Pro-life laws violate human rights?
What?! Isn’t that an oxymoron?
Okay, let’s sort this out and apply some critical thinking skills. Here’s how Time reports the story.
A ruling on the case of a woman known only as C has reignited the long-running and divisive abortion debate in Ireland. On Dec. 16, the European Court of Human Rights found that C, a cancer survivor, had her human rights violated when she was forced to travel to England to get an abortion…
In cases that date back to 2005, three women — known as A, B, and C — went to the European court with the allegation that a lack of abortion services in Ireland was a breach of their human rights.
A breach of their human rights. A: Medical and scientific textbooks acknowledge the facts about embryology that from the moment of conception, what has been conceived is new life of the species homo sapiens, or human life; B: Abortion legalizes the termination of that life; so C: C’s contention that her human rights were violated completely denied or disregarded the human rights of the human being in her womb.
Which gets to this other take on the story, a more measured and thorough one, and particularly the last line, by Cardinal Sean Brady of Armagh, the Primate of All Ireland.
Under existing Irish law, Cardinal Brady said, doctors are legally obliged to protect both the life of the mother and that of the unborn child. Arguing strongly against any effort to introduce new policies legalizing abortion, the cardinal said: “No law which subordinates the rights of any human being to those of other human beings can be regarded as a just law.”
