Scotland’s Abortion-Until-Birth Proposal Exposes the Fatal Crack in the “Clump of Cells” Argument, By Mrs Brittany Miller (Londonistan)

Imagine a healthy, viable baby at 39 weeks gestation: kicking, dreaming, recognising its mother's voice, capable of feeling pain, and mere centimetres from drawing its first breath. Under a bill currently advancing in the Scottish Parliament, that child could be legally dismembered, poisoned, or starved to death for purely social or economic reasons — right up to the moment of birth.

The defenders of this radical change will, of course, deploy the familiar slogans: "It's just a foetus." "It's not a person." "It's a clump of cells." "My body, my choice."

But once you permit abortion until the moment of birth, those slogans collide with a brutal philosophical problem that no amount of chanting can wish away.

The Sorites Paradox of Human Rights

If personhood and the right to life begin only at the precise second of birth, then the moral status of a human being hinges on one variable: location.

One minute before delivery, the baby has no rights and can be killed for any reason or no reason.

One minute after delivery, the same baby has the full protection of the law, and anyone who kills it commits murder.

Nothing biologically meaningful has changed in those two minutes except geography — the baby has moved about eight inches down the birth canal. Its brain waves, heartbeat, DNA, capacity for pain, and dependence on others are identical. Yet we are asked to believe that a few inches and a subjective desire ("I don't want it") are sufficient to turn a non-person into a person.

This is the classic sorites ("heap") paradox applied to human rights:

A single grain of sand is not a heap.

Adding one grain never turns a non-heap into a heap.

Therefore, a trillion grains of sand is still not a heap.

Replace "grain of sand" with "cell" or "developmental milestone," and you arrive at the pro-choice destination: a 21-inch, 8-pound, perfectly formed baby with fingernails and eyelashes is still "just a clump of cells" with no moral claim on the rest of us.

The Infanticide That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Most politicians who support abortion up to birth will furiously deny that they also support infanticide. Yet they have no coherent principle with which to draw the line.

Every single argument used to justify killing a full-term foetus applies with almost identical force to a newborn:

"It's completely dependent on another person's body."

"It places enormous physical and emotional burdens on the mother."

"It is not yet self-aware in the philosophical sense."

"The woman has a right to bodily autonomy."

Secular philosophers who follow the logic honestly, openly defend post-birth abortion (their euphemism: "after-birth abortion") in exactly the same circumstances they defend late-term abortion. They are at least consistent. The mainstream "safe, legal and rare" crowd wants the conclusion without the premise that leads to it.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

Countries and jurisdictions that have removed gestational limits give us a glimpse of the future:

In Canada, there is no legal limit whatsoever. Late-term abortions for social reasons are performed and funded by the state.

In England & Wales after the 1967 Act was liberalised, abortions after 24 weeks rose steadily; some are performed for cleft palate or club foot.

In the Netherlands, the Groningen Protocol explicitly permits doctors to end the lives of newborns with disabilities if the parents and parents agree.

In U.S. states that repealed limits after Dobbs (New York, California, etc.), data show abortions occurring at 30+ weeks for non-medical reasons.

And yes, babies are sometimes born alive after failed late-term procedures and left to die. Canada stopped collecting the data because it was embarrassing. Several U.S. states still report dozens or hundreds of such cases every year.

The Principle That Cannot Be Contained

Once a society declares that there exists a category of human beings who may be intentionally killed because their existence is inconvenient to someone more powerful, that principle never stays neatly inside the womb. It leaks. It always leaks.

History is littered with examples: slavery, eugenics,the Cambodian killing fields — all began by designating some living human beings as non-persons. The criteria change (race, class, disability, gestational age), but the underlying logic is identical: "These humans do not count."

The Choice Before Us

Defenders of abortion-until-birth will accuse pro-lifers of hysteria for raising the spectre of infanticide. But the charge of hysteria only works if they can offer a principled, non-arbitrary reason why the right to life begins at birth and not a day later. They cannot. They fall back on emotion ("but it's a baby now!") or legal fiat ("because the law says so").

Those are not principles. They are feelings and power.

Scotland is about to etch into law the most radical devaluation of human life in the Western world since the eugenics era. If it passes, it will not be the end of the argument. It will be the moment the mask slips, and the Western world is forced to confront what it has been whispering for fifty years:

If a perfectly formed, pain-capable, viable baby can be killed the day before birth for social reasons, then there is no rational barrier — only a sentimental one — to killing it the day after.

And sentimental barriers against the intentional killing of innocents have never, in the long arc of history, held for very long.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/scotland-may-soon-allow-abortions-up-to-birth-for-social-reasons