Archives for March 2012

I love the free market with the best of them, but I don’t believe body parts or bodies should ever be for sale. That goes for sperm too.

A Canadian writes about American abortion law. Last line:

Americans may tell pollsters they’re pro-choice, but at the state level they don’t act like it.

I’m not sure Americans do tell pollsters they are pro-choice anymore, but even if they did, on the state by state level there is a lot of variation. One reason (among many) why abortion politics are so acrimonious in the States is that Roe v Wade mandates something the grassroots in many states entirely, wholeheartedly and vociferously disagree with.

Somebody isn’t happy about the looming abortion debate in April.  Mercedes Allen, writing for rabble.ca makes a series of interesting but erroneous arguments concerning the abortion issue and when life begins.  I imagine it would be difficult to try to defend a position that holds that a child is not a human being “until it has proceeded in a living state from the body of its mother.”  But she does give it a good shake.

One of her more interesting positions is  that spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) somehow justifies abortion, because it means that the life was only potential.  In other words, because some embryos don’t make it past the one month mark, that seems to raise the question as to whether or not all life begins at conception.

But miscarriage is simply an anomaly of a natural (human) process.  It says nothing about “what it is to be human.”  We seem to lack the ability to know the “essence” of things and end up judging them according to accidental, irrelevant criteria.  Just because an embryo does not continue through all the phases of human life, does not in any way negate the fact that it was, for a brief time, human.  Similarly, if a toddler dies before reaching adolescence, this in no way negates the humanity of that child.

The crux of her argument rests on the fact that determining when human life begins is something that not even pro-lifers can say with certainty (huh?), so we must resign ourselves to calling early human life, “life potential.”

“The question then becomes whether people are or are not justified in making the decision as to whether that life potential does indeed become life.  Should every fertilized egg be made to develop into a human, or are we sometimes justified in stopping that process?”

First of all, the embryo is not a “life potential” but an actual life with lots of potential. All things stand in potency to some act. That potency does not negate their essence, their “what it is to be that thing.” The question “should every life be made to develop into a human?” is pure semantics.  Every life, that has a human father and a human mother, is human, and will follow a natural, predetermined course of development, unless it is interrupted, through natural impediments (miscarriage) or through a deliberate and purposeful killing (abortion).

The question, “are we sometimes justified in stopping that process?” is better put in these terms: when in doubt, do no harm.  The “do no harm” principle, (and this case, the harm is absolute [ie. death], which is why abortion is such a travesty) has always been the bulwark of civil society.  That is until medicine, corrupted by abortion, threw it out.  “Kill now and ask questions later” is the new “golden rule.”

But there is one thing we can all agree on. In Ms. Allen’s words,

“Like it or not, Canada, the debate has been reopened.”

The deVeber Institute would be a great place to do a summer internship. For more info, click here.

When I wrote that, it had the same rhythm as One Night in Bangkok. Two very different things.

In any event, One Day in April, reports the Ottawa Citizen, MPs will debate Stephen Woodworth’s motion on what a human being is. This is only peripherally related to the abortion debate. Naturally I’m glad this will come up in the House of Commons. I might even head up to listen. Should be good–I’m sure a number of pro-choicers will be lighting their hair on fire with the contrived sort of fake anguish that only MPs in the House of Commons can muster.

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Update: That day appears to be April 26.

Should doctors be permitted to assist those who want to end their life but are physically unable?

I just voted no and you can too. Doctors should never have the right to kill patients.

Two things I’m interested in here. What was it before? (Chances are they never asked the question but my money would be on fewer men believing it is OK to assault a woman in “the olden days,” for lack of a better term) and secondly, did they ask how many women think it is OK to hit a man? Because when relationships go sour, we see plenty of that, too.

I find it interesting that abortion providers are loath to admit that complications occur when they employ the various “procedures” used to dismember and destroy the child in the womb.  In fact, they have often been found to skew the numbers so as to make this operation seem as innocuous as going to the dentist.  Until, that is, a study comes out that proves that  “major complications during early surgical abortions are reduced by nearly a third in comparison with the placebo.”  Then the truth comes out.

The Lancet has published a study showing that Misoprostol administered before an abortion will likely cause some nasty side affects in the mother prior to her abortion (heavy bleeding, abdominal pain etc.), but that it will reduce serious damage like “incomplete abortion, cervical tear, pelvic inflammatory disease, uterine perforation, or other serious events” by a third.  Eek!

Remember that this is an elective procedure.  You can leave home without it.

In fact, I believe that women are a lot better off without it.

Read the article here.

Obviously gut-wrenching and what’s the word I’m looking for–oh, it’s wrong–how young mothers were forced to put their children up for adoption against their will:

Most of the mothers interviewed for this story said the coercion was systematic: From the church-run maternity homes where accommodation was sometimes predicated on adoption and where mothers had to write a letter to their unborn child explaining the separation; to the social workers who concealed information about social assistance and who told single mothers they could be charged with child endangerment; to the medical staff who called the women “sluts” and denied them painkillers, and who reportedly tied teenagers to their beds or obstructed their view of labour with a sheet. “To the Canadian establishment, this will come as a big surprise,” said Ms. Lynn, who heads the Canadian Council of Natural Mothers, which aims to expose the negative treatment of mothers in adoption practice. “What we hear all the time is, ‘You gave up your baby.’ What I say is that, at very best, it was a tragic choice.”

And speaking of “tragic choices”–today we feed young mothers a line about how it is a rock solid choice to kill their unborn children instead of putting them up for adoption. In not too long we’ll have newspapers reporting that story.

I just saw the trailer for the movie In Time, which wasn’t exactly a blockbuster. However, the trailer is great. (Does anyone else feel like the people who make trailers are more talented than those who make movies?) This is a sci-fi movie about a world where the rich can live forever and the poor die young, because they don’t get more time allotted to them by the powers that be. Justin Timberlake, who is poor and supposed to die (I gather, please keep in mind I’ve only seen the trailer) busts free from this conspiracy and escapes with a rich woman, who can live forever. He asks her: “How can you live with yourself, watching people die right next to you?” To which she replies: “You don’t watch. You close your eyes.”

Perhaps this was a little more dramatic with the gritty soundtrack playing in the background but I thought there’s some truth there for how we live.