wato newsletter

Shaun Ley's newsletter this week features correspondence they received after the archbishop's call to reduce the time limit for abortions, now that we're better able to treat premature babies. Some bright spark wrote in to say that that's not a reason to change the time limit - since an infant "has no memory or awareness of what's happening until about three or four years of age," it doesn't matter when the termination takes place.

It's a flawed argument anyway developmentally - just because an adult doesn't remember back to when they were two years old, doesn't mean that two-year-old children fail to experience things at the time. Nor does your inability to remember your past experiences prevent them from having repercussions on your later life. (It's the same in principle actually for foetuses before they're born - just because you don't now remember what it was like, doesn't mean you weren't experiencing things then, and doesn't mean that your experiences in the womb don't have any lasting impact on you. Remind me to tell you about the language abilities of newborns sometime.)

But what's really absurd about this guy's argument is that it's something you'd never say about any other thing that you could do to an infant. Parents who batter their pre-school children can't justify themselves by saying it doesn't really matter because children have no memory or awareness of what's happening till they're three or four. It's basically only an ad hoc justification for this one type of violence, ie 'termination,' and it only needs to be stated for its absurdity to become obvious.