Infant Rights

Extract

When the mother’s hfe is menaced, and the birth bears a threat not a blessing, is the baby then an aggressor, and accordingly to be disposed of as neatly as possible? Intervention to that effect, is it not demanded by plain common- sense, clear responsibility, a humane scale of values? The Christian Church, however, can never consent to the direct destruction of innocent human hfe—notice the qualifications direct and innocent, through the use of force to repel aggression is approved. Nevertheless our present question, which cannot be summed up in a single brutal or sentimental statement, has been charged with anxiety and misrepresentation: on one side, the Pope has been accused of preferring the unborn baby to the mother, and of a characteristically clerical unconcern for ordinary human tragedies; on the other, materialism and paganism can be too readily ascribed to some of his critics, and their reluctance to go to extreme lengths not allowed for.

Let us begin by recognising how rare is a classical case of Mother v. Child; their relations, from beginning to end, should be for the health of both, and indeed so they are, when the physical, psychological, and moral rules are observed. Women are well designed by God to be mothers. We speak of an ‘expectant’ mother; and certainly she can look forward with happy confidence to the birth of her child. The situation is not abnormal, the condition not pathological, the business not a dangerous operation. A woman when she is in labour hath pain, because her hour is come; but as soon as she is delivered, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world.