Incoherence in the Parliament

The key words in this astonishing story are “For the record…” 

The All-Party Parliamentary Pro-Life Group has pretty much astounded everyone when some of its members claimed to be both pro-life and pro-abortion, re-defined Catholic Church teaching on when life begins (probably to justify their irrational position at this point), and then one of them went on to say….never mind all that, because there’s yet another argument. Dr. John Pugh said that besides the “religious view” (which he got dead wrong)…

justification for abortion becomes enormously harder from the moment when the foetus becomes conscious or responsive to pain.” He said, “Frankly, there is no basis for giving anything a right other than that it is conscious, and there is no more significant event in the life of any being than becoming conscious”.

Whoa. What’s in the water in Parliament these days?

Human embryology, besides the Church, defines the new existence of the life formed as species homo sapiens, or human life.

Not so in British Parliamentary pro-life circles, where to be pro-life and pro-abortion at the same time is not regarded as contradictory. At the time of the debates in the House of Commons, while MPs considered proposals to lower the gestational time limit for legal abortion from its current 24 weeks, many were shocked by the pro-abortion statements coming from the “pro-life” Parliamentarians.

That’s when the political tipoff came, when the chairman of this group said:

“For the record…I am not opposed to abortion. I believe that women should have the right to choose; I just hope that they do not choose to have an abortion.”

She wants her support of….everything….to be on the record. It’s politically expedient. Especially when you don’t have members of the media asking questions like, ‘why do you hope women don’t choose abortion?’ And ‘if there’s something offensive about it, is it only relatively offensive?’ And the oft-repeated but apt analogy: Would you say you believe people should have the right to choose to own slaves, though you really hope they choose not to? Because slaves were the other group of humans denied personhood for the convenience of those who controlled their fate.