Ann Furedi is the chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. Despite the misleading name, it is the country’s largest independent abortion chain. Unsurprisingly, she’s a seriously radical pro-abortion extremist, promoting sex-selective abortion, fighting against abortion clinic inspections because she fears they’ll scare away future abortionists, and supports abortion even though she agrees that abortion is taking a life. Furedi’s organization performs more than 1 in 3 of abortions in England and Wales, and for Furedi, that’s no big deal.
Furedi was featured in the Daily Mail, where she argued that women should be able to use abortion as birth control, saying, “The clinical risks of early abortion are not significantly higher than those of contraception, so why should it matter morally or legally if a woman chooses to practise birth control through this method instead of another?” She also compared abortion to marriage, saying that they were morally the same. “Women make moral choices all the time,” she said. “An abortion may be a difficult choice that a woman would rather not make. But this is no different than many decisions we make and women are no less competent to make pregnancy choices than they are to make other life-changing decisions, such as whether or not to marry, or whether or not to divorce.”
But it was the fact that she shrugged off the fact that abortion kills a human being that was especially horrifying.
Abortion may be an act of killing – but it kills a being that has no sense of life or death, and no awareness of itself as distinct from others.
What’s horrifying about that statement is that, according to Furedi, it’s evidently acceptable to kill someone based on their awareness of the world around them. So presumably, she could agree that a severely mentally disabled adult without awareness of the world around them can be killed without there being a moral issue. What about infanticide? Newborn babies aren’t aware of the world around them. They don’t understand life or death. Is it ok to kill them, too? The idea is despicable, but there are plenty of people who feel they should be allowed to dictate which lives are or aren’t worth living.
It doesn’t matter what each person’s “sense of life or death” is. It doesn’t matter if they don’t have awareness of the world around them. What matters is that they’re human beings, with intrinsic worth and dignity. Preborn babies may lack awareness, but that’s also — as Furedi well knows — only a temporary state, as they will grow and develop if only given the time to do so. And meanwhile, they’re still alive. They’re human beings, with beating hearts. Furedi’s own horrifically biased mindset doesn’t give her the right to make a judgment on whether or not those human beings can be brutally killed.
