When the British Medical Association met last week, Prof. Stuart Campbell had reason to be optimistic doctors would vote to change the upper limit for abortions due to social reasons from 24 to 20 weeks – after all, stunning 4-D ultrasound images created from a technique he pioneered, showing fetuses stretching, kicking and leaping at 12 weeks, had spawned that debate.
But 77 percent of BMA members voted to continue aborting babies at 24 weeks, a position Campbell believes goes "against British public opinion."
"I was particularly surprised because of the huge success of the [television] program Life Before Birth, which of course used my ultrasound images," Campbell tells the Glasgow Sunday Herald. "So many people told me that they felt very emotional about it. [Source]
Prof. Stuart Campbell is rather naive to think that the abortion debate is about facts or science. Fr. Pavone of Priests for Life mentioned before that when he would talk to doctors about science they would switch to philosophy and the topic of personhood.
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abortions due to social reasons
What on earth is a “social” reason?
Prof. Stuart Campbell is rather naive to think that the abortion debate is about facts or science.
Of course it isn’t. See also the comments section here.
I wrote there (but it also applies here):
My mind always boggles with the “it isn’t human life” argument advocated by people who think pro-life arguments can only come from “a religious background”. The converse is true. From the scientific point of view, even a fertilized egg is human life: it has a human genome that is different from the mother’s. (…) I think that the so-called pro-choice position is not very far away from mere magical thinking – the child becomes somewhat “magically” a “human being”; mysteriously at the exact date indicated by law. This is why pro-choicers like to resort so much to philosophical concepts like “personhood” – because philosophy is subjective, after all, and can’t be challenged…
And, of course, there was a time when African-Americans weren’t considered “persons.”
It’s amazing to see the lengths to which anti-lifers will go to rationalize the killing of the innocent unborn.
I’m waiting for the medical community to make it so that doctors will have to do so many abortions per week to make their quota. This would be un-Godly but at the rate things seem to be progressing it wouldn’t surpise me. Sick and sad.
I recall the serious sounding narrator of those science films we watched in fourth and fifth grade on Life on Planet Earth. “Two ameobas rub together… and there is life!” [paraphrasing, of course] pronounces the deep voiced narrator.
The scientific community jumped and shouted for joy at the discovery of ancient life embedded in some rock on, where was it, Mars??
So… eveytime I found out I had a little blastocyte in my uterus I clicked my heels like the Lucky Charms fellow. “I have LIFE in me!!!” Yeah!!!
(zygotes, embryos, babies, toddlers, children, teens*, young adults, mid-lifers and the elderly tickle me too!)
*well… I’m not altogether crazy about them. I think they’re put here to lessen our time in Purgatory.
Lucy – actually in NY, residents at non-private institutions of learning must learn to perform abortions – used to be they could opt out.
Soooo, asking to decline the class on the grounds of your religion isn’t an option then? That is sick and sad.