50 Years of the Abortion Act

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, 50 Years of the Abortion Act

"It was Christopher Hitchens who said that if you accept that the concept of a child has any meaning then the concept of the unborn child has to have meaning... the most fundamental human right is the right to life...

‘I don't think there's any more appalling thing that could be done to a person than sexual crime, but we live in a society that holds as an objective value human life.

We don't allow the victims of sexual crime to execute their attackers. So it seems to me that we're placing a greater value on the human life of the attacker than on the child.

And it seems to me that if you are going for abortion in cases of say rape or incest, you are basically saying, well, it's okay to visit the crimes of the father on the child, but not on the father himself...

I believe that every person should have the right over their own body, but I would take a sort of John Stuart Mill's approach of your right to wave your fist stops just short of the end of my nose. A woman's right over her body is absolute to the extent that it doesn't cause the death of another'...

'I think that the question of rights always exists in a hierarchy and the Right to Life, I think, is the highest right. So for example, if a woman or a man is found by their flatmate having ingested a lethal dose of pain killers and having written a persuasive and eloquent note on why they want to end their own life no one would fault the flat mate for calling the ambulance, no one would fault the doctor for treating them, even though they've exercised their right to do what they want with their own body.'...

‘I fear our society is not honest about the reality of abortion. Now, Professor Savage, I was astonished when she said that perhaps the reason why many doctors would rather not carry out an abortion after 12 weeks was because of squeamishness. Well they’re not squeamish about removing a liver are they? No.

They’re squeamish about abortion, because particularly after 12 months (sic), it requires the dismemberment of what, when you look at it, is very clearly a human being, and that is the reality of abortion... let us not either hide it behind clinical language behind closed doors or try and obfuscate'...

'If we are conscious of the person who, and the rights of disabled people, does it not affect their rights, their personhood that 90 percent of babies which are diagnosed in the womb as having Down’s syndrome are aborted - does that not have some clear impact upon grown, disabled people's own sense of personhood, rights that people like them can be so discarded in the womb on the grounds of their disability.'"