Ambiguities of Birth and Death

Once upon a time the funerals of newborn children were commonplace and a family that had never had to experience any would have been fortunate. Now they are far less common; but I took one a couple of days ago. A young couple from the parish had twin boys, born premature at 23 weeks. It is far from unknown for such tiny babies to survive if born at that point in a pregnancy, but these were not expected to, and only lived a couple of hours. It wasn't quite as difficult an occasion as the funeral of a stillbirth I once did at Lamford, but rough enough. 

I thought of showing you the picture the parents put on the front of the order of service (such as it was), but decided it wasn't mine to share. There are two tiny forms, clearly not ready to come into the world, with dark, shiny skin, wrapped in the woollen hats and coats they never had much time to wear. Their casket was a single white box, which their dad carried into the church, and through the cemetery, when we got there, to the children's plot.

Of course these twins were a week below the legal abortion limit in this country. This terrible issue is one about which my opinions swing back and forth over time. I can't see the humanity in a small blob of cells, and, given the rate of spontaneous miscarriage early in pregnancy - which sometimes takes place before the woman is even sure she's pregnant - and that fact that we don't, practically or liturgically treat such events as the death of human persons, reason seems to support that assumption. But where, then, is the line where humanity begins? I find it a sobering thought that, in theory, in the same hospital where these two babies were born and died, two babies regarded by their parents as fully their children, perhaps just yards away another might have been regarded entirely differently, and treated so, without differing objectively in any way. Surely it is irrational for the status of a being, as or as not a human person, to be determined not by any objective standard but by the opinions of those who have created it?