From Across the Pond

If you didn't know better, you'd swear that this piece on new ultrasound technology came right out a prolife journal.

New ultrasound pictures of a foetus show it toddling at 12 weeks, yawning at 15 and smiling at 18. What is the public reaction? Are we
awestruck at this manifestation of the quickening within the womb that every mother feels?

Do we recognise ourselves, our children and our children's children
in what is visibly a tiny human being? No, people are more likely to
reflect uneasily on the fact that tens of thousands of foetuses just
like this are legally aborted before they are born.


The piece is actually a editorial from the Telegraph of London. It questions how abortion is practiced in the UK, at a time when infertility and shrinking populations are major concerns. Coming outside of the US culture wars and the election-year politicing, it's perspective that is at least worth listening to.

There is something amiss in a society in which abortion is too easy and adoption too difficult; in which conception, frowned on in fertile youth, is postponed until the onset of infertile middle age; in which reproduction is entrusted to doctors; in which old age is prolonged by embryonic stem cells.

Such a society will be blighted by its own sterility.