The Guardian in the past few days has been writing about “draconian laws that force women from both parts of Ireland to travel to Britain to access abortion”. What is this “draconian” law in the Republic of Ireland? It is an article in the country’s Constitution, mandated by two thirds of it population, which gives the right of life to children awaiting birth in their mothers’ wombs. What is draconian about that?

 Draconian might be much more accurately applied to all those laws across the world, legislated by enlightened men and women, which have accounted for the termination – no, not the termination of pregnancies – the termination of millions of lives over the past five decades. This is all in the name of so-called “choice”. It is a perverse world which talks so much about choice but never asks about the rights and wrongs of choices. It is of course the result of a prior perversion, that which sets up the individual as God, a God whose only guide to behaviour is its own will regardless of the value behind the whim, mood or preference which is guiding that will.

If you want to illustrate the injustice of regimes which allow the termination of unwanted children just look at Sally Philips again and her sad reflection on a country which now destroys any child in the womb which seems to belong to the Downs community. Just consider these before you make up your mind on whose side you stand on this issue. This is a community which is being exterminated by in the name of choice – all done by legislatures which paradoxically pride themselves as the protectors of the rights of minorities. Human beings never seemed less logical.

We are a doomed civilization if these are the laws we are going to live by. If the Guardian and the other forces seeking to drive our culture towards a new absolutism, the absolutism of the individual will, prevail, then we are on a short road to that state of nature where all lives will be “nasty, brutish and short”.