Chapter 6
Respect for Life
From the very first pages on, the Bible teaches that the whole of creation is for every human being, and that it is our responsibility to develop it. Each of us is made in the image of our Maker and all other claimed rights are subordinate to the right of each person to live. We are not expendable raw material but unique people prized by our Maker. The destruction of created life can never be a matter of 'choice' and any logical concern for social justice would see a respect for the most powerless of human beings as an over-riding concern. To argue that it is our individual right to choose to end another person's life is to place the individual's rights above the rights of the human person. The atheist or secularist should not wonder at Christian insistence on this age-old truth; we do, after all, believe in a God who took the form of humanity in its most vulnerable form. We believe God came as an embryo. His first witness was a foetus, John. The Gospel writer, Luke, a doctor, records how John leapt with joy in his previously infertile mother's womb as he greeted the tiny Jesus - who at that stage was just a 'primitive streak' or 'pre-embryo'. The utilitarian arguments put forward by those who favour destructive experimentation on human embryos, abortion, limited infanticide on disabled babies, eugenics and euthanasia, all take as their central theme the erroneous belief that they are doing it for the individual's or for the general good. Wilberforce well understood where such thinking led when he proclaimed: 'Resolutely disclaim that dangerous sophistry of doing evil that good may come.' Our generation has seen a general baptising, in all walks of life, of demanding one's own rights. The language is aggressive and it legitimises the very selfishness about which we moralise when we attack other aspects of the grab-what-you-can society in which we live. This impoverished economic and political language demands rights without duties and responsibilities: we must re-establish balance in the equation. It is not a choice between mother and child: it is a question of love, care and practical help for both of them. What it can never be is simply 'my right' to choose to take another person's life. This is the supreme human rights issue. The issues at stake are the sovereignty of God and the sanctity of human life. Because the protection of human life is at the heart of the matter, it cannot be dismissed as a topic for 'private morality' or left as