ABORTION remains morally objectionable to many. Science has revealed that life begins at conception and logic therefore dictates that abortion is the taking not of a ‘potential’ life but of a real life.
Christians in particular are often uncomfortable about abortion because the Judaeo-Christian tradition has always taught additionally that it is wrong deliberately to kill any innocent person. The Commandment ‘You Shall Not Kill’ forbids it and, as Pope St John Paul II said in Veritatis Splendor, his 1993 encyclical on the moral teaching of the Church, the negative precepts of the Ten Commandments are inviolable. They make abortion ‘intrinsically evil’. For conscientious Catholics such as Dr Thérèse Coffey, the newly appointed Health Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister, such teachings will make abortion a grave matter indeed.
