman’ s action took the life of a helpless human being, yet prestigious bodies in Britain believe that the judge should have showed compassion to the woman. While it does appear this woman was having a hard time – she has three other children – it’s also clear that she took the life of her baby. The many expressions of compassion for the woman – from the judge, from the RCOG and the RCM – underline their sympathy.
I wonder if the baby had been born and had been killed by its mother at eight months would the calls for compassion have been as loud? I don’t think so. Every effort to feed and protect such an infant is made; the thought of someone killing It evokes compassion. That’s compassion for the baby, not the person who killed the baby.
As I’ve already indicated, British law declares a foetus to be human at 24 weeks. Since this child was killed at 28 weeks, it was the legal equivalent to taking an eight-month-old infant and killing it. To even write the words seems a violent act. And yet public bodies and even the judge sympathised with the woman who did the killing.
My guess is that this woman evokes compassion because when she killed the infant, it was still in her womb, hidden from view. It’s always easier to kill people you can’t see – witness Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The pilots who dropped those bombs would have been revolted at the thought of cutting the throat of each of the tens of thousands of people who died in the blast. Likewise this mother would probably have been revolted by the individual killing of her baby if it was in its cot and eight months old.
Most debates over abortion aare between those who think a foetus becomes human at 28 weeks and those who believe that it becomes human at conception. Not this one. This one involves the killing of a human being, according to the law of the land.
In the light of this case, there are those who declare the British abortion law to be antiquated and in need of changing so that it’ s lawful to abort a foetus at any stage prior to delivery.
I have little doubt the compassion expressed for this unfortunate woman was genuine. But this is to impale yourself on the spear-end of logic. I too would feel compassion for her, but I cannot see any way that I would want to be in the infant’s shoes rather than those of the offending parent. Can you think of any other situation where you feel for the trauma of the killer and feel nothing for the killer’s victim?
