Time Immortal

If we allow abortions for such fatuous and trivial reasons as the fact that it “isn’t the right time,” or that we “can’t afford a baby” at the moment, is there any real reason why we should disallow a woman from another culture (one that doesn’t necessarily view women as having the same value as men) from getting an abortion for the purposes of gender selection? Especially since we are ostensibly a multicultural nation, and since all cultures are equal, and since we should not judge other cultural norms and practices (according to the received wisdom of our progressive betters)?

…takes its first tentative steps towards becoming accepted by the mainstream. It’s funny, isn’t it, how the sacred cows of feminist ideology are, one by one, being turned against women?

For twenty years, under five prime ministers, Parliament has failed to reinstate any restrictions, with the result that Canada continues to have the world’s most radical abortion regime. The unborn child has, in this country, to this day, no protection in law whatever. This child is ruled a “foetus” who may be disposed of at any point up to and including the moment of live birth — a moment that can be as vague as any that occurs after the precise moment of conception.

Under Canada’s system, it would be perfectly legal for a doctor to plunge a pair of scissors into the chest of the baby pictured above (notice how the child’s lower half is still within the mother’s body). Twenty years ago today, we made it legal for that event to transpire, in the Crown v. Henry Mogentaler decision, ruled on by the late Justice (I use the term loosely) Bertha Wilson.

In the reasoning of the late Justice Bertha Wilson, no man could respond to the abortion dilemma, “even imaginatively … because he can relate to it only by objectifying it, thereby eliminating the subjective elements of the female psyche.”

But which women decide? For polls have fairly consistently shown, that women are more troubled by abortion than men; and few women are radical feminists.

The 1988 ruling was the most significant in a string of cases in which the same Puisne Justice and others wrote this principle — that a woman’s subjective judgement may trump objective facts — into the heart of Canadian law. In the Crown v. Angélique Lavallee, 1990, she extended this reasoning to hold that a woman who had been abused by a man could be excused for killing him, even if the man was defenceless and she came to the encounter armed. In such a case, the courts could employ the testimony of feminist experts on “battered wife syndrome” to discount witnesses whose view of the facts might be contaminated by “myths” and “stereotypes.”

I am speaking today in defiance of the 1988 ruling, being that I am in fact a man, and therefore should not be able to discuss the issue of abortion “even inaginatively.” Let me say, then, that as a man, I think Bertha Wilson — and all of feminism — has missed the point.

I am Catholic, and believe that abortion is the taking of a human life (and is therefore immoral). However, my view of the nature of the unborn is justifiable solely on the basis of biological fact. In my view, the abortion issue is really, honestly, only concerned with at what stage of development it is permissible to end the life of a genetically unique human being. As noted above, it is legal in Canada for the doctor to end the life of the infant human being pictured even further above. That’s the crux of the debate, right there.

But when Bertha Wilson wrote that a man can only relate to the issue by objectifying it (and, by extension, objectifying all women), she missed one important point: there has been no development of the sexual revolution or our progressive, secular society which has benefitted men more than the mainstreaming and/or legalization of abortion. In making abortion “safe and legal” (that sentence should normally be concluded with “rare”, but cannot be if one is speaking in truths), and in making abortion an issue of “choice” for women, feminists have stripped men of any and all responsibility for the outcomes of their sexuality. They have liberated men from any need to worry about the consequences of hooking up with one woman, or a series of women, for the express purpose of having sex.

Previously, a man was beholden to marry a woman whom he carelessly impregnated; men who abandoned such women were derided and looked down upon. Now, since the woman always has the choice to have an abortion open to her, it is not the errant man who will be looked down upon if he departs from the side of a woman who has proven just a tad too fertile for his tastes. After all, she has a choice; keep the child or keep the relationship. Why should men still be beholden to women who do not choose in such a manner as is conducive to sustaining the relationships on terms both partners regard as acceptable?

Nothing — not condoms, not the pill, nothing — has aided and abetted the continued and enhanced objectification of women by men as much as abortion has, because nothing has done more to eliminate any sense of responsibility from peoples’ understanding of the sexual act. Though condoms and the pill do much to chip away at the bedrock of maturity one would hope to find in a sexually active couple’s psyches, condoms and the pill are not 100% effective, and do sometimes fail to discharge (ahem) their proper interdictive role — one can, despite having used the pill and/or a condom, become pregnant (if female) or make one’s partner become pregnant (if male).

But abortion is the “final solution” to that uncertainty — it is (almost) always effective, and in a way that is both sudden and final. Depending on which research one chooses to believe, it may have some harmful physical, mental, or emotional side effects…or it may not. But that is rarely discussed anyhow; the important thing is that women have “choice”. And out of that regime of “choice” comes the final releasing of the human person from having to have any notion of consequence, any measure of responsibility, as far as the sexual act is concerned. Because even if all one’s other precautions fail, one can still sweep the mistakes under the rug with a simple outpatient procedure.

And unfortunately, a system like that benefits only men in the long run — after all, any man (or at least, the average post-modern man, more or less unmoored from any sense of personal responsibility or righteousness that Religion brings) is free to leave the side of any woman who does not make choices that are in line with his own lifestyle. And all this is to say nothing at all of how abortion has benefitted those who demand for themselves a male child first — abortion is used, in many places around the world, as a tool of gender selection, and even in Canada this practice is becoming common. That is eugenics, plain and simple.

But then, most of the early proponents of abortion — Margaret Sanger comes readily to mind — were racists and eugenecists, so it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that in the most permissive implementation of a system which they lobbied for, we see that eugenics is readily, and all too easily, practiced.

Twenty years ago, all of this was enabled in Canada by one careless court ruling. Perhaps in another twenty years, we will have begun to rebuild what was torn down so many years ago.

…a Supreme Court of Canada decision sentenced millions of the unborn to a most horrible death. The Henry Morgentaler decision was Canada’s Roe vs. Wade…but unlike in that case, the pro-abortion personality in the Canadian equivalent has not since flipped to the pro-life side.

Since the 1988 Supreme Court of Canada decision vindicating Morgentaler and decriminalizing all manner of abortion, a political chill descends whenever the subject is broached. In the last federal election, Paul Martin exploited the fear of an abortion ban to demonize Stephen Harper, who pointedly distanced himself from any challenge to the existing non-law. And when Conservative MP Rob Merrifield suggested pregnant girls might benefit from pre-abortion counselling, feminists tore a strip off him, urging women not to vote Conservative on that basis alone. Other politicians took the hint and kept shtumm.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease on abortion, it seems, and not the 68% of Canadians who in a 2004 poll said they wanted legal protection for fetuses at some point in their development. Most Canadians are uncomfortable with the complete ban on abortion (including cases of rape, incest and severe fetal deficit) advocated by ardent pro-lifers, and as well with the complete lack of constraints on abortion we now “enjoy.”

Canadians should be informed that the Morgentaler decision produced disturbing outcomes. But there is no public forum to discuss them. Here are two of the many resulting media orphans:

1) Young women today are more careless about becoming pregnant, indicating an increasing psychological desensitization to the creation of new life. For example, in 1988, 16% of pregnancies in Quebec, Canada’s most abortion-friendly province, resulted in abortion. Today, 30% do. Girls are using abortion — tax-funded and easily available — as an alternative form of birth control. No morally aspirational society should feel complacent abetting this trend.

2) A less predictable outcome (in Canada, at any rate) was, with access to early and improved ultrasound technology, the use of abortion for gender selection — a popular strategy amongst cultural groups that privilege male children. If even the women’s rights-obsessed Morgentaler balks here — “It seems a bit awkward to eliminate a fetus on the basis of gender,” he said in an interview — there can’t be many who would support it, or at least not on the basis of women’s rights. Yet it remains perfectly legal.

Abortion is like medicare: Both need a policy change, but for no logical reason an old template has evolved into such a sacred national cow that their respective ideological guardians are able to drown out reasonable voices.

The average progressive does not believe in open dialogue about the abortion issue, and for good reason — open dialogue about the issue inevitable favours those who oppose the practice of abortion as immoral and murderous. There is simply no way to sidestep the fact that at its core, what the abortion issue is really about is whether or not, and (if so) at what stage(s) of development, it is considered legal for one human being to kill another.

For that is the plain truth about abortion. There is little point in denying — absent any religious consideration, mind — that the gestating child within the womb of a woman is, biologically, both of the species homo sapiens and genetically distinct from either of its parents. That is simply a more complex way of saying that the unborn are human. Likewise, the unborn are alive in almost every case, for in almost every case in which one is born the baby turns out to be alive (and, usually, quite vocally so). Abortion, then, in terminating the existence of the unborn, is killing a living human being.

But that is not the only way in which the abortion issue can be shown to be the horror that it is when the discussion about it is open and honest. Two more examples can be found above: the idea of “safe, legal, and rare” has been shown, in most cases, to be little more than a lie, while in many places around the world (even here in Canada), abortion is used to the detriment of women. Red China is the easiest example, where approximately 116 male children are born for every 100 female children (if I do remember the statistics from America Alone correctly) — and a part of the reason why this happens is because Chinese parents prefer their one allowed child to be male, and so abort any pregnancy in which the child is female. The same happens a bit further south, in places on the Indian sub-continent. And the same happens here.

But of course, progressives do not care to discuss this. They instead cling to the tired platitude that the ability to choose to have an abortion is “a woman’s right”. But to have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing that thing, and I think that is certainly true in the case of abortion. And indeed, bearing that in mind, and bearing in mind that the right of my fist to swing ends just shy of the right of my friend’s nose to occupy a point in space, perhaps we need to re-think whether women really have the right to choose to end the life of a living human being who is related to, but genetically distinct, from them, regardless of said human being’s current place of residence.