Catholic Medical Quarterly Volume 73(1) February 2023
Book Review
Moment: A novel
by Miles Christie. Beati Publishing
Reviewed by Pravin Thevathasan
I found
this book to be a really useful reminder of why we need to be pro-life.
The graphic format suggests that the book is aimed at young people. Not
too young, I would suggest, as the descriptions of the abortion
procedures are matter of fact and detailed. And, as one ought to expect,
horrifying.
The story is quite simple. A rogue bioethics professor
gives a lecture to a group of students. It turns out that he is not the
rogue after all. It is surely the abortionists who are guilty of robbing
countless human lives.
The book is not religious. All the arguments in
favour of life beginning at the moment of conception are based on
science. The author gives us a beautiful summary of the development of
human life from the moment of conception.
Perhaps wisely, the professor
does not detail the so-called hard cases: rape, disability and maternal
ill-health. What he wants to tell his audience over and over again is
about the moment of conception. That is when human life begins and that
is an objective fact. What about distinguishing human life from human
personhood. According to this view, the unborn child may be a human being
but is not a human person as yet. The trouble with this view, says the
professor, is that it is entirely subjective: you decide when personhood
begins according to your own "faith". It all sounds a bit
pseudo-religious. Maybe the professor should have reminded his audience
that the most famous ethicist in the world, Peter Singer, does not think
that the new-born baby is a person and therefore, in his view, infanticide
is morally okay.
We then have a very detailed description of the
various abortion procedures. Members of the audience become increasingly
unsettled. This is surely what is needed: we need to wake people up from
their moral complacency.I highly recommend this work