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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
February 7, 2010
Abortion & health
Like anything that involves killing babies, abortion tends to be controversial, and remains so in Canada more than 40 years after a bunch of white males decided to relax the common-law restraints on this practice. It is controversial in other countries, too: check out the United States, for instance, or the various European countries, in most of which it has long been "open season" on the unborn.On the other hand, there is no public controversy in China, where abortions are not only legal but, thanks to the "one child policy" of the communist state, often mandatory. The politburo that runs that immense dystopia does not brook opposition to its population control measures, nor otherwise recognize the dignity or independence of born or unborn. Consider Michael Ignatieff's little performance this week, in which he demanded that Stephen Harper include support for abortion in his G8 initiative to provide maternal and child healthcare in the world's poorest countries. While the prime minister's spokesman was right to express disgust at Mr. Ignatieff's cheap attempt to politicize an uncontroversial humanitarian measure, it is important to grasp the more immediate argument against him. This is a logical proposition so elementary that people get upset when you mention it. Mention what? That killing a baby in no way improves its health. Nor, incidentally, does it improve the mother's health -- except in extremely rare circumstances. This latter is a fussy point, however. "What do you mean 'baby'?" I have sometimes been asked. This is a rhetorical question, because the supporters of taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand, who ask it, know exactly what the word means. I have before me a packet of cigarettes with a Health Canada message in capital letters that reads: "Cigarettes hurt babies." The text underneath this begins, "Tobacco use during pregnancy reduces the growth of babies." Since an accompanying photograph further shows a pregnant woman smoking, it was unnecessary to specify "unborn." Similarly, when we are discussing abortion, it is unnecessary to specify that the babies in question are "unborn." Indeed, the refusal to use plain language, the substitution of euphemisms and rhetorical evasions, is an infallible indicator that a speaker or writer feels uncomfortable with the truth. Consider for instance the proposition, "a woman's right to control her own body." Not even men believe this, and a pregnant woman, who actually believes that the baby she is carrying is part of her own body, should wait for it to kick. Perhaps she has an astoundingly primitive notion of biology; but I should think even a woman of subnormal intelligence would understand the difference between what is in that bump she is carrying, and what is in the rest of her flesh. To wit: a different person. I have myself had the experience of sitting inside a car. And yet even in the moment I was doing so, I did not consider myself to be a car, or part of a car. Nor -- had the car the mind of a pro-active feminist -- would I consider it had the right to do what it wished with its own body, if that involved tossing me out on the highway. So far I have made no argument against abortion, incidentally. I might be willing to consider an argument in favour of an abortion, at least in extremely rare circumstances. But I cannot engage with, nor otherwise take seriously, an argument based on an obvious lie. No civilized human being has the "right to choose" whether another human being should live or die. "Women do not give birth to cats," as a Canadian sage once observed, and any honest argument from what is misleadingly called the "pro-choice" side must begin by acknowledging that we are discussing the slaughter of a human being. And an innocent one, too, at least in the sense that the child has not had an opportunity yet to do anything consciously evil. The question for Ignatieff, of course, would not be, "What do you mean, 'baby'?" since as a posturing progressive politician he is careful to avoid using that word, and the word "abortion" on the same page. Rather the question would be, "What do you mean, 'health'?" I strongly doubt that he could answer that question with any candour. But he ought to be asked it anyway, plainly, for the record, by an inquisitive press. Perhaps he is sitting on some new medical information, previously unknown to the inhabitants of this planet. That women in the poorest countries are endangered in childbirth -- like women in all countries prior to the development of antisepsis by Pasteur and Lister -- we know. The mother is not endangered by her child, but by the accidents attending its birth. That is why public health measures are required, of exactly the kind our prime minister was proposing. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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