Dialogue: Life's ironies that leave me floored

By GARTH GEORGE

Of all the modern-day ironies contained in several articles in just one issue of the Herald this week - the weekend one - by far the strangest was to be found in Carroll du Chateau's comprehensive Weekend Life report on medically assisted baby-making.

It read: "Here, in this homely, rather cramped building on the old Green Lane Hospital site, one floor below the Epsom Day Hospital, where most of the city's abortions are performed, a team of dedicated doctors, scientists and nurses will this year carry out around 250 in vitro fertilisation (IVF) procedures - half of them paid for by the state."

Now I'm pretty quick on the uptake, but it took me a second or two to realise what I was reading here - that on one floor of a building desperate couples are paying up to $6000 a throw for the woman to undergo lengthy, difficult and painful IVF treatments in the hope of producing a child, while on the next another set of doctors and nurses are aborting a significant proportion of the 16,000-odd unwanted children terminated in this little country each year - at the taxpayers' expense.

It struck me as odd, too, that for the childless couple to qualify for a Government-financed one-off IVF treatment the woman has to score 65 or more in a complicated points test, whereas all the woman (or child) with the unwanted baby in her belly has to do is say she wants an abortion and the state pays up - and not always only once, either.

It was purely coincidental that this weekend piece dropped right in the middle of a resumption of the abortion debate in our correspondence columns after pro-life people saw an inconsistency between the widespread condemnation of the execution of Timothy McVeigh and the general acceptance of the day-by-day execution of 300-odd unborn New Zealanders.

They draw a long bow, but nevertheless are entitled to their views, as are the anti-lifers, some of whom have trotted out the tired old rationalisations for open-slather abortion, particularly "a woman is in control of her own body" and "a baby isn't alive until it's born."

I have difficulty with the first, because if a woman has control of her own body, how come she gets pregnant when she doesn't want to; and with the second because as far as I'm concerned, life begins the moment the sperm fertilises the ova and the cell begins to divide.

Meanwhile, much of the controversy about the McVeigh execution surrounded an editorial in the Herald condemning it, and one of the premises upon which the editorial was based was that the execution of a murderer (of 168 people, including women and children) was "against Christian principles."

Now you can condemn the execution of criminals on all sorts of humanitarian, legal and social grounds, but you can't condemn it for being against Christian principles, because it isn't. And it always amuses me when people quote "Christian principles" to justify an occasional argument but studiously ignore them when they don't suit, which is most of the time.

Jesus Christ, the enunciator of all Christian principles, told us that even if heaven and Earth passed away, the law would always be with us "until all is fulfilled." Obviously all has not yet been fulfilled, for we still have laws to obey. And the law that Jesus spoke of contains these words: "Whoever kills any man shall surely be put to death."

However, Jesus gave us an out. He said that all the law could be fulfilled if we would but obey one simple principle: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your soul ... and your neighbour as yourself."

If we all did that, said Jesus, we would be free of the law. Which makes sense. If we all loved God and our neighbours, there would be no need for the law. Just imagine what a world it would be: no murder, no rape, no violence, no child abuse, no poverty, no thievery, no executions, no abortions - no crime at all because all crime is an offence against other people's person or property.

But it comes at a price. In order to be able to love God and one another we would have to believe in Jesus Christ and, by so doing, be filled with the Holy Spirit, because only the power of the Holy Spirit could make us flawed humans able always to be kind and loving, irrespective of the circumstances or the cost to ourselves.

And, today as always, there are only a handful who are prepared to make that commitment, so the law still stands, and those who break it must pay, sometimes with their lives, for their lawlessness.

As for those of us bound by Christian principles and struggling, as we all do, to live rightly, all I can say is thank God that his forgiveness is unlimited and that his mercy endures forever.

* garth_george@herald.co.nz