Museum of the Future

I found this editorial in a British newspaper about the opening of the "London, Sugar and Slavery" museum to be a fitting follow-up to our earlier discussion of abortion. In the piece the author says a few noteworthy things as he makes a comparison between abortion and slavery. Here are a few excerpts that I thought noteworthy:

Dawn Primarolo, ... the health minister, was telling the Commons Science and Technology Committee that there was no justification for lowering the limit for abortion below the current 24 weeks. In doing so, she was going against those who argue that medical advances now make it easier for children born before 24 weeks to survive. As if timing it to undermine Miss Primarolo's position, Millie McDonagh, who was born in Manchester aged 22 weeks, celebrated her first birthday the following day, photographed with her mother in the newspapers.

I found it interesting that the UK prohibits abortions after 24 weeks. He continues the piece looking at the new slavery museum and envisioning a future one.

I found myself wondering how abortion will be viewed by museum curators, teachers, historians and moralists 200 years from now.

As the slavery exhibition shows, something that one generation accepts readily enough is often seen as abhorrent by its descendants – so abhorrent, in fact, that people find it almost impossible to understand how it could have been countenanced in a supposedly civilised society.

How could people not see that Africans should not be bought and sold for the convenience of our trade or our domestic life? We reserve particular scorn for those who sought to justify slavery on moral grounds. We look at the moral blindness of the past, and tut-tut, rather complacently.

It is not hard to imagine how a future Museum of London exhibition about abortion could go. It could buy up a 20th-century hospital building as its space, and take visitors round, showing them how, in one ward, staff were trying to save the lives of premature babies while, in the next, they were killing them.

I'll end with this excerpt ... I think that it somewhat reflects our previous conversation.

In many ways, I accept, such a museum of the future would be extremely unfair. We anti-abortionists should not paint all those who disagree with us as callous. Many of those who support abortion have a deep concern about the horrors of an unwanted child, not realising that the culture of abortion is one that promotes unwantedness.

Others worry about world population growth. For reasons too long to explain here, I think they are mistaken, but I would certainly not want to argue that this automatically makes them haters of the human race. We should be conscious of how genuinely difficult some of the situations of a pregnant woman can be. We should think more of help and less of condemnation.

More of a help and less condemnation.. something we can all agree on.