The concept of “thin end of the wedge” is a standard one in moral argument. What it means is this: when you concede a point in hard cases, very soon the concession you made, despite the safeguards that were stipulated at the time, gradually comes to apply to other less hard cases, and eventually to all cases. “Thin end of the wedge” is the equivalent of the old legal saw that “Hard cases make bad law.” We should be familiar with the thin end of the wedge in this country. The Abortion Act of 1967 was meant to cater for hard cases, and to make unsafe back street abortions unnecessary; it was not, at least so we were told at the time, meant to open the floodgates. But history has shown otherwise. Though the text of the Abortion Act sounds fairly restrictive, in practice Britain has abortion on demand. Those who dispute this would do well to back up their case by producing women who have asked for abortions and been refused them. The thin end of the edge is also evident in Belgium, with its supposed toleration for hard cases in the field of euthanasia, as reported here. This is a chilling quote: