Viability, dependency, and abortion

James Mumford has a thoughtful piece in The Telegraph ("It's time to rethink our attitude to abortion") that engages the widespread but (he thinks, and I agree) misplaced emphasis placed on the "viability" of unborn children in abortion law and in the abortion debate.  Here's a bit:

But why should being capable of being born alive – being able to survive the onset of breathing and oral feeding – be the make-or-break threshold? Viability may have solidified as a legal concept, but the science shows that in reality it’s a moving target. . . .

More fundamentally, what feminist thinkers have shown is the fact that viability constitutes a profound category mistake. Human beings arrive in the world in a state of radical dependency. To insist they reach a stage of independence before we confer rights upon them is to assume, in the words of feminist political philosopher Seyla Benhabib, a "strange world" in which "individuals are grown up before they are born". . . .

Mumford's piece resonates strongly, I think, with what many of us here at MOJ (and many others, too) have said about the content of the Church's "moral anthropology," i.e., that it provides an account of the human person, of human dignity, and of human destiny that is not built on autonomy and self-sufficiency so much as on dependence and relationships.  (For an essay of mine that touches on this account, go here.)