Dialogue: Sanctity of life can be honoured in breach

By JOHN ROUGHAN

There are some challenges I can't resist, though I probably should. The day the Oklahoma bomber was executed the Herald expressed horror at capital punishment, even of a mass murderer.

Its editorial didn't dwell on the pragmatic arguments that death has been no deterrent or that an innocent might go to the gallows.

It did not even borrow the compelling objection of Listener columnist Brian Edwards, who suggested there can be no worse mental torture than to let someone know the precise time and manner of his death. Think about that. They say there are no clocks on death row.

The editorial argued simply that human life was sacred. On radio that morning and in letters to the editor since, people have challenged the paper to apply the same principle to abortion. Wisely no doubt, the paper has not replied. I am on my own here.

Abortion is no longer the only challenge to human value at one end of life, nor is capital punishment at the other. Advances in artificial conception, genetic engineering and cloning, chemical abortion, the morning-after pill, the dilemmas of resuscitation, life support and euthanasia are all shaking the cradle of nature.

But abortion, even more than capital punishment, remains the principal battlefield. In the United States the death penalty is almost never an issue at federal elections; abortion always is.

The easiest way to reconcile abortion with the sanctity of life would be to invoke the idea that life does not begin at conception. But I doubt anyone really believes that. If we did, the whole subject would be easier to discuss and the act itself not surrounded by so much counselling and dread.

In any case, if the law can decree an artificial beginning of the right to life, why should it not be allowed to remove that right on conviction for murder or for any other reason a voting majority might support?

Another way out, for males at least, is to embrace the principle that it is a woman's right to choose. Most men are happy to endorse that, and maybe not just for the reason that they usually avoid responsibility in these things.

Men, I think, believe there is something special - sacred even - in the way women make the choice. It may be part of the maternal instinct to know when a life cannot be nurtured.

It is hard to read of a baby of four months burned in a fireplace at Remuera, or of the deaths in Houston of five children and their mother's immediate confession, without a sense that something beyond the reach of criminal law is at work there.

After the insight the Listener gave to the Lillybing case last week, I would hate to have been Judge Eddie Durie.

For all that, abortion is not a question males can avoid. We are all voters. If I am content for it to be a woman's right to choose I am not absolved from responsibility for it to be so.

It is detestable to hear abortion promoted as a bodily right, as though a foetus was a troublesome appendix or an ingrown toenail.

Abortion lobbyists do their cause a disservice with their attempts to diminish the enormity of what they ask. The terrible euphemisms they use, "termination," "extraction," "procedure," even "abortion," are shrouds for what in plain English is foetus killing. That term would not offend if an early foetus was just tissue.

When we breach the sanctity of human life, we should at least face the fact. And, facing it, we need not disavow the principle, though that suggestion runs hard against the grain of contemporary thinking.

This is an age that abhors failure to live up to a declared principle, calling it "hypocrisy"- which it is. But the tragedy of today's outlook is that when behaviour does not live up to principle, we discard the principle.

It was not always that way. Those hypocritical Victorians held to certain beliefs and standards even when they failed to live up to them, and I suspect they were better for it.

There is a healthy hypocrisy in today's official attitude to abortion. The law insists on the fiction that it is a restricted service, available only on rigorous criteria such as a risk to the physical or psychological health of the mother.

In reality, if we don't have abortion on demand we certainly have it on request, and everybody knows it. Yet the official fiction, like the lobbyists' euphemisms, like the counselling and the widespread distaste for discussion of the subject, are all in a way testaments to the sanctity of life.

If abortion is allowed to honour that principle in the breach, why not capital punishment? The difference, I think, is that one is a personal, private decision, the other is a very public act.

It is one thing for the law to allow a woman or a couple to make the awful decision to kill an unwanted baby before it really imposes itself on their lives. It is another thing for the state to strap someone down and put him to death.

Timothy McVeigh went to sleep staring unblinking through a camera at those of his victims' relatives who wanted to watch. The execution served his delusions to the end. In his warped mind his destruction of a Government building in Oklahoma City was a protest against capital punishment, among other things.

It is obscene really to compare his fate with the victims of abortion, and not only because he was a convicted murderer and they are innocents. Capital punishment is a deliberate, public, forthright challenge to the right to life. Abortion is quite the opposite.

You seldom hear of women - as distinct from the abortion lobby - approaching the decision with anything other than a loathing of it and suffering a bleak sickness in the soul. So long as the sanctity of life carries that much force, humanity can survive.