Claire Prentice on the reality behind the doctrine

ON Friday night the Catholic Church in Scotland celebrated the 10th anniversary of the late Cardinal Thomas Winning's Pro-life Initiative (PLI) with a mass in Glasgow. The PLI aims to offer financial and practical support to those women who are considering having an abortion but who decide instead to have the child.

Forgive me if I don't join the celebrations. The PLI, a relic of the time when Winning was a moral and political force in the land, may appear to offer succour to vulnerable women, but it enforces a ruthless morality on those who are least able to resist it.

Set aside the fact that attendance at the Catholic Church is falling. Leave alone the fact that the church's misguided views on abortion and contraception are largely responsible for that decline, and that those who do still go to mass largely ignore the church's mediaeval sense of morality.

Focus for a moment on the devastated, vulnerable women who come to consider whether they want to bear the child they carry. Some old, some young, some reeling from the breakdown of a relationship, others raped or abused. I do not believe that the appropriate place for those people to seek advice is from those who, for their own doctrinaire reason, consider abortion to be a mortal sin.

In one of its most controversial cases, that of a 12-year-old girl referred to the PLI by her father, the centre maintained that, from the start, the girl was adamant that she wanted to keep her baby.

Imagining the state of mind of that young girl, facing her father and the fathers of the church in confusion and distress, still a child herself and being told that she is responsible for the child she carries, makes me want to weep. Incredibly, distressingly, the Catholic Church in Scotland judged the child capable of being a mother.

On its website the PLI features photographs of racks of baby clothes. Militant anti-abortion websites prefer pictures of blood and severed limbs. But though the window-dressing differs, both hold the same views about the need to curtail abortion rights.

Despite the fact that anti-abortion campaigners maintain that abortion is morally grotesque, their hardline stance means they adopt equally grotesque positions. In August of last year the media reported a Vatican official as saying that the Catholic Church would excommunicate a medical team who performed Colombia's first legal abortion on an 11-year-old girl, who was eight weeks' pregnant after being raped by her stepfather. Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, the president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family, said the measure could also apply to "relatives, politicians and lawmakers" who were "protagonists in this abominable crime".

THERE are many adjectives that could be used about such a position. Moral is not one of them. And there are other positions, equally worrying, which flow from the belief that life begins at conception and that the human rights of the foetus outweigh the civil rights of its mother.

For abortion is merely the most emotionally powerful arrow in the quiver of those who cling to a belief in the sanctity of biological destiny. It sits next to opposition to stem cell research, the long-hoped-for lifeline of those afflicted by Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis or motor neurone disease.

Anyone who has seen a loved one destroyed by a degenerative neurological condition;whohaswatchedthe shredding of personality; the wasting of limbs, the despair, the cruel destruction of dignity, autonomy and control, should know what is at stake here. Weigh up the pain of thinking human beings who suffer from such diseases against the rights of a speckle of cells in a petri dish and you quickly realise that this is the cruellest kind of "morality" imaginable.

Do I believe that a proto-life, a life without thought, without personality, without autonomy, has rights that outweigh those of a 35-year-old woman with children confined to a wheelchair by multiple sclerosis so savage that it deprives her of the ability to hold her own child? No.

But that is an equation that militant pro-lifers have no hesitation about making. In the first presidential veto of his time in office, president George W Bush killed a bill to provide federal funds for embryonic stem cell research. Those who oppose such research claim that there is no evidence that it will work.

Yes, and that is precisely why the research must be continued.

But what I object to most is the hijacking of the term "pro-life" by anti-abortionists. I am pro-life too. It's just that the life I am in favour of is one in which sentient people have the right to make vital decisions about their own bodies and their own destinies without the interference of intimidating pressure groups.

Those who oppose abortion aren't pro-life. They are pro-biological destiny and they champion their views with a thinly disguised contempt for women who won't succumb to their view of the world. I would never insist that a woman had an abortion, any more than I would insist that she bore a child she did not feel able to bring up. The difference between those who would ban abortion and the rest of us is that they seek to impose their views on those who don't share them.

The rest of us, who realise that human life is too complex to be forced into doctrinaire categories, just ask that those women who want to make that difficult decision are allowed to do it with the advice of their doctors, without running the gamut of the screaming protesters, the pictures of aborted foetuses through the post and the abuse that some anti-abortionists seem to think is an acceptable form of debate. They're utterly wrong, and it's important that we're not soft-soaped into thinking otherwise.