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Yes, abortion is killing. But its the

lesser evilAntonia Senior

Last updated June 30 2010 12:01AM

Ive been wavering. But a womans right to choose herown way of life is paramount

In the Cradle Tower at the Tower of London is an interactive display that asks visitorsto vote on whether they would die for a cause. Hmm, lets see. I like dolphins, but if it

came down to a straight choice, goodbye Flipper. Ill shout abuse at a Uruguayan

linesman when my country calls, but I wouldnt take a paper cut for England, let

alone a bullet.

Standing where religious martyrs were held and tortured in Britains turbulent

reformation, I could think of one cause I would stake my life on: a womans right to

be educated, to have a life beyond the home and to be allowed by law and custom to

order her own life as she chooses. And that includes complete control over her own

fertility. Yet something strange is happening to this belief that has, for so long, shaped

my core; my moral certainty about abortion is wavering, my absolutist position is

under siege.

Its not a baby, its a foetus, you God-squaddies, the teenage me would have crowed at

the pro-lifers. Its a womans body, her choice, end of, I would have proclaimed in

whatever patois we were speaking back then. The report last week by the Royal

College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, which found that the human foetus

cannot feel pain before 24 weeks, would have been waved triumphantly at anyone

who crossed my path, along with an invitation to be taught the meaning of pain. Thisis not, you see, a rational debate, but one of passion and vitriol and tribalism.

Then came a baby, and everything changed. I think of it as the Anna Karenina

conundrum. If you read the book as a teenager, you back her choices with all the

passion of youth. Love over convention, go Anna! Then you have children and realise

that Anna abandons her son to shack up with a pretty soldier, and then her daughter

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when she jumps under a train. She becomes a selfish witch. Having a baby paints the

world an entirely different hue. Black and white no longer quite cut it.

The abortion issue hinges on the notion of life. The pro-life position is clear: a baby is

a life, with rights, from the instant of conception. The pro-choice position insists that

we are talking only about a potential life, with no rights. An embryo is not a person.

Baldly, the debate is foetal rights versus reproductive rights. But you wont see such

dispassionate wording from the campaigners. Both sides are adept at using language

to further their position. Women terminate pregnancies or kill their babies,

depending on who is talking. In pro-life propaganda, the gory details are recounted

with a prurient relish during a suction abortion, a foetus is decapitated and

dismembered.

If scientists had established that an early foetus can feel pain, rather than the reverse,

the pro-lifers would have seized on it, but actually it makes little difference to the

central arguments on either side. Either a foetus is a life from conception, or it is not ability to feel pain is not, in itself, a defining factor.

In fact, a definition of life is extraordinarily difficult to arrive at. Friedrich Engels

said: Life is the state of being of proteins. But no single definition is agreed by

scientists or philosophers. Some scientists argue that the Universe is set up in such a

way to make the spontaneous eruption of life inevitable Christian de Duve, the

Nobel-prizewinning biologist, called life a cosmic imperative. Others claim that the

existence of life is so unlikely that it is a miraculous fluke. Either way, there is

something utterly extraordinary in the notion that we are all recycled matter that

our atoms were once part of something else, animate or inanimate, and that some

miracle of assembly created me or you.

Is life defined by consciousness or an awareness of self? Is it simply the ability to

breathe? Take a few moments to try to define being human and alive. Done? Its not

easy, is it?

What seems increasingly clear to me is that, in the absence of an objective definition,

a foetus is a life by any subjective measure. My daughter was formed at conception,

and all the barely understood alchemy that turned the happy accident of that

particular sperm meeting that particular egg into my darling, personality-packed

toddler took place at that moment. She is so unmistakably herself, her own person

forged in my womb, not by my mothering.

Any other conclusion is a convenient lie that we on the pro-choice side of the debate

tell ourselves to make us feel better about the action of taking a life. That little

seahorse shape floating in a willing womb is a growing miracle of life. In a resentful

womb it is not a life, but a foetus and thus killable.

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So we are left with a problem. A growing movement in America, spearheaded by

Sarah Palin, is pro-life feminism, This attempts to decouple feminism from abortion

rights, arguing that you can believe in a womans right to be empowered without

believing in her right to abort. Its proponents report a groundswell of support among

young women looking to reinvent their mothers ideology.

But you cannot separate womens rights from their right to fertility control. The singlebiggest factor in womens liberation was our newly found ability to impose our will on

our biology. Abortion would have been legal for millennia had it been men whose

prospects and careers were put on sudden hold by an unexpected pregnancy. The

mystery pondered on many a girls night out is how on earth men, bless them,

managed to hang on to political and cultural hegemony for so long. The only answer

is that they are not in hock to their biology as much as we are. Look at a map of the

world and the right to abortion on request correlates pretty exactly with the

expectation of a life unburdened by misogyny.

As ever, when an issue we thought was black and white becomes more nuanced, the

answer lies in choosing the lesser evil. The nearly 200,000 aborted babies in the UK

each year are the lesser evil, no matter how you define life, or death, for that matter.

If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too.

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