Endowed With Personal Meanings

Dignitas Infinita needs to be read as a whole, and that is especially true of 4. Some Grave Violations of Human Dignity, paragraphs 33 to 62. If you are concerned about any of these issues, then this is why you ought to be concerned about all of them. And if you are concerned about all of them, then this is where you ought to be. Although perhaps we were spoilt by the last two, this Pope can read as if he is equivocating even when he is not. But there is none of that this time.

Within that, the emphasis on biological sex as existing from conception raises huge questions for many of the staunchest opponents of gender ideology, and with it of surrogacy and of the sex industry. What is biologically male from the point of conception cannot be "part of a woman's body". That is as unanswerable as when we point out the incomparable misogyny of the suggestion that something could simultaneously be insentient and be part of a woman's body. Is it the whole of a woman's body that is insentient? Or is it only the parts that are directly concerned with reproduction? If cells with Y chromosomes, including those of a penis, can be part of a woman's body until birth, then why can they not be so from self-identification onwards?

I told you about Donald Trump and abortion. Of far more interest are those who are moving in Great Britain towards the full decriminalisation that may as well have existed for as long as almost anyone can now remember, and which this Government has already imposed on Northern Ireland. Ask them to define a woman. Ask them whether a man can get pregnant. To the second question, if they said no, then ask them how some cells of a pregnant woman's body could be male, including the cells of what must presumably be her penis.