Thought for the Day, 24 October 2007

The Rev. Joel Edwards

Good morning.

I always come to public debates about abortion with a degree of reluctance.

In the first place, Christian leaders - and particularly evangelical ones - get easily painted in the reactionary corner on the subject. There seems to be no way of being 'pro-life' without sounding 'anti-choice'. As far as the east is from the west I want to distance myself from the despicable conduct and caricatures associated with elements of pro-life Christianity in the States. The people associated with blowing up clinics for God!

And I have to say I get nervous about the parade of male clerics across the faith spectrum who appear in the media to tell women what to do about their bodies.

I have never been inside an abortion clinic. I will never experience the emotional tsunami which comes with a positive pregnancy test six weeks after you've been raped.

However, I am an integral part of a society which has a corporate responsibility to dig deep in responding to the Abortion Act which together we put on the statute books 40 years ago. And part of that 'digging deep' involves taking notice of the emerging evidence of scientists and respected journalists who lay before us clear indicators that foetus's can survive at an earlier age. It's evidence which is making the law obsolete.

In this complicated life and death debate a woman's womb has become one of the most politicised places on the planet. But had we known 40 years ago that today, 186,000 unborn would be terminated every year would we have said 'Yes'? And would we have been prepared to live with our consciences in making that decision then in the light of these facts?

Would we have signed up had we realised that in 40 years we would have destroyed the equivalent of London's population and that in the vast majority of cases we had legislated to make abortion a choice of convenience rather than the safety of a woman's life?

I doubt that Parliament would have done it then. Why should it continue to do it now?

At a critical time in their history, the descendants of Abraham stood between their former existence as slaves and their potential as a liberated nation. The emerging nation of Israel had two things to guide them.

First, they had the Statutes of Sinai - the law of Moses. Demanding and esoterically prescriptive, the Old Law was a social contract for justice, morality and community cohesion, as much as it was a code for spiritual well-being.

But this law was never going to cover every eventuality. So they had something else. It was the recognition that from the womb, they had been made in the very image of God. Perhaps more than anything else, this shared life of God governed their ability to choose between right and wrong.

And as Joshua, Moses' successor, said to the young nation - 'Today I set before you life and death. Choose life and live.'