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The Role of Ahimsă in Healthcare Ethics : 65
inviolable right to life of the fetus as a full human person, and is therefore antiabortion. On the other side there is the pro-choice group that stands for the woman's right to control her own body and its reproductive processes, and therefore opts for abortion-onrequest. The reasoning of the principle of ahimsā steers a course somewhere in the middle.
Along with the pro-life people, Hindus believe in the spiritual creation of nascent life, which invests it with inviolable dignity and sanctity. The embryo or fetus is more than tissue in the mother”, it has a separate, individual life of its own. Just as there is no such thing as being a little pregnant," gestation- from the first mitosis of the fertilized ovum-cell to birth - is one continuous process. To say that termination of the process is morally permissible at one stage but not at another is to truncate the untruncatable. Termination at an early stage may be safer, but it is no less the termination a person-in-being. The anguish of a pregnant woman may be real, but it is seldom commensurable with the fetus's life that is being taken.
At the same time Hinduism breaks rank with the pro-life group on the grounds that the right to life of the fetus ought not to be absolutized. In place of absolute rights, Hinduism advocates addressing competing rights and values. Ethical dilemmas arise in cases of rape and incest and when the mother runs the risk of grave injury or death. Hinduism is sensitive to the uniqueness of each situation, with its own moral tragedy. The best we can do in such situations is evil, but then it boils down to a question of degree.
In a pregnancy where the mother's life is in a balance, the principle of ahiṁsā places greater weight on maternal rights than on fetal rights. The adult human being, having arrived at a karmic stage in which there is much more at stake for her spiritual destiny, and in which there are existing obligations to be performed for family and society, is in a position to be favoured over an equal human being whose evolution in this life is by comparison
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