For the benefit of the rest of my readership, I decided to compose a partial list of Impossible Things To Believe Before Breakfast (jotted down over the course of an hour while working on a Cerebus page - I figured a dozen or so would get my point across).
I'll just continue the numbering from our Daycare entries.
3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus.
4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of making an unethical choice.
[I was going to allow the Impossible Things to stand alone and "hatch out" however they might in each inidividual reader's mind once they had been planted - to mix a metaphor. However in the aftermath of Carol West's resignation that seems unnecessarily naive, given the wilfulness with which the hard questions are ignored in our society. So, here, interposed, is my more eloborate opinion on abortion:
The far larger question, to me, is one of "what God therefore hath joyned together let not man put asunder" (Matthew 19:6, Mark 10:9). (This, so far as I know, being the only genuinely Biblical quotation - the Synoptic Jesus again, caveat emptor - in the otherwise wholly and completely secular Christian wedding ceremony is a major reason that I have no objection to gay marriages. I'm reasonably certain that marriage is a completely pagan, completely female invention no more sacred as an institution than are feminism or communism. It is, after all, called Matrimony and not Patrimony, isn't it? I mean, duh.) It seems to me utterly foolish to ascribe vitually any of our society's haphazard - literally "catch as catch can" - marriage unions to our Creator. In my view, an omnipotent and omniscient being simply wouldn't have that lousy a track record.
Pregnancy, it seems to me, is an altogether different matter.
Inexplicable as it is that some acts of coitus produce offspring while others do not (despite the best efforts of medical science to establish irrefutable "laws" of cause-and~effect) it seems to me that here, God's hand is very much in evidence and "what God hath joyned together let not man put asunder" - sperm and egg, fertilized egg and uterine wall - very much applicable. If abortion is, as the feminists insist, a matter of a woman having control over her own body, then I think a public demonstration of a woman willing herself to become un-pregnant or willing her fertilized egg to detach itself from her uterine wall would settle the issue once and for all. At which point I would happily go along with the secular-humanist consensus view.
But, of course, a woman no more has control over her reproductive functions - apart from abstinence - then she has over the number of hairs growing on her head or the colour of her eyes.
Thus, to me, "a woman's right to choose" constitutes little more than an imbecilic paraphrase of "free will". That is, we are all, by the grace of God, free to choose. That is what free will is. We can choose to commit murder, we can choose to steal, we can choose to commit adultery. The underpinning of the life of the God-fearing individual is that there is a price to be paid - sometimes in this world, sometimes in the world to come, sometimes in both - for choosing incorrectly. The ritual sacifice of babies is well-documented among the pagan peoples named in the Torah and is, irrefutably, an abomination in the eyes of God.