There’s a lot of moral idiocy about and it’s perfectly immune to scientific knowledge. Our enhanced scientific observation of life in the womb has not brought in its train a greater respect for that life. Posters showing sonograms are descried as offensive by pro-abortionists. “Human kind cannot bear very much reality” said Eliot. Indeed not. We feel that abortion is wrong but why? The move to place it under a rule that everyone accepts to be just namely killing persons is wrong, is rhetorically a poor strategy. The argument is then shunted into a siding where deep discussions about personhood take place. Someone once asked me, she was a philosophy Phd.- How would you characterise abortion then, as murder or manslaughter? I replied that I would call it, as per the 1861 act, the procuring of a miscarriage.
It is just that and ordinary undefiled moral sense knows that this interruption of the course of a life is just wrong. Hindu and Buddhist scriptural teaching is perfectly clear on this.
Hinduism and Buddhism on Abortion
(a good summary of the main sources)
Obviously the concept of personhood obtaining in Western disputation was not a factor and moreover the embryological knowledge was likewise fanciful. Thomistic theological wrangling about quickening and ensoulment are historically interesting but take place on a siding like the personhood puzzle. Making the gravity of the taking of a life a time limited matter is a mistake.
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