Abortion – only those who love understand

I congratulate Ann M. Spiteri (April 10) for her erudition and well-researched stand in her piece concerning the right to life and abortion (April 10). I beg to differ from her conclusion.

There is one simple reality that perhaps may be highlighted before we decide who has the right to life and who has not. All the members of the highest and most learned courts and commissions, as well as Dr Spiteri and myself, are indeed able to discuss the point because those who conceived us chose to respect our lives when we were still zygotes, embryos or foetuses. Similarly, all the respectable commissions mentioned by her are made up of people who now have a mind and a voice because they have been respected and protected when they still had no mind and no voice.

Life cannot survive dissection, not even intellectual or legal dissection. It needs to be respected in its wholeness, from start to end. Life does not distinguish between the various steps on that single journey from non-existence to existence and from biological existence to human existence. It simply progresses in a harmonious and continuous development of a noble human creature.

In defending the foetus it is humanity that is being defended. The simple dignity and sacredness of every human being is acknowledged at whatever stage of life and development.

Both mother and baby are equally sacred and vulnerable. Both need to be respected and assisted, but never with a deliberate, arbitrary bias towards either one or the other. What is at stake is not just the life of one or other individual, but the very humanity of us all.

Some mothers choose to risk and sacrifice their own lives so that their offspring may live. Other mothers may choose to sacrifice the lives of their offspring for their own well-being. While offering all our empathy and support to those who are too weak and distressed to keep their offspring at all costs, no amount of legal arguments or intellectual exercise by themselves will erase the fact that choosing to give one’s life for those one loves makes our race eminently human and divine.

The crucial element in this issue is neither legal nor biological and, perhaps, not even philosophical. What is central is the ability to sacrifice oneself for a loved one. It is this that makes a person truly human and therefore stronger than his or her own mortality.

In refusing to legalise abortion a society is opting for a higher form of humanity, where giving life to those we love in their very weakness remains a much more ennobling value than the right to life itself.

The choice remains ours. We can opt to prefer the rights only of those who have already made it out of the womb and can start enjoying the other rights of equality, prohibition of torture and inhumane treatment. On the other hand we can build a society which dares defend the weakest and most silent of its offspring, who have not as yet made it to the common table, so that they too can have access to equality and humane treatment.

The erudite among us may know much, but only those who love will understand.