This was not the first time I marched at a Walk for Life, but it was the first time I attended with my wife, who volunteers at a pregnancy support centre, and who is expecting our first child (Tada!), whom we call Lil’ Chillun.

Having my own unborn baby present would perhaps have added more poignancy to the experience if I was a more sentimental man. But for me, it mainly added some fresh awareness of how thoroughly the political, medical, and cultural argument has already been lost.

In Australia, becoming pregnant automatically delivers you into the waiting hands of our healthcare system. My doctor is actually a very good one in my experience, and when we first visited he was quick to point out that pregnancy is not an illness, it is a unique and dynamic but normal state of health. From the outset, Edith and I were scheduled for appointments to get ultrasounds and blood tests, and after the first results were processed, I called a hotline and our pregnancy was assigned a number.

We didn’t initially realise, however, that some of the tests that were being booked on our behalf were ‘screening’ tests.

A screening test is, by definition, meant to create awareness of potentialities but not to draw conclusions. Someone has done a bunch of work measuring various dimensions that can be discerned on an ultrasound – particularly the skin fold on the back of little one’s neck – and correlating these dimensions to potential genetic disorders that little one might have. It’s a statistical correlation and has very poor predictive capability, but that’s not the point. The point of screening is that oodles of false positives are fine, as long as there aren’t false negatives – hence issues can be identified early.

The next step after the screening study is meant to be a more reliable test. These days, a non-invasive prenatal test (NIPT) can examine traces in a pregnant mother’s blood that can identify issues in the baby she is carrying. The ‘Harmony’ test, as it is more pronounceably (and intriguingly) called, provides an indication of all sorts of previously difficult-to-determine details, including the baby’s gender. It also costs upwards of $450, so until it gets cheaper or gets a hefty Medicare rebate… Well, I’m feeling disinclined.

Yet there’s something awful about this streamlined embryo health check. Of course, the medical profession wants to know about your problems as early as they possibly can, but this is usually to maximise their ability to interrupt the disease and heal you. In the case of Lil’ Chillun and other unborn, the search is on for incurable illnesses. We asked our doctor, ‘What responses are possible if we obtain this additional data?’ Our doctor pointed out that not all genetic disorders are like Downs Syndrome. Some will always miscarry; some are always fatal. And perhaps if you know there’s an incurable disease at work, then you might cancel your baby shower or your gender reveal party. Or tell fewer people that you are pregnant. Or prepare yourself emotionally, or something like that. But let’s face it, that’s not what everyone’s been doing.

Many people, perhaps the majority, are simply being scared witless by a doctor telling them that there’s a ‘possibility’ that their child has a disease, and then trying to work out how to feel and how to respond until either time or $450 tells them that they needn’t have worried.

For others, the main point of finding out through early screening and testing if little one has a genetic disorder, is so that they have the earliest practical and legal chance to end their life. And that is what has been happening. In Australia, the proportion of births with Downs Syndrome, for example, has decreased by 66 per cent since the 1970s, despite a significant increase in the main risk factor – the average age of mothers. The lowest rates are in Denmark, where more than 95 per cent of pregnancies with potential chromosomal disorders are terminated.

As I listened to the speeches at the Walk for Life, I reflected that my own anti-abortion argument has shifted over the years. I used to argue that ‘life begins at conception’! My focus was on logically proving that if it is wrong to kill babies the day after they are born, then surely it must be wrong to kill them the day before they are born. And the day before that. And presumably the day before that, also. And really, how can we find a line at which life commences?

It’s not such a bad argument. But it suffers subtly in that it takes up the fight on scientific turf. This tacitly accepts that it is indeed a scientific question. How do we determine the relevant element of life from which we derive a moral prohibition against ending it? Is it having a heartbeat? Ability to feel pain? Ability to consciously want to live? Ability to live outside the womb?

Science cannot truly answer this question, because science cannot explain why murder is wrong at all. Science can only observe. Life is natural, and death is natural, too. Things that we call good occur, as do things that we call bad. What, scientifically, would make even the murder of an already-born baby morally wrong? If the tool of science cannot be used to justify the morals we all agree on, we surely cannot use it to prove the morals we don’t agree on, nor find the line between the two.

This is why all those scientific fact sheets about Downs Syndrome present two statements side-by-side: firstly, that due to early termination, we have decreased the incidence rate of the disease. Second, that the life expectancy for those born with Downs Syndrome has increased from 10 to 50 years. Both of these are presented as improvements.

If I wish to argue honestly, ‘life begins at conception’ does not address the crux of the matter. I don’t really care when ‘life’ begins. (I cannot even claim to be pro-life, in the abstract. I have no issue with eating meat, and I even look favourably on capital punishment when it is deserved.)

Science sees life and death, birth and miscarriage, and it puts them in a single category ‘natural’. But I see a different moral frame. There are two forces at play in this world, and two ways to live in it. There is a magnificent creation that is, in its design, ‘very good’. Then there are forces of destruction that work to transform what was created into other things, which are very bad. Sickness and decay and, eventually, death all destroy good things. I don’t use my scientific lens and logical contortions to discern what is good and what is not. I rather see whether a thing creates or destroys, whether it brings joy or brings pain, whether it is celebrated or hidden, whether it has joy or has shame, and whether it is self-sacrificial or self-indulgent.

I don’t deny the scientific reality of sickness and death. But acknowledging, seeing, and living with them are one thing – causing them is quite another. Denmark’s medical fraternity haven’t ‘defeated’ Downs Syndrome, they’ve taken its side.

‘Those who are healthy have no need of a physician.’ And it follows that those who are sick have no need of an executioner, either.

The Walk for Life is one of the largest protests that gets held in South Australia; abortion has many victims – the unborn children first, and second, the many women who carry a confusing shame/guilt/regret with them that weighs so differently to the grief of a miscarriage. The issue usually mobilises about 4,000 to 5,000 people.

Yet no side of politics is really interested in taking the issue on. Our governments continue to neglect the single, most basic moral duty they have. They still quietly continue to make abortion more and more easy, as they make adoption more and more difficult, and they never go backwards. Only last week Queensland changed the law so that midwives and nurses, not just doctors, can prescribe early medical abortion pills. Those who are pro-life now must work one mother, one baby, at a time, trying to win the ‘choice’ of ‘pro-choice’ for choosing life.

Governments can continue doing this because, culturally, this is not a present battleground. The majority of people support abortion ‘choice’ without a second thought. Culturally, we are thoroughly morally whacked and this particular line is many kilometres behind the battle-front (now we’re debating the use of puberty blockers as treatment for gender dysphoria!) Yet this line is a critical one that will keep me and my wife marching. Our society amasses many victims in its relentless fight against reality, but none are more innocent, and none victims of a more serious crime, than those killed before they are even born.

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