Science is on OUR side

MANY of those campaigning for the repeal of the Eighth Amendment are endeavouring to frame the debate as a battle between Church and State, between outmoded religious convictions and modernity.

This does not stand up. It is science, not religious faith, that has revealed the inconvenient truths that so many who call themselves pro-choice choose either to deny or to ignore. What, then, are those inconvenient truths that science presents us with?

Firstly, the science of genetics has put it beyond argument that from the moment of conception, as soon as the sperm cell and the ovum merge and their DNA unites, before a single cell division, the blueprint for a unique human individual, not the father, not the mother, has come into being.

Secondly, embryology has elucidated the development of that single fertilised cell into a human person. It has identified when the heart begins to beat, when the brain begins to function, and when the unborn individual begins to react to stimuli. Thirdly, medical science has pushed back the potential viability of the baby in utero in one case as far as 21 weeks and five days. What was born was certainly not ‘a clump of cells’: it was (and is today) a human person.

So let’s not pretend that opposition to abortion is somehow backward and irrelevant to modernity. On the contrary, it is soundly based on the solid (if inconvenient) science. Just who is being Luddite here?

PETER CARVILL, Dublin 4.