Emotional reactions to the subject of abortion seem inevitable.  Pro-Life groups, certainly in America, react violently to pro-abortíonists by attacking and vandalising family planning and abortion clinics.  Pro-abortionists retaliate by demonstrating vociferously in public, chanting about a "woman's right to choose".  They also accuse The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children of using emotional methods in its visual portrayal of the life of the child in its mother's womb.  Rational, unemotional discussion seems to break down in the face of such entrenched and embattled positions.

But first I think it needs to be asserted categorically that the end can never justify the means, if those means can be shown in themselves to be bad.  Hence violence wrought upon family planning and abortion clinics is inexcusable.  However well-intentioned the perpetrators of such violence, the violence itself cannot be condoned.  Here, if anywhere, is an example of rational argument being replaced by emotional reaction.

On the other hand the claim that a woman "has a right to choose" is again a direct appeal to the emotions in its attempt to fabricate associations with the Women's Liberation Movement, with the suffragettes, and with the late 2Oth century movement to give equal recognition to women in general.  This slogan, like all slogans, contains underlying, unproven assumptions, and glosses over important distinctions.  This slogan, like all slogans, is a facile way of preventing the individual from thinking for him/herself The rational objection to such a claim is straightforward.  If, on other grounds, abortion can be shown to be unjustified, and therefore evil, NO ONE - I repeat - NO ONE can have a right to do evil.

There are those in high places - famous gynecologists, ennobled lords - who defend their pro-abortion attitudes by claiming that they have at heart the good of the mother.  This emphasis on "the good of the mother" is another appeal to our emotions.  After all who would want to expose himl/herself to the charge of denying the good of the mother?  But yet again these experts show their disregard for the basic moral principle that the end does not NECESSARILY justify the means.

Rational discussion of the pros and cons of abortion, however, seems to centre on the point in gestation at which the human embryo becomes a person.  The trouble with this approach is that the sincere enquirer has first of all to grapple with the philosophical question of what it means to be a person, and secondly to apply that hard-found knowledge to the biological facts of life in the womb, a daunting prospect to say the least.  It is not surprising, therefore, that that same sincere enquirer decides just to listen to the so-called experts.

Would not a more easily understandable approach be based on the implications of what it means for a husband to love his wife, and a wife to love her husband?  It is generally assumed that the most concrete expression of this love is the act of tender intercourse.  But even this act is short-lived and transitory.  Surely the most lasting and most real expression of a couple's mutual love is a walking, talking, living child?  Herein lies the tragedy of separation and divorce, that the fruits of that erstwhile love should be witnesses to the breakdown of the love that brought them into being.  And if separation and divorce are such tragedies, how much more tragic any action which seeks to terminate the future life of a walking, talking, living child?

Thoughts such as these might make well-meaning couples realise that the procurement of an abortion is the most far-reaching contradiction of their love for each other that they can ever bring about.