Why is it legal to kill a person before birth but not after?
Children are the most privileged members of society. Yet that same society officially permits children to be killed – and on a massive scale.
A tragedy occurred in Boryspil: on the day she returned home from the maternity hospital, a mother threw her newborn baby from a sixth-floor window. The infant died. The woman has already been notified that she is suspected of intentional homicide and will almost certainly face prison.
What happened is unquestionably horrific. Women suffering from postpartum depression sometimes kill their children or take their own lives. But here we would like to focus on something else – the strange logic of our society.
Killing a newborn child carries a prison sentence. And that makes sense: under the law, taking a human life – especially the life of a child – should be punished.
But if that same child had been killed several months earlier, it would have been regarded as perfectly normal and legal.
In Ukraine, abortion is permitted up to 12 weeks of pregnancy and, in certain circumstances, up to 22 weeks – five and a half months. Childbirth normally occurs at around nine months.
In other words, if the Boryspil mother had, for whatever reason, decided to have an abortion, it would officially have been called an “induced termination of pregnancy.” But now it is called “murder,” with all the consequences that entails.
But what is the difference? Only that the child would have been killed earlier? Only a matter of a few months?
Children are the most privileged members of society. They are carefully protected and given the very best.
Yet that same society officially permits children to be killed – and on a massive scale.
How did we end up living in such a looking-glass world?
