A supposedly civilized society

David Mills at Mere Comments [Touchstone]:

In Like a slave, is an unborn child not a brother?, published in the Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore reflects on the opening of a museum exhibition and slavery and asks how curators will see abortion in 200 years.

It is not hard to imagine how a future Museum of London exhibition about abortion could go. It could buy up a 20th-century hospital building as its space, and take visitors round, showing them how, in one ward, staff were trying to save the lives of premature babies while, in the next, they were killing them.

It could compare the procedure by which the corpse of a baby who had died after or during premature birth was presented by the hospital to the mother to assist with grieving, with the way a similar corpse, if aborted, was thrown away.

It could display the various instruments that were used to remove and kill the foetus, rather as the manacles and collars of slaves can be seen today.

He ends with an argument that "with the passage of time, abortion, especially late abortion, is slowly coming to be seen as a "solution" dating from an era that is passing. It will therefore be discredited." I hope he is right, but the drive (need/desire/addiction) for sexual license is so strong, and therefore the need for abortion so great, that abortion's coming to be seen as outdated strikes me as unlikely.

In the article Mills quotes, Moore notes:

As the slavery exhibition shows, something that one generation accepts readily enough is often seen as abhorrent by its descendants – so abhorrent, in fact, that people find it almost impossible to understand how it could have been countenanced in a supposedly civilised society.

Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments: The Brother Many Ignore