The greatest threat

Mark Azzopardi has chosen a very slippery slope to prove his thesis that "a foetus, on the basis of its mental capacity should be considered a person, with full moral rights, during the last three months of gestation (or perhaps, a month earlier to allow a margin of error)" (January 24). Does this mean that if an unborn baby just before its birth, let us say at 38 weeks, were to be discovered to have an impaired mental capacity it should be considered not quite a person yet and therefore eligible for abortion?

If a person's attribution of personhood is his mental faculties then there are numberless millions in the world, children and adults, whose mental capacities are extremely limited - the elderly in a wheelchair who have lost all perspective of past, present or future, patients with dementia and those in a persistent vegetative state - who do not qualify to be considered as persons. Incidentally, around 70 years ago, Hitler and his regime decided that some Germans with severe mental disabilities should not be allowed to live anymore and consequently 70,000 men and women were put into gas-wagons and exterminated.

The embryo or the foetus is not a potential human being but a person with potentiality and carries the full programme of what that person will be in the future. After all, the mental and physical facilities of a five-year-old are certainly not those of a fully mature adult but we would never dream of not endowing such a child with moral and legal rights.

Thanks to the advances in medical science, there are now (rare) cases when a baby at a gestation period of just less than 24 weeks can be put in an incubator and survive. So much so that there are places (for example, the Lombardy region in Italy) which, after cases where the baby survived following a premature birth or an abortion procedure, have decided to lower the time limit allowed for an abortion to happen. Should doctors not abide by this ruling because such a baby is not considered yet a person and therefore allow it to die? Those who have lived through such an experience and are now fully mature persons will certainly not agree.

There is a continuum in the life of each and every human being that lives, has lived or will ever do. I can write this letter because I was once an embryo which slowly used its potentialities to grow and mature and will perhaps, if God so wills, decline to a point where mental and physical capabilities are no more. Should I therefore be considered less of a person than I am today?

Mother Teresa used to say that abortion is the greatest threat to peace that there is in the world today because if the unborn child is not safe in its mother's womb then there can be no safety anywhere and therefore no peace. The present state of matters in the world certainly seems to be proving her right.