We used to share an idea of what we mean by the word human. Now it's not so clear.
Following the decision of the U. S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade legalizing abortion, it became acceptable, even politically correct, to call a human embryo, 'a bunch of cells' thus denying the obvious truth that the 'bunch of cells' was a human being at the earliest stage of development. When the clear bright moral line upholding the sanctity of human life was breached, a Pandora's box was opened.
We are seeing the consequences now.
In the past few days, Parliament has pooh-poohed the idea that human beings, artificially bred in a laboratory, need fathers or father-substitutes.
The same law-makers, who see nothing wrong with aborting a child aged 24 weeks in the mother's womb, have also joyfully given the go-ahead to research which will involve the creation of human-animal hybrids in laboratories.
This is a momentous step. A decent society is one in which every man, woman and child is regarded as a sacrosanct individual, but such a belief is untenable if our law is also to allow scientists to tinker with our DNA, the stuff of life itself, and to mix it with the DNA of other species.
A N Wilson imagines What would the world be like without men?
In light of the debates this week in Parliament and elsewhere about embryology, about the very nature of life itself, it seems all too possible that by the time today's children are middle-aged they will be living in a Brave New World more horrible than Aldous Huxley imagined in 1932.
--
People in Huxley's nightmare do not reproduce through sex or family life. Instead, they are bred in Hatcheries, and then divided into castes - the Alphas and Betas running the show, the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons are slaves.
Is this really so far-fetched?
--
A few die-hards insisted on such foolish old mantras as 'everyone needs a dad', but the appendage 'like a hole in the head' was soon tacked on by the rest of society.
After the coup, masculinity became illegal and it became necessary, by humane means, of course, to eliminate males altogether.
In the matter of abortion, for example, agnostics and religious believers all agreed that the foetus was a human being. Such a simple belief is no longer taken for granted, and the human body itself is seen by many scientists as an object in a laboratory with which to be experimented.