RESUMO
PIP: Professor Peter Hungerford (25 August, p 496) says that he is fed up with semantic arguments about abortion which ignore reality. He then invokes two major fantasies of the last decade, those of sexual equality and the woman's right to choose. The second of these has become an article of faith to many pro-abortionists and its credentials should be examined. Whence does this right derive? A woman takes part in a more or less pleasurable activity with a man and then, without her volition, with no conscious effort on her part at all, the miraculous occurs and a new life comes into being. How does she have the right to destroy this new life? The argument is usually to the effect that it belongs to her and could not survive without her: "It's mine and I can do what I like with it." Of course, it is true that a fetus cannot survive without the support of its mother; no more could Professor Hungerford or I survive without the support of our fellow men who provide us with food, drink, and clothing, but that does not give them the right to kill us. The claim to possession, the assumption that the fetus is owned by its mother involves, I believe, a semantic error. In a sense, the fetus is "hers" in that it is growing inside her, even though she did not create it. Likewise, her husband is hers because joined to her by marriage and her country is hers because she lives there, although she does not own either of them and certainly has no right to destroy them. The life growing inside the mother is not hers in the same way that a cardigan she has bought or knitted for herself is hers. It is the consideration of semantics that protects us from the "realities" of such as Professor Hungerford.^ieng
