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Down with Dogmatism on Abortion

While reading this weeks letters' page (Salient 5.6.77), I was confronted with the blatant and overtly selfish logic of the antiabortion faction. I know as well as any of us that this faction is dominated by, if not entirely composed of. Catholics, and I feel that it's about time someone told them that they have no monopoly on Christian morality. Allen Ginsberg the American poet said that the surest way to kill a man was to drop him into the middle of the Twentieth Century and leave him there What does this have to do with Abortion? In point of fact everything, because by insisting on the birth of unwanted children you ultimately ruin at least two lives if not more. It is better in terms of simple humanity to destroy a fetus which has only the most narrow clinical definition of life, than to impair a childs chances of any form of advancement in this world and further to similarly impair the chances of its parents.

To my mind the Catholic Church church has no mandate from any authority, secular or sacred, to impose it's morality on others. Not only did Christ abhor the sort of people that in his day fromed the party of the Pharisees, or in todays society form organisations such as the Society for the Protection of Community Standards, but also I do not feel that Christ had any intention of ever forming a Church so stubborn and dogmatic in it's morality that it can ignore human suffering and can condemn without a thought unborn children to even more suffering.

As for the 'rights' of the unborn child. I fail to see why it should have precedence over it's parents, when, once it is born, it's parent, until it is at least 16, have considerable, very considerable rights over it.

To return to Christian morality. I cannot see why Christ, whose concern, whether you believe him to be divine or not, was with the common people, would advocate a ban on birth-control. I feel that abortion is not ultimately desirable yet no birth control method is in any way flawless, for in spite of everything unwanted pregnancies continue to occur, and therefore it is a necessary part of the social welfare system to maintain or establish a free abortion service, without government interference.

There is no justification on grounds of morality, certainly not on Christian morality grounds, to oppose the rights of a mother over her child, especially a child which has not lived in any sense but a medical one.