By Kathleen Gilbert
LONDON, U.K., July 6, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - After contemplating the immense mysteries of human life and sacrificial love in comparison to a woman's "right to fertility control," a writer for the Times of London concludes that attempts by pro-aborts to dismiss the life of an unborn child are a "convenient lie" hiding the fact that, "Yes, abortion is killing.”
“But,” she concludes, “it's the lesser evil."
Columnist Antonia Senior in a June 30 column (available by subscription only) says that, despite the fact that the abortion debate hinges upon whether the unborn child is a unique life or not, women who wish to assert the cause of their freedom from male domination "must be prepared to kill for it."
Senior begins by linking the cause of abortion to that of religious martyrs.
“Cradle Tower at the Tower of London is an interactive display that asks visitors to vote on whether they would die for a cause,” she says. "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."
However, she admits that her "absolutist position” has been “under siege" since she gave birth to her own child.
She notes how "having a baby paints the world an entirely different hue" by revealing the underlying selfishness in what at first appears to be courageous self-affirmation.
Senior gives the example of Leo Tolstoy’s adulterous heroine Anna Karenina in the book by the same title, writing: “If you read the book as a teenager, you back her choices with all the passion of youth. Love over convention, go Anna! Then you have children and realise that Anna abandons her son to shack up with a pretty soldier, and then her daughter when she jumps under a train. She becomes a selfish witch.”
Senior then launches into discussing abortion, which she says "hinges on the notion of life," no matter what other arguments or tactics are employed. "Either a foetus is a life from conception, or it is not,” she notes.
Senior then admits that: "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."
"Any other conclusion is a convenient lie that we on the pro-choice side of the debate tell ourselves to make us feel better about the action of taking a life."
"That little seahorse shape floating in a willing womb is a growing miracle of life. In a resentful womb it is not a life, but a foetus — and thus killable."
This fact, she says, leaves feminism with a "problem," to which she attributes the "groundswell" of young pro-life feminists.
But, she insists, "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."
She concludes therefore that, "As ever, when an issue we thought was black and white becomes more nuanced, the answer lies in choosing the lesser evil” – in this case choosing "the expectation of a life unburdened by misogyny," which she suggests can only be achieved through abortion.
Hence, she says, "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."
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