The abortion debate continues to heat up, and the fire is showing up on both sides of the 49th parallel. It has engrafted itself into both the Canadian and American political process because there remains a conviction in the conscience of many North Americans that aborting a life is “wrong in itself.”
Many people have bought into numerous distortions of truth. The pro-choice position is that every woman has the right to choose what she does with her own body. However, it is a medical fact that the child in her womb is a totally different person and that life begins from conception. Many are now stating that this life should have the right to choose for his or herself – ie. they have human rights that need to be protected.
Why is it that the law can make it illegal for us to put a needle filled with heroin into our blood stream? Why is it that the law can intervene when they fear we will commit suicide or take the life away from our own body? Why is it that we can face a jail sentence for putting alcohol in our own body and driving? Why is it that we will most likely end up in the psych ward for mutilating any part of our body? The fact is that we all have limited freedom to choose what we will or will not do with our bodies, and that limitation is rooted into morality.
The pro-choice movement loves to trumpet the idea that morality cannot be legislated. Is this true? What do we call it when we tell people that they cannot murder, slander, rape, steal, or enslave? Aborting a child was considered a criminal act at one point in Canadian history, and now you can abort a child simply because the pregnancy interferes with a holiday cruise. Can you make something that was immoral and illegal moral and legal by simply saying it is? Well, we did, and now we have to pay the piper.
In Criminal Justice there are two types of laws: malum in se and malum prohibitum. Malum in se is a Latin phrase meaning, “wrong in itself.” Most of us feel that murder is wrong, and so laws are constructed to outlaw it. Malum prohibitum means something is wrong because it is prohibited: eg. on this side of the Atlantic we have made driving on the left side wrong, and so sorry my English friends, prohibited.Malum in se laws are based on moral codes, much of which grew out of English Common Law, which in turn was based on Judeo-Christian perspectives of morality. So, those who decry the inroads of morality into public policy are a little too late. The roads have already been paved. However, you don’t have to be a Jew or a Christian to know something is wrong in itself. We all share a common conscience. That conscience will one day be our judge, and we will all have to face the consequence of violating that internal law of right and wrong.
The challenge with our culture is that we don’t tend to make better laws. Human nature tends towards law breaking. When our nation legalized abortion on demand, did they see the day coming when the most recent controversy would be sex-selection abortion? The medical profession is now lamenting “female feticide.”
Years ago members of the medical profession opened the flood gates to choice and said that women needed to achieve full autonomy over their bodies. Then, members of the legal profession embraced the idea that there was such a thing as a life not worthy to be lived, and children with Down Syndrome were targeted. Now we are told that some are having a tinge of conscience that we may have gone too far as sex-selection abortion has specifically targeted the female gender.
Those that fought so valiantly for the world of choice are trying to close the barn door after the horse has bolted. As one of my friends, Ted Gerk said, “You can’t cheapen life by allowing it to be taken for any reason and then go back and arbitrarily decide which death troubles your conscience.”
Perhaps if we had all held to the view that all human life was valuable and precious we wouldn’t find ourselves in this predicament. God help Canada!
I have a different view on the issue of abortion in that I do not think it is possible to legislate morality or ethics. If they are not there in the culture, legislation will simply fail. I suggest that there are ways to raise public awareness that to date have been banned, and one of them is the freedom to make known exactly what abortion entails including the woman’s health. If the ban on this information were lifted and abortion were no longer covered under our public health care, things would begin to turn around, including the culture. It has never made any sense for abortion to be publicly funded under health care, since it has nothing to do with health care, pregnancy is not a disease and at best it could only qualify as elective surgery which is not funded.
There is no debate. Harper supports abortion and will not do anything to change the law. You should get on the Conservative train and drop this issue.
So it has become culturally acceptable to abort a baby with Down syndrome as the parents life would become complicated though the reality is our culture is not able to accept the full and purposeful life a downs syndrome baby/child/adult can have. But now we have concerns that ‘female’ babies are being aborted strictly on sex selection. And somehow that is now wrong though it never was before when it was a down syndrome female baby. Oh the shades of grey and inconsistency that grow when you do not take a principled stand…
Feminists fighting for the right to kill little girls. Can there be a more horrific irony?