\”This week, I received an invitation to the opening of a new gallery in the Museum in Docklands, an offshoot of the Museum of London.
The gallery, which is in an old sugar warehouse, will be called \”London, Sugar and Slavery\”. \”Discover,\” says the invitation, \”how the English sweet tooth, consumer boycotts and the Notting Hill Carnival are linked by one of the great crimes against humanity\”.
The opening of the gallery marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. The publicity material speaks of \”obscene profits, horrific brutality\” and how \”the seeds of racism\” were sown. It would be an understatement to say that the museum organisers regard slavery as a wholly evil thing.
On the same day as I opened my invitation, Dawn Primarolo, whose name sounds like a brand of margarine, but is actually the health minister, was telling the Commons Science and Technology Committee that there was no justification for lowering the limit for abortion below the current 24 weeks.
In doing so, she was going against those who argue that medical advances now make it easier for children born before 24 weeks to survive.
As if timing it to undermine Miss Primarolo\’s position, Millie McDonagh, who was born in Manchester aged 22 weeks, celebrated her first birthday the following day, photographed with her mother in the newspapers.
I found myself wondering how abortion will be viewed by museum curators, teachers, historians and moralists 200 years from now.
As the slavery exhibition shows, something that one generation accepts readily enough is often seen as abhorrent by its descendants – so abhorrent, in fact, that people find it almost impossible to understand how it could have been countenanced in a supposedly civilised society.
How could people not see that Africans should not be bought and sold for the convenience of our trade or our domestic life? We reserve particular scorn for those who sought to justify slavery on moral grounds. We look at the moral blindness of the past, and tut-tut, rather complacently.
It is not hard to imagine how a future Museum of London exhibition about abortion could go. It could buy up a 20th-century hospital building as its space, and take visitors round, showing them how, in one ward, staff were trying to save the lives of premature babies while, in the next, they were killing them.
It could compare the procedure by which the corpse of a baby who had died after or during premature birth was presented by the hospital to the mother to assist with grieving, with the way a similar corpse, if aborted, was thrown away.
It could display the various instruments that were used to remove and kill the foetus, rather as the manacles and collars of slaves can be seen today.
It could make a telling show of the propaganda that was used to promote abortion – the language of choice, control of a woman over her own body – and compare it with less happy information about the infertility caused by abortion, or depression or about the link between breast cancer and having an abortion before the birth of the first child.
It could show how women, vulnerable and often alone, came under pressure from the medical authorities to have an abortion without being offered help with the alternative.
The museum could make a pretty devastating contrast between the huge growth of rights for the disabled, which began in the late-20th century, and the fact that the disability (or even mild deformity) of a child was always grounds for abortion.
Just as, today, we are invited to glare at the Georgian portraits of fat, bewigged English sugar planters or pro-slavery politicians, there could be a rogues\’ gallery of pro-abortionists.
Here Marie Stopes, the great advocate of abortion and pioneer of \”sexual health\”, who was also in favour of sterilising \”half-castes\”; there Lord Steel of Aikenwood, the leader of the Liberal Party, whose 1967 Abortion Act produced more than seven million abortions in 40 years.
How about a picture of Dawn Primarolo, accompanied by her words this week, and juxtaposed with photographs of children born before 24 weeks, who grew up and led full lives?
In many ways, I accept, such a museum of the future would be extremely unfair. We anti-abortionists should not paint all those who disagree with us as callous.
Many of those who support abortion have a deep concern about the horrors of an unwanted child, not realising that the culture of abortion is one that promotes unwantedness.
Others worry about world population growth. For reasons too long to explain here, I think they are mistaken, but I would certainly not want to argue that this automatically makes them haters of the human race.
We should be conscious of how genuinely difficult some of the situations of a pregnant woman can be. We should think more of help and less of condemnation.
Much better, as the late Cardinal Thomas Winning did, to give practical assistance to hard-pressed mothers who do not abort their children than to attack the clinics attended by those who do.
And although I cannot think of any good arguments for slavery, I think there is something priggish and unhistorical about the approach of the Museum in Docklands, which seems to be jumping into a pulpit rather than spreading information.
An anti-abortion museum in 200 years would be less educational than one that simply told the whole extraordinary story.
But the reason I throw this argument into the future is that, with the passage of time, abortion, especially late abortion, is slowly coming to be seen as a \”solution\” dating from an era that is passing. It will therefore be discredited.
Partly it is the effect of technology. My wife and I still have the video of the scan of our twins at about 18 weeks. You can see heads and limbs. That was in 1989. It bears the same relation to the technology today as do silent, black and white films to modern Hollywood hyper-realism.
Nowadays, it is even more visible and undeniable, as it was not to the first generation of people who had legal abortions, that what you are removing is human – human, though usually not in independent form, like you and I.
It is also visible that this human entity is alive, and therefore that, by removing it, you are taking life.
You may say that this physical image should not make a difference to the moral case, but in practice it does. The famous anti-slavery image was of a black man in chains, on his knees, saying, \”Am I not a man and a brother?\”
It was powerful because it used the physical to make a direct moral appeal: this person is essentially like you in body and soul, so why do you deny him the rights which you demand for yourself? To see a foetus in the womb is to experience the same appeal.
If you want to do people wrong, you must first undermine the idea that they are people. The Nazis called Jews rats. The Hutu in Rwanda called the Tutsis cockroaches. Pseudo-Darwinian views promoted ideas about racial purity or mental or physical health which allowed those who lacked these qualities to be seen as \”inferior stock\”.
One of the good moral trends of our time has been to reject this way of looking at things. Instead, we insist, in the great debate about what it means to be human, that weakness is not a disqualification, but, by a famous Christian paradox, a strength.
Abortion runs against this trend, and so civilisation will eventually reject it, as once it rejected slavery.

This week, I received an invitation to the opening of a new gallery in the Museum in Docklands, an offshoot of the Museum of London.
The gallery, which is in an old sugar warehouse, will be called \”London, Sugar and Slavery\”. \”Discover,\” says the invitation, \”how the English sweet tooth, consumer boycotts and the Notting Hill Carnival are linked by one of the great crimes against humanity\”.
The opening of the gallery marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. The publicity material speaks of \”obscene profits, horrific brutality\” and how \”the seeds of racism\” were sown. It would be an understatement to say that the museum organisers regard slavery as a wholly evil thing.
On the same day as I opened my invitation, Dawn Primarolo, whose name sounds like a brand of margarine, but is actually the health minister, was telling the Commons Science and Technology Committee that there was no justification for lowering the limit for abortion below the current 24 weeks.
In doing so, she was going against those who argue that medical advances now make it easier for children born before 24 weeks to survive.
As if timing it to undermine Miss Primarolo\’s position, Millie McDonagh, who was born in Manchester aged 22 weeks, celebrated her first birthday the following day, photographed with her mother in the newspapers.
I found myself wondering how abortion will be viewed by museum curators, teachers, historians and moralists 200 years from now.
As the slavery exhibition shows, something that one generation accepts readily enough is often seen as abhorrent by its descendants – so abhorrent, in fact, that people find it almost impossible to understand how it could have been countenanced in a supposedly civilised society.
How could people not see that Africans should not be bought and sold for the convenience of our trade or our domestic life? We reserve particular scorn for those who sought to justify slavery on moral grounds. We look at the moral blindness of the past, and tut-tut, rather complacently.
It is not hard to imagine how a future Museum of London exhibition about abortion could go. It could buy up a 20th-century hospital building as its space, and take visitors round, showing them how, in one ward, staff were trying to save the lives of premature babies while, in the next, they were killing them.
It could compare the procedure by which the corpse of a baby who had died after or during premature birth was presented by the hospital to the mother to assist with grieving, with the way a similar corpse, if aborted, was thrown away.
It could display the various instruments that were used to remove and kill the foetus, rather as the manacles and collars of slaves can be seen today.
It could make a telling show of the propaganda that was used to promote abortion – the language of choice, control of a woman over her own body – and compare it with less happy information about the infertility caused by abortion, or depression or about the link between breast cancer and having an abortion before the birth of the first child.
It could show how women, vulnerable and often alone, came under pressure from the medical authorities to have an abortion without being offered help with the alternative.
The museum could make a pretty devastating contrast between the huge growth of rights for the disabled, which began in the late-20th century, and the fact that the disability (or even mild deformity) of a child was always grounds for abortion.
Just as, today, we are invited to glare at the Georgian portraits of fat, bewigged English sugar planters or pro-slavery politicians, there could be a rogues\’ gallery of pro-abortionists.
Here Marie Stopes, the great advocate of abortion and pioneer of \”sexual health\”, who was also in favour of sterilising \”half-castes\”; there Lord Steel of Aikenwood, the leader of the Liberal Party, whose 1967 Abortion Act produced more than seven million abortions in 40 years.
How about a picture of Dawn Primarolo, accompanied by her words this week, and juxtaposed with photographs of children born before 24 weeks, who grew up and led full lives?
In many ways, I accept, such a museum of the future would be extremely unfair. We anti-abortionists should not paint all those who disagree with us as callous.
Many of those who support abortion have a deep concern about the horrors of an unwanted child, not realising that the culture of abortion is one that promotes unwantedness.
Others worry about world population growth. For reasons too long to explain here, I think they are mistaken, but I would certainly not want to argue that this automatically makes them haters of the human race.
We should be conscious of how genuinely difficult some of the situations of a pregnant woman can be. We should think more of help and less of condemnation.
Much better, as the late Cardinal Thomas Winning did, to give practical assistance to hard-pressed mothers who do not abort their children than to attack the clinics attended by those who do.
And although I cannot think of any good arguments for slavery, I think there is something priggish and unhistorical about the approach of the Museum in Docklands, which seems to be jumping into a pulpit rather than spreading information.
An anti-abortion museum in 200 years would be less educational than one that simply told the whole extraordinary story.
But the reason I throw this argument into the future is that, with the passage of time, abortion, especially late abortion, is slowly coming to be seen as a \”solution\” dating from an era that is passing. It will therefore be discredited.
Partly it is the effect of technology. My wife and I still have the video of the scan of our twins at about 18 weeks. You can see heads and limbs. That was in 1989. It bears the same relation to the technology today as do silent, black and white films to modern Hollywood hyper-realism.
Nowadays, it is even more visible and undeniable, as it was not to the first generation of people who had legal abortions, that what you are removing is human – human, though usually not in independent form, like you and I.
It is also visible that this human entity is alive, and therefore that, by removing it, you are taking life.
You may say that this physical image should not make a difference to the moral case, but in practice it does. The famous anti-slavery image was of a black man in chains, on his knees, saying, \”Am I not a man and a brother?\”
It was powerful because it used the physical to make a direct moral appeal: this person is essentially like you in body and soul, so why do you deny him the rights which you demand for yourself? To see a foetus in the womb is to experience the same appeal.
If you want to do people wrong, you must first undermine the idea that they are people. The Nazis called Jews rats. The Hutu in Rwanda called the Tutsis cockroaches. Pseudo-Darwinian views promoted ideas about racial purity or mental or physical health which allowed those who lacked these qualities to be seen as \”inferior stock\”.
One of the good moral trends of our time has been to reject this way of looking at things. Instead, we insist, in the great debate about what it means to be human, that weakness is not a disqualification, but, by a famous Christian paradox, a strength.
Abortion runs against this trend, and so civilisation will eventually reject it, as once it rejected slavery.

“I never suggested that asking God for guidance was the wrong thing to do. I was merely responding to your suggestion that it may not be morally permissible (insert to have an abortion under the circumstances mentioned).”

I never suggested that asking God for guidance was the wrong thing to do. I was merely responding to your suggestion that it may not be morally permissible. I’m saying it is morally permissible and already gave the reasons why I believe so.

Praying for guidance doesn’t always have to do with something that is morally permissible or not- its to know the direction you should take in your particular circumstance.

I think that’s pretty unlikely too. But telling couples to seek guidance from God is hardly guiding them in the wrong direction.

This is the statement you made that I am referring to. Maybe you don’t have an opinion, but the church does- I don’t believe the church would guide us in the wrong direction. If they didn’t think the aforementioned statements were morally acceptable they wouldn’t say so.

If you want to argue that their stance is one of “i don’t know” maybe you would be better suited for another church.

And to add to that I think taking a stance of neutrality on this matter is a slap in the face to the women who are forced to go through this. Telling them that what they are doing may or may not be morally permissible when they have no choice in the matter makes no sense at all, and is devoid of all compassion.