NEVER muddy the language. George Orwell, even in his clumsy Etonian prose, showed us where obfuscation leads. State psychopaths are fond of bland terminology, the better to excuse their crimes. Bureaucrats adore jargon, the better to justify a want of competence. Meanwhile, most of us, meaning no harm, love a good euphemism: that way, somehow, words lose their moral sting.
For what it is worth, I was never comfortable with “a woman’s right to choose”. Neither the choice nor the right is disputable, in my book. In parts of our world both still require a defence against men who need to treat their sexual partners as meat or breeding stock. But if by choice you mean abortion, say abortion. If by abortion you mean the killing of a foetus, then talk of killing, not of “procedures”, or of medical nec essity. I’ll stand with you.

If killing is the issue, equally, don’t bother me with “euthanasia” or some other bit of old Greek with lots of vowel sounds. “Assisted suicide” is murder by consent, and none the worse for it. I hope that when the day dawns, I have the right and the strength to demand such a release. Just don’t insult me, in my dotage, with something that sounds like a request for the home help. If I want to be killed painlessly, I will, with luck, be able to say so.

Trust this, though: come that moment, I will mean what I say, and say what I mean. That’s the point.

This sort of stuff is offensive to many, obviously enough. Most faiths take a dim view of those who kill, and particularly of those who trespass on a creator’s patch. Suicides get hell for it, apparently. Abortionists are, meanwhile, consigned to one of the circles Dante didn’t get around to naming. Life is sacred, except when it isn’t, or when a god’s purpose is deemed too mysterious for any of our words. Can’t speak; won’t speak.

Sod that. I am just about old enough to remember a Britain in which abortion was illegal. I can certainly remember a time in which some of my female teenage contemporaries gave up their children to strangers because this was, someone said, “for the best”. Churches were always more than happy to help with that harvest: they had a thing about reaping little souls. It was evident then, nevertheless, and self-evident now, that medical termination – killing – was preferable to hot bathtubs, coat hangers and dead girls.

So why do I hesitate over the Nuffield Council on Bioethics? The fancy title might have something to do with it. I am out of date, clearly, but when did “bioethics” become a word? “Morals”, non-bio, should do. The serious point is that this council says “extremely premature” babies, those born before 23 weeks’ gestation, should be denied intensive care and allowed to die. The liberal abortionist sitting in my chair, the one with all the correct, predictable views, disagrees. Seriously.

Call it fanciful, he says. Call it some sort of male conceit, or a presumptuous middle-class-rent-a-thought, but this bothers me. Worse, I cannot quite locate my own unease. If I would accede to the abortion of an unborn child at 22 weeks, why quibble when serious people say that life for these babies could be worse than death?

Most won’t survive, despite medical intervention. Many, a great many, are liable to be disabled if they live. All are liable to suffer “intolerably” during treatment, thanks merely to the effort to keep them alive. Finally, let’s be brutal – or brutally honest: there are many more injured souls on whom the taxpayer could be spending money. Triage, NHS-style, is the truth that can never be named. Spend on one and you fail to spend on another. Most of us are never faced with such a choice.

This abortionist has a chink in his armour of bold, blunt, liberal truth, and it would be untruthful to pretend otherwise. For some reason, even now, I make a distinction between a child in the womb and a child in the world. It makes no real, medical sense. Of babies born between 22 and 23 weeks, only 1% survive. In any case, only 4000 scraps of life are born annually at between 22 and 26 weeks, and most of those are still-born. Of children born at 23 weeks, only 16% to 20% will live, and two-thirds of those might – the research is less than comprehensive – be disabled.

We’ll get to that. Think, first, of the Nuffield proposal: let them die. It is a notion that this society has yet to accommodate. Anti-abortionists would say that we have been ducking this very issue for a very long time, but their notions of sanctity have less to do with life than with holy death, to my ears. The Nuffield argument is of another order.

Unless parents insist, unless doctors are willing, and unless a hospital is up to the task, “extremely premature” babies should expire: such is the suggestion. Most of these infants will not repay the considerable medical effort, after all. A majority will be disabled, many will suffer thanks to medicine’s “duty to prolong life”, and each will inherit a paradox. Only science makes them viable. Twenty years ago, 10 years ago, death for such mites was assured. Do they now live because they should, because they must, or simply because a few machines say that they can?

First answer: what is this “should”? If the medical profession will not embrace aided self-murder, who then earns the right to deny life to the early born? Because “they must”? Life must find its path, generally, one way or another. That’s the Darwinian imperative. And technology’s several challenges? If the latest Sony PlayStation could keep a premature baby alive – as an optional extra, you understand – no-one would blink at the cost.

This is facetious, obviously, but relevant. Two points matter seriously. One has to do with what the Nuffield group calls “intolerable” suffering in the premature.

The Nuffield group admits that language – words, in other words – creates a large difficulty. It doesn’t know what they really mean: welcome to that club. The group cannot, however, identify the point at which the duty to maintain life in a new human becomes a kind of cruelty. Since the child cannot choose, the group offers a choice. Handy.

The Nuffield team has less difficulty in issuing an administrative invitation to death, however, as though it might be easier just to avoid the choice of deciding what, if anything, to do with a fistful of struggling humanity. The moral argument is ceded on practical grounds. This is, in my experience, always a bad sign. The real effect is to advocate the practice of abortion outside the womb.

There I halt. I should not have to say that a disabled person is a person first and always. A person is a person is a person. And disability is not, cannot be, a grounds for preventing life. Abortion as a right and a practice is not a reason to avert every medically-inappropriate existence, yet that is what Nuffield proposes. Cease treatment, “withdraw”, and the child dies: in Victorian language, it would count as “a kindness”.

Why do I support abortion and object to the willed killing of infants, “viable” or not? To a scientist, my opinion probably counts as arbitrary. Once a child is in the world, she belongs to the world. Once a child is born, once he exists, our obligations are absolute, in my accounting. A hard birth, a tough life? Invariably, there have been worse. It strikes me, nevertheless, that a world wedded to selection after birth will be bleak for all of us.

I’m sentimental, too. Crass, probably, but human. Without fail, the new-born always soften my calloused heart. It seems to me that if we cannot care for them, no matter what, the chances are that we cannot care for ourselves. This is not an argument you should lose, in other words, for the sake of “bioethics”.

The anti-abortionists always had an honest point: that was the reason for the fight. How many weeks? How old is old enough? What do you mean by viable? What do you mean by human? Just this: a child emerging from the womb is ours, no matter the price or the pain or the contradictions. The paradoxes are human, too, like the infants.