ABORTING MORALITY

I've have my attention pulled around to the abortion debate.
 Mostly Christian groups Abort67 and 40 Days To Life have upped their picketing of British Pregnancy Advice Clinics, stopping women going in and coming out and offering them leaflets and waving pictures of dead foetuses in the hope of what they believe is saving a life.
Roman Catholic Tory MP Nadine Dorries has tried to slip in a law that makes pro-life pregnancy counselling the only counselling allowed.
 I know, I know what I should say. I'm not a Christian. I should pull out that old chestnut 'it isn't alive till it's born' and insist on calling it a 'foetus' instead of an 'unborn baby'. But, well, I have more than one team in this game.
 I was born with a life-threatening condition for which there is no cure. In the early 60s when I was born it was still in the guinea pig stage, out of the animal testing and into people testing. That is, I spent almost all of the first five years of my life in hospital, sometimes due to the effects of the treatment fed me to keep me alive. Up to being five, the doctors didn't know if I would survive beyond a certain age.
In fact, I remember, very vaguely, being on the ward in a hospital gown in a cot and attached to a drip feed and a little lad coming up to me and saying he had this illness (can't remember what it is) and knowing he would be dead before he reached his early twenties, and I would probably be, too. Because I hadn't been told any different.
I used to mention it a lot to my Mum, 'will I die before I'm old' and my Mum used to say 'no one know when they are going to die', that is, she wasn't going to lie to me because she didn't know because the doctors didn't know.
Now, today, it is possible to tell the parents of one born with my condition that they will live a normal life span, so long as they put restrictions on their behaviour, the first one, always remember to take your tables at eight am every morning, for ever.
God, that was drummed into me, so much so that I instinctively wake at eight am to swallow my life-giving tablets, even if I've just got into bed a couple of hours before. If I get in from work at seven I can get ready for bed, see to my cats, and then get my head down and I will wake, a silent alarm drummed into me, at eight, for my tablets. My ex was fascinated by this.
Even today, they can't make this condition go away, can't even promise to cut down the number times it will threaten my life, but they can monitor it. And they can test for it while still in the womb.
 My point, if you're still with me. Suppose medical science was as it is today but my condition was at the same stage of understanding it was in the 60s. Suppose a pregnant woman, first time mother, is examined and told by a grave faced doctor that the foetus she is carrying has this mysterious illness, barely named, and they can't say if it will be born health and live and thrive, and it will need constant care and medication and be in hospital more than it's out and it could die early and it will die without treatment.
What is to stop that woman aborting someone like me? Getting the disability out of her and then catching again in the hope of replacing me with a healthy baby?
 I can function, I'm more or less healthy, I've a good brain, I can contribute. If I could step out of this genetically deficient body and into one that works, like Jake Sully in James Cameron's Avatar, I would, so I could be well, but I'm alive, and can live a life alone, without having to constantly rely on others. But medical science could not have predicted, then, that I was going to be here now.
You see what I'm getting at. Abortion is not cut and dried, and those who say 'it is murder, there is no excuse' have as much right to have their as those who say 'it's up to the woman'. They aren't doing it to annoy people, they genuinely believe it, just like 'it's up to the mother' also believe it. Neither side in the war is fully right.
But you can't tell one side that about the other. Not if you want to be accused of being for the other side and words like 'insane' 'fanatical' 'lefties' 'fascist' 'feminist' 'misogynist' are more penetrating than bullets, and the blood spilled is in the soul and the wounds make the injured more enraged, more sure of their righteousness in this case.
The pro-lifers, well, you're all right so long as you are in the womb. Soon as you're born, you can shift for yourself. Those who are pro-life are more often than not anti social care programmes to give the kid a chance once it comes out screaming into the cold world. No disabled baby can hope for the money provided to make the necessary medications to maintain life.
The pro-choice lot, it's all about 'a woman's right to choose', 'she hasn't to carry it, she can get rid of it if she likes', 'it's a painless, five minute process'. 'Maybe, if it's not going to survive,  better if you get rid of it.' Then they pull out the emotion-primed 'in the case of rape or incest' or 'the mother's life in danger' card, flinging it at the stone hard inexorable 'abortion is murder' 'she should have kept her legs closed' opponents.
 But both sides are so lost in a blizzard of words and accusations and lies and hysteria they have forgotten the foetus itself.
 If you're reading this, and you are disabled, when you get the chance, if you don't already know, and you feel comfortable doing so, ask your Mum what would she would do if you'd been conceived at a time when medical science was up to date with everything except your disability, and the doctors discovered you had this disability and suggested an abortion.
 Me? My Mum would have kept me. A life is a life, after all. Even if it's a potential life.
Even if it's old demmick, innocent victim of a cluster of enzymes that didn't switch on and missed a hormonal connection when the body was being formed.