Women’s reproductive rights and control over their own bodies and their own lives are about to be brutally assaulted in the United States.  I therefore, on this blog, wish to make the following statement, which is based upon the humanist message of care, compassion, support, love, consideration for others, and wish for all human beings to have full and happy lives,  a message that resonates down the ages from the days of Epicurus, who espoused these simple, decent, civilised principles:

“It is a grievous  and shameful sin to bring into the world a child that is not wanted by its mother, and cannot be loved, cared for and brought up like other well-loved children.

Making a mother carry a child to term by law or by societal or religious custom is cruel and intolerable, more cruel than terminating a foetus that might be technically alive but cannot yet comprehend or cope with a probable life of no love, poverty, inadequate diet, little schooling and no prospects –  and to live that life until what age?  80 years old? More likely, 35 in many countries of the world.  That is the way of adding more messed-up, angry, unloved, unhappy people to an already unhappy world.

The exponents of banning abortion, very often the same people who inflict homelessness and sudden death on the innocent in foreign wars in the name of liberty, ignore the misery they cause others.  A woman, brutally raped, is expected to love and cherish the unwanted offspring of some man she barely knows?  In a failing marriage and amid much unhappiness the announcement of  a birth is unlikely to mend the marriage;  rather, it breaks it up, leaving a single, resentful  mother to cope singlehandedly, often projecting her resentment for lost opportunity onto her child. A 14 or 15 year old teenager, not yet a woman, has to suddenly undertake to rear a human child in the face of a blighted future?

But whether it is rape, teenage unpreparedness for motherhood, marital misharmony, lack of education and earning prospects, threat of illness or incapacity, the body of a woman and the brain encompassed within it are the sole property of that woman.  No busibody has to right to tell her what to do with it.  It is for her, not some preacher or politician to decree how she should live her life; or if they do do insist on bully tactics, they should themselves be prepared to support that woman and her unwanted child emotionally and financially, or keep their views to themselves. Of course they have no intention of doing anything to help the agonised and wretched women who, for their own personal reasons find themselves in the position of unwanted motherhood.   These advocates of making abortion, even family planning, illegal, are from an Epicurean perspective immoral”.

This is a matter of principle, Epicurean principle.