In round figures our medical people abort around two-hundred thousand unborn babies each year. And the great majority of those babies would become children and then adults – if only they were left where they were.
I have spent much time thinking about those poor children, and their unhappy mothers. If only there was a way of avoiding such loss and such unhappiness.
I also spend time thinking about all our other children ; the children who were not killed in their mothers’ wombs. I think of the survivors. What do they think of the situation we are in? Or, more to the point, what do they think of the situation they are in?
What can it be like to be ten years old, say, and knowing that about one-third of all babies are killed unborn? Knowing that there is a fair chance that your own mother has had a previous abortion? Or that she is likely to have one any day? What can it be like to reflect on the fact that you might have had a brother or a sister, but for the other fact – that he or she has been killed.
Of course, the child cannot be sure that his mother had an abortion ; but does that make it any easier to have these thoughts? We know, by talking to ex-servicemen who have survived battles in which their colleagues died, that they can be deeply troubled by lifelong feelings of sadness, depression and guilt. “Why me?” they ask, “Why did I survive when my friends died?”
I know it is unpleasant for the rest of us to think of these things but, if we are to make a society that can be at ease with itself, we really must do so. And we must do something to put matters right.
Adventures of ideas 