Time Immortal

…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.