The only comment I have on this story is about the media on it.
Dr. Michel Ronald Prevost, an Almonte, Ont., gynecologist, admitted he gave abortion patients incorrect doses of medication that resulted in fetal abnormalities in two pregnancies that went to term.
That the doctor in question was trying as a matter of routine to kill babies bothers no one. That he wasn’t very good at it, however, now THAT’S a problem.
I did this little piece about the difference between living common law as a new longterm relationship norm and getting married. The comments are always fun. There’s a note on behalf of All Divorced Canadian Men telling me to stuff it, as well as the usual clever atheist drawing out the fact that Christians are Loons Who Cannot Think. Truthfully, I privately take bets on how early that remark will arrive. It makes it fun. Now the challenge for everyone else is to replace “Christian” with “Jewish” (“They are not to be trusted! They twist arguments!”) so that we all understand how clearly bigoted that kind of remark is. Tis the new normal. And if I couldn’t take it, I wouldn’t write columns.
Oh, and Happy Valentine’s Day!
Loons. Beautiful creatures, symbolic of Canada, who can swim great distances under water! I quite admire them, actually
Please consider supporting John Robson and Brigitte Pellerin in making this documentary:
Hosted by John Robson, “Magna Carta: Canada’s Legacy of Liberty” will visit key British, American and Canadian sites from Runnymede to Westminster, Jamestown, Valley Forge and Nova Scotia in a feature-length documentary to bring Canada’s history to life. Our nation is not a recent, intellectual concept that arose out of a sociology department. It is an adventure in liberty under law that is still being written.
The documentary will explain the origins of our government: How control of the purse by the commons, freedom of speech in Parliament, the specific, accessible legal remedies that protect ordinary people from arbitrary arrest and the seizure of their property were all affirmed in Magna Carta, and preserved over succeeding centuries by men and women clear on their rights and brave in their defence.
An excellent enterprise, made by smart and fun people. What could be better!?
I first met Daniel Gilman on a very, very cold day outside Canada’s Supreme Court years ago for a pro-life protest. Daniel and I both cling to this strange, fanatical, anachronistic, dinosaur notion that life matters, that people matter and we ought not kill them, even when it seems like that would be a good idea. I suspect I’ll be seeing lots more of Daniel outside the Supreme Court in the coming years.
Anyhoo, Daniel does a lot of good things, and one of them is happening on Monday. You should go. Information about this gender cafe looking at solutions for the rape culture on campus can be found here.
The Supreme Court of Canada’s decision about Canada’s laws on euthanasia/assisted suicide will be released today at 9:45 am.
I don’t think anyone is holding their breath. Father De Souza’s article in the Post is most excellent, very poignant, very worth reading:
Should the court rule tomorrow to liberalize our laws on euthanasia and suicide, we will be on the road to Belgium. There will be many assurances about all the strict guidelines and robust procedures in place around euthanasia — just as there were in 2002 when Belgium legalized it. Less than a decade down Europe’s euthanasia road, the milestones have been quickly passed: involuntary euthanasia, euthanasia for treatable mental illnesses, euthanasia for children.
Last October, when the Court heard the arguments to be decided tomorrow, I wrote that to embrace euthanasia and suicide as constitutional rights involved three revolutions in jurisprudence: i) abandoning the legal principle that every life is always a good to be protected, ii) embracing the idea that suicide is a social good, and iii) removing the particular obligation of the law to protect the weak and vulnerable. Before the juggernaut of personal autonomy those venerable principles don’t stand a chance in today’s Supreme Court.
Indeed, the price of exalting the personal autonomy of the able and influential is the removal of protections for those who have little autonomy to exercise and are easily preyed upon. We saw this clearly enough in the court’s prostitution decision, in which the justices opted for the liberty of those few high-end escorts that make such compelling figures at press conferences. If the removal of protection for the much larger number of exploited, abused and poor women driven to the streets is the price of that, so be it.
Tomorrow, we will hear positive reviews from the telegenic advocates of expanding the number of suicides and people euthanized in Canada. They will have compelling stories to tell. They will have fashionable spokesmen. We will not hear from those who have no advocates — the isolated elderly, alone with no one to speak for them, judged to be burdensome to our health system. The disabled who will now wonder if their doctors are coming with counsels of death do not have fashionable advocates. The truly weak and vulnerable, the exploited and abandoned, do not hold press conferences.
Canada got a break in 1993. Less than a decade after the Charter came into effect, a slight majority of justices thought it a bit of a stretch to create a right to suicide that none of the drafters of the Charter thought was there. Twenty years on, that reticence is now gone. The Charter becomes a tool of the powerful against the weak, much like medicine will increasingly become in the age of euthanasia and suicide. It begins tomorrow.
Since Father De Souza published this yesterday, I can add now that all this begins today.
Father Raymond de Souza
Three parent embryos was approved in the UK yesterday. This article explains what this is about:
But what has been proposed, and now approved by the House of Commons, is not a treatment at all. The proposed technique ignores people who already have mitochondrial disease, spurning them in favor of creating new individuals who will (advocates hope) not carry the genetic mutations. The proposal is to manufacture genetically-engineered babies. Mitochondria are inherited from the mother, so the proposal calls for recombining parts from two different eggs to engineer a genetically new egg (or destroying and recombining parts from two different embryos, to assemble a genetically new embryo), theoretically with healthy mitochondrial DNA.
My cab driver this morning understood this sounds like a terrible idea. The question is, why didn’t the majority in the UK Parliament?
Miriam Grossman, (100 percent MD, 0 percent PC) is doing an admirable job these days to equip us all to cope with 50 Shades of Grey. I’m encouraged that she is rising to this challenge, considering I just saw a 50 Shades of Grey display at my local grocery store, felt a rising sense of despair and then did…precisely nothing. (Well, I paid for my groceries and left. That much I did. So I’m not still standing there, incapacitated. Hurray!)
Miriam Grossman, MD
Parents, however, can do more. It’s something small and important and it will build your family up. You can talk to your sons and daughters about this stuff. And tell them why it’s not normal. Then you can expand and continue the discussion into one of what you want them to know about sex. It takes a lot less (a lot less) than 50 Shades of Grey behaviour to damage a young person. The scars they accrue in their teens and twenties will be with them for a lifetime and will be shared by their future spouse, in spite of them not having a sweet clue about who or even whether they will get married one day. Them’s the breaks and yes, it is sad. The short-lived days of the “freedom” of the sexual revolution of the 60s have already turned over into a legacy of divorce, STDs, lack of intimacy, and rising porn rates.
So, parents: you have the power to prevent pain in your kids through loving and compassionate conversation. Miriam Grossman is great, and she provides links to other helpful sites like this one.
I think if I were the mom I would have pummelled the lady. Not pretty. This mom responds to a cashier who implies her son with Down Syndrome should have been killed.
Like the cashier who gave me sad eyes and spit poison in a whisper, “I bet you wish you had known before he came out. You know they have a test for that now…”
Shock, horror, hurt and fury coursed through my body. I considered jerking her over the register and beating her senseless. I looked her up and down; I could take her.
Instead I used wit. I smiled a crazy lady smile. “I know right?! It’s so much harder to get rid of them once they come out. Believe me I’ve tried…” Jackpot! Her mouth dropped open, and she stared at me in shock. I leaned over the register and whispered to her, “What you’re saying is that it’s OK for me to kill him while he’s inside but not outside? In my book there isn’t a difference. For the record, we knew everything about him during my pregnancy. He’s our son now, and he was our son then. There is no way in hell that I would let any harm come to either of my children, including during the time that they’re so ridiculously considered disposable.”
Great article. You’ll remember Brittany Maynard as the young woman who killed herself recently, after being diagnosed with a brain tumour. The author of this piece asks important questions about how it is she may have gotten this brain tumour. We can’t say for sure, is the bottom line, but the questions are worth asking.
I happened to meet the author at a conference last weekend. I don’t think Canada has the same issue with widespread egg donation. If we do, I haven’t heard of it. I’m also not in the demographic where people would donate eggs. I’m in the demographic where people hold on to their eggs and hope they can still have children. My demographic may think they should use an egg donor if they can’t have kids, but I think that is the wrong course of action, because it encourages a young woman to wait to have kids, as if she had forever. It is sad to encourage young women to do something apparently altruistic, so that they can find out later they can’t have their own children. My demographic should not be responsible for perpetuating the problem for younger folks.
Anyways, I think Canada outlaws payment for egg donation. Am I right? Which is good, since even this free marketeer believes stridently that bodies and their parts ought never be for sale.
Read here, and decide for yourself:
In order to reach high effectiveness rates, hormonal contraceptives rely on two main mechanisms: prevention of the fertilization of a woman’s egg (prefertilization effect), and prevention of the implantation of an embryo by the modification of the lining of the uterus (postfertilization effect). The second mechanism is what we’re concerned with here. If ovulation occurs and if the egg is fertilized by a sperm, which sometimes happens, especially with today’s low-dose pills[iv], the resulting embryo will travel to the uterus and attempt implantation. However, scientific literature shows that oral contraceptives, implants, the shot, the patch[v] and IUDs make the lining of the uterus inhospitable to it. It is also clearly stated in the labels of these contraceptive methods[vi].
