There are a number of stories in the press at the moment, which from an ethical point of view, highlight a contradiction. On the one hand we have heard of the mother whose nightmare of losing a child was only made worse by discovering that the grave was empty. The body was still in the Leeds General Infirmary mortuary. The mother had to go through the agony of burying her stillborn child again. Periodically we have news of retained organs or tissue samples that are discovered and the family decide they want them to be buried. I conducted the burial of some of these last year in this churchyard and we have the graves of stillborn children too.

Then we have the case of a late abortion for what is being presented as trivial reasons, though the precise details have not been released. A developing foetus was aborted after the 24 weeks cut-off point because it had a cleft palate. The curate bringing the case to judicial review herself went through corrective surgery for something similar and has a Down’s syndrome brother. Both of those strike home pastorally, because we have a boy in our congregation with a hair lip and one of our servers has Down’s.

It is almost as if the overall moral principle is that if the child is wanted then we mourn the pregnancy not going full term. If the child is not wanted then it can be disposed of. We have got ourselves into a moral mess and neither the ‘woman’s right to choose’ nor the pro-life camps seem to offer the full picture. There is something uncomfortable about being asked to conduct funerals for wanted pre-term babies, but not for unwanted and especially disabled foetuses; even the language changes. What does this say of the Christian concern for the vulnerable and lowly that Mary’s song exalts? We are either pandering to the sentimental with one or ignoring something important in the other?

Ask medical experts when life beings and they will tell you that it depends what you mean by life. The potential for life and the stuff of life is present in the sperm and the egg before they come together. But after fertilisation there is a gradual emerging of what it means to be a person. Some of course take this to mean that we should offer absolute protection from the moment of conception. Others allow a sliding scale of what is regarded as being viable.

The idea of the person emerging actually ties in with the Christian understanding of what we call the ‘soul’. Far from being an escape pod that exists in isolation from our bodies, the New Testament talks about the person in terms of the body, it talks about a unity between the two. Much of our language about death and the soul has rather gone off piste and created a false separation between the body and the soul. The soul is really a shorthand for how we talk about a person in the presence of God. So there is nothing in that incompatible with a contemporary scientific understanding of what it means to be a person emerging.

This provides some important background notes to help us grapple with the complexities of abortion, but of course does not settle all arguments. The case of the child or foetus with a cleft lip and palate really turns on its severity and the boundary between viability and disability - which at the moment is not known publicly.

Talking of viability is very different to talking about disability. It is also very different to talking about whether a pregnancy is wanted or not. But then again, just as the soul (what it means to be a person in the presence of God) does not exist in isolation from the environment in which it emerges, so no pregnancy exists in a vacuum either. Here we enter a very murky world, where there are social assumptions.

One of the points of the curate’s test case is to clarify just how the law regards disabilities. There is an assumption that disabled people are not viable, or really wanted, so they can be aborted. We have some good friends who have a Down’s syndrome son and some others who were told in the antenatal tests that their child would be disabled. They refused the abortion against quite a bit of pressure and the child was born with no disabilities at all.

I remember talking to another couple who were told that something had gone horribly wrong with the pregnancy. As we talked it became clear that this was a question of viability not disability. The birth was induced, the child did not survive more than a few minutes and a day or two later we met in the church to say some prayers. The life lost was mourned, though it had barely begun. It is difficult to know how much of a person existed, but if soul is about personhood in the presence of God then it expands our notion of what it means to talk of souls being in the hand of God. There is a prayer about God making nothing in vain, which was quite helpful in this situation.

Then at another level there is the whole social environment that children are born into. For some the family will find ways of coping. Some are on their own and the pregnancy going full term will break them. A doctor friend tells me that many abortions are carried out for mature couples who just can’t cope with the idea of another child at that stage of things. I don’t feel qualified to stand in judgement over other people’s agonising decisions. I also don’t feel content to leave it to ‘if the child is wanted it lives, if it is not it dies’.

Now I feel it is appropriate to air all of this here because the Mothers Union is gaining a reputation for being a place where social issues like these can be aired. It is also something that should concern us in Advent because we find ourselves looking at a heavily pregnant Mary who in today’s world would have the choice of whether the incarnate Lord would get off the starting block! The God who enters the human world is right in the middle of this or our sentimentality makes him of no use what so ever. If that is the case, then our view of Christmas has nothing to say to us.

To look to the Christ child, to God in human form, is to affirm that there is something of God in our humanity, whether it is wanted or not. The more I think about this whole area and the more I see the way compassionate abortion has become abortion on demand, the more I find myself growing more and more uneasy.

Our first reading, from 1 Thessalonians (3:9-13), included the call for us to ‘abound in love’ (v12). It is easy to be sentimental in how we look at such a phrase. But abounding in love means wrestling with the difficult questions about how we cope with unwanted pregnancies as well as the wanted ones, with the viable and the unviable, with the disabled and the able-bodied. Much of how our love abounds in this will depend on where we start. If we start from a notion that God is in life then we will be cautious about treating any of that life as being disposable. But then we will also have a compassion that can see more deeply than just the headlines. Circumstances can force decisions that in a perfect world would not be faced or forced. We therefore hold the whole murky agonising before the redeemer who comes among us.

A great deal more is challenged by placing these decisions under the spotlight of Advent and the extremes of the ‘right to choose’ or the ‘pro-life’ sound bites can obscure some of them. Abounding in love spreads out way beyond the sentimental to touch the very core of our being and the being of the most vulnerable, be they yet unborn or carrying the unborn.

© Ian Black 2003

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