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Salient. Newspaper of Victoria University of Wellington Students Association. Vol 41 No. 5. March 27 1978
More on Abortion
More on Abortion
Dear Editor,
Lindy Cassidy's letter in last week's Salient (20/3/78) just bears out what I wrote the previous week. If one says something often enough one starts to believe it (and believe it sincerely too! — a sort of self-hypnosis). She says that abortion is a woman's "democratic right" because it is a "democratic right" and giving no other reasons.
That abortion is "a woman's democratic right" is denied by a large section of the world's population and is most certainly not universally recognised as such. It could possibly be argued (and may well have been argued) on the same grounds that Hitler had a democratic right to kill off over 6 million Jews, that certain "democratic states" have a "right" to exterminate thier opponents, etc., but that doesn't mean that such a right really exists. Rather in those cases it was a matter of their own invention, as I submit is the case with those who claim that abortion is "a woman's democratic right". It is using emotive terminology because there is no other justification for their stance.
Rights derive from the nature of human beings, and the killing of a foetus just because the mother was too lazy to use contraceptives and just can't be bothered accepting the consequences (which is the more common situation in which abortion is wanted, leaving aside the rarer difficult situations e.g. rape, for the moment) is to deny the right of the foetus to live! To wantonly kill a foetus seems to me to be not excercising a "fundamental democratic right," but rather denying one.
Yours etc.,
Vic Urwin.
(Our problem seems to be a scale of rights, and who is deemed to possess rights. The scale starts with the woman, who does have certain rights by virtue of being human, and goes down the line through the foetus, to the individual sperm and egg cells To claim a foetus should have rights over and above those of a fully grown adult is just as sensible as saying that every sperm, by virtue of the fact that it is a potential human being, if only allowed the chance to develop, should not be denied that chance, and that the use of contraceptives is murder. Suggesting that either a sperm cell or a foetus have rights over and above the parents is to me rather absurd. The motivation for these arguments would appear to be a form of prudery which delights in seeing people suffer unwanted children as a result of enjoying the forbidden fruit - their bodies. There is certainly no logic in it. Until it is born, or at least until it is viable outside the womb, there is no way that one can realistically consider a foetus to be a human any more than an ovum. — typstr)