The weak: To be despised and eliminated in the name of natural selection or to be helped more because they need it more?

We are in the presence of two entirely different world views. Or is this just a matter of personal choice?

Good on you if you help them, but they have no “right” to help. They have no “claim” on help. Or does the
need for help in fact bestow a right to help? Does a person have the right to the basic necessities for their life, growth and flourishing? Does a starving person have the right to food or a dehydrated person the right to a drink of water? Does a wounded person have a right to medical care? Does a homeless person have a right to some form of shelter to survive? Does an unborn child in fact have a right to his mother’s womb?

The ‘right to choose’ is a code word for the ‘right’ to refuse your womb to your unborn child at the expense of his life.

What is this right rooted in?

The right of refuse a dying beggar? The right to refuse the drowning man ahand to get out of the water? Is there really a right for the strong to refuse the basic necessities of life of the weak? Are rights in the end only for the strong? Or does weakness actually present itself to the human community as a priority – as a case that needs special treatment because of its special need?

Otherwise, have we not simply got another form of tyrannical injustice trying to present and sanitise itself in the language of justice?

Ken Orr has been the victim of a hate campaign, since the High Court agreed with him that most abortions in New Zealand are illegal. Hatred as a passion is an interesting emotion to analyse. We hate something because we love something else, which it seems to be attacking or limiting. So what is it that the people who lashed out so violently against Mr Orr love so passionately?

Can it really be abortion? No one really loves abortion in itself it would seem. Even those who are in favour of abortion on demand tend to use slogans like: “I want to see abortion legal and rare”. But why rare? We don’t say: “I love classical music. The enjoyment of it should be legal and rare” (unless what is really loved is not the music, but the snobbery of being in an elite few). If the minister of education said: “The study of the Maori language should be legal and rare” – what would it imply? Or if there was a bizarre brigade of people who wanted to outlaw learning Maori, there might be many things to say to them,  but would one of them really be: “The decision to learn Maori is a hard enough one to face without being made to feel guilty for it”? Or “I am personally against learning Maori and I would never do it myself but I think people should still have the right to choose”? It’s not the way we argue for something that we consider to be a good.

With abortion, it seems normal for its supporters to say:  “it is a difficult decision …  I am personally against it … I would never have one myself … it should be rare.” Implicitly they are saying: there is something wrong with abortion. And the question they least expect after those statements is: “Why is it a difficult decision?” “Why should it be rare?” “Why are you personally against it?” “Why would you never have one yourself?” That question can take them aback because their slogan was designed to deflect attention from looking at what abortion is and the question: “Is abortion really a good thing?”

It seems that no one really loves abortion for itself and even if pregnancy is often not desired, people know underneath that the developing child in the womb is not of the same nature as a cancerous growth.

So what explains the hatred that erupted at the thought that the abortion law might be upheld? Abortion is seen as a guarantor of sexual freedom, the backup that ensures for ever that sex and babies don’t have to be associated. It does this by the hidden removal of an unseen little one when we are still capable of imagining that its size cancels out its quality as a living human being, or that its potential to be a human adult is irrelevant, seeing it isn’t one yet. It has helped realise the dream that sex can be just in the moment and without the acceptance of a long-term responsibility. A human child is not like a calf or a kitten, independent in just a matter of weeks after birth. The requirement to be nurtured and protected, for love and education, calls for a long-lasting and stable environment called the family. This is so because the human being is so marvellous, such a complex and wonderful reality. But to associate sex and commitment seems an unthinkable step backwards to a society that spent the last 50 years disassociating them. The availability of abortion is the trophy of a society that has divorced sexual activity from responsibility. And if Ken Orr thinks he can remind a country that in its law the little new human life deserves protection, deserves the conditions of life that will allow it to develop and flourish and come to be a new citizen, then he needs to be rubbished, ridiculed and wiped out.

What is loved with such a passion is the notion of sexual freedom and what is hated with such a passion is anything that might limit it by linking it again to responsibility, including the upholding of a law to protect the most fragile, vulnerable and dependent members of the human community.