There could be few more telling examples of the negative side of interference with birth processes than the case involving the woman who, after fertility treatment, is now pregnant with octuplets. All the ingredients of controversy and condemnation are combined, from her foolhardy decision to ignore doctor's advice after treatment and risk pregnancy to her apparent determination to milk the resulting situation for all its financial potential with the help of a compliant newspaper - raising a second set of ethical issues.
Many relevant questions have been asked which have not been fully answered yet. Why, for example, was Ms Mandy Allwood given treatment normally limited to women who have difficulty in conceiving when she had already given birth to a healthy child? And why, when the most elementary medical must have told her that the eight foetuses she is carrying will almost certainly not survive to full term, has she - with her advisers, including Mr Max Clifford, a high profile PR consultant - carried on as if this was not so? It is reasonable to assume that part at least of the answer to the second query is related to the commercial value of the story she has sold to the News of the World. But words almost cease to have meaning in the reported reaction of Mr Paul Hudson, the father of the octuplets, to the suggestion that six should be aborted to give the remaining two a chance to live: "That's too horrific to contemplate", he said. "Our eight babies were obviously meant to be."
Few prospective fathers, in more ordinary circumstances, would dare to express such confidence. Birth, in spite of scientific advances, still retains some of its mystery and uncertainty. While one must respect the stated beliefs of Mr Hudson and Ms Allwood, the case poses some of the issues of the abortion debate in the most extreme and even grotesque form. A medical correspondent in The Times yesterday summed up the fundamental dilemma by pointing out that not only were the babies highly unlikely to survive to birth, but "the pregnancy and delivery also pose an unnecessary threat to the health, even life, of the mother. In medical eyes this pregnancy is a catastrophe."
Is the ethical situation changed by the fact that these foetuses could not possibly have come into being without human intervention? The answer, and not only in Catholic eyes, is undoubtedly that it is not affected. Yet can that be a fully satisfactory answer if human intervention, once more, can be deployed to ensure that some survive when the likelihood is that, without it, all will die? The recent case in Britain of the woman who had one of her twins aborted highlighted (in admittedly very different circumstances) the agonising decisions that individual women, as well as doctors, are confronted with in the era of choice.
Anti abortion campaigners who attempted to raise money to persuade that woman to keep both her babies would probably wish for a more suitable candidate for their moral support than Ms Allwood whose motives, at best, appear to be mixed. Her case, however, is far from typical, and has little relevance to the average concerns of women who want to become pregnant or alternatively feel compelled to consider an abortion. Debate over the whole range of sensitive issues involved is not helped by the intolerance shown by Youth Defence in its protest yesterday against the refusal of the broadcasting authorities to allow its emotive advertisement on the nation's airwaves. And few will be reassured by the totalitarian language used to make its point.