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Ponnuru on Biden on abortion

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For those of you eager to hear something encouraging about the U.S. presidential campaign: A post at the Corner about Joe Biden’s stance on abortion, which appears slightly less extreme than that of Barack Obama.

For pro-lifers, there is one tiny hopeful sign in the Biden pick. For a long time now, the top ranks of the Democratic party have embraced an orthodoxy on abortion policy that includes support for taxpayer funding of it and for keeping partial-birth abortion legal. The Democratic platform supports taxpayer funding. The three top contenders in this year’s Democratic presidential primaries—Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards—support both taxpayer funding and partial-birth abortion.

Since partial-birth abortion became a political issue during Bill Clinton’s first term in office, every Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominee has supported keeping it legal (or making it illegal in name with loopholes to keep it legal in practice). When Gore considered running with Evan Bayh in 2000, feminist leaders told reporters that he was unacceptable because he had voted against partial-birth abortion.

This time the feminists said very little as Obama considered Bayh and Biden. For the first time in many years, the Democrats have a candidate for national office who opposes taxpayer funding of abortion. For the first time since partial-birth abortion became an issue, they have a candidate who opposes it, too. It is a less important development, I think, than the fact that their presidential nominee believes that some forms of infanticide should be legal. But it strikes me nonetheless as progress, however painfully limited.

It’s not every day…

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…that I agree with Stéphane Dion. But he’s right about this:

Stéphane Dion has challenged the prime minister to clarify his view on abortion, threatening to reignite the debate as Canada careens towards an election.

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“I think all Canadians have the right to know what the party leader thinks,” he said. “I gave my opinion. I want to hear the opinion of Stephen Harper.”

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And Andrea is staying true to form: and disagreeing with Dion. He only wants to know Harper’s stance on abortion now because he’s bought into the misinformation on Bill C-484, which expressly excludes abortion. Voting in favour of Bill C-484 is not a vote against abortion, much as Joyce Arthur would have us believe. If I thought that–I’d blog about it more often. In any event, all we’d get from Harper at this stage would be Ye Olde “I support a woman’s right to choose” too, and given the circumstances, I wouldn’t expect any different. Now if Dion weren’t asking, and if Harper were to clarify under different circumstances…that’s a different story. Then, yes, I’d like to know his stance on abortion. As it stands, I’d prefer Dion clarify his position, on, oh say, the environment. Or finances. Or just about any existing policy debate… where to begin…

Not very impressive, no matter where you look

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I found this news story added very little to anything. But good grief, have a look at the kinds of comments readers have left, here. Sheesh.

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Andrea adds: From the Globe article:

In light of the role that she has assigned to herself, I’d be surprised if many people would have a problem with the way that she carries out that particular role,” Chief Justice Scott added.

“The role she has assigned herself”? Is this truly the way the system works? At that level? The Chief Justice sits on the committee to do whatever she assigns herself to do? There are also conflicting reports. Some say she never involves herself, and this story says she votes in cases of a tie. So which is it? I might also add, it is August 18. This controversy came up July 1. Is that the amount of time it takes for some communications specialist in the Governor General’s office to explain how things work? Since no one’s talking, they can hardly be surprised–Justice McLachlin can hardly be surprised–that people don’t know what to think and that there’s “misinformation” and “rumours” swirling.

Like what, one out of two implants?

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Oh dear. CRTC approves new porn channel, which promises to show 50% Canadian content. Insert your own bad joke here.

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Rebecca adds: The mind boggles. Given that most mainstream Canadian television has the low production values and cheesiness of porn (I’m told) how amateurish and cheesy will Canadian porn be? Oh well, at least it will be exquisitely politically correct, and no doubt bilingual, to boot.

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Andrea adds: “and no doubt bilingual, to boot…” Because porn generally requires a lot of translation to really understand the subtle nuances of intricate plot schemes.

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Tanya says: Already looking forward to the parodies.

A touching letter

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In today’s Ottawa Citizen:

Re: The shortest life, Margaret Somerville, Aug. 5.

I wept the whole time that I read Margaret Somerville’s opinion article.

Seven years ago I was pregnant with our first born, a son Darren. When I was 24 weeks pregnant, we found out that he had a rare congenital anomaly, a diaphragmatic hernia. They told us that his chance for survival wouldn’t be good at 50/50.

The first thing that they offered us also was to terminate the pregnancy. I went into hysterics that this was the only option they were offering us.

We didn’t know anything about what he had. To us it seemed that if this is what they are offering, it must mean he doesn’t have a hope at all to live.

My husband and I had discussed before we even thought about conceiving that if ever there was anything wrong with our baby, that depending on the severity of it, we would continue on in the pregnancy no matter what.

We chose to continue with the pregnancy because there was a chance things would be fine in our mind with the chances we were given.

The doctor was so casual with his comment that “so folks are we going to terminate this pregnancy today?” That was before we knew what a diaphragmatic hernia even was. Our son only lived for six days and we decided to remove treatment as he got worse over those six days. We had no regrets, for it had ultimately been our decision about his care and to this day I am thankful for the decision we made.

I had a lot of “issues” to deal with about our care and how we were treated but we have made it through that chapter of our lives and have had two beautiful children since then. Thank you to “M.G” for writing your story as it brought back a lot of memories for us. We are glad that people are getting to hear the other side of the story.

Thank you Ms. Somerville for sharing the e-mail. It is appreciated. It helps to know that other people, as sad as it is, have been asked the same questions and sadly treated the same way.

LUCY HONSINGER, Nepean

Wow, really?

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‘Supermom’ increasingly considered unrealistic:

LONDON — The enthusiasm for juggling high-powered careers and motherhood is on the slide in Britain and the United States as support for stay-at-home moms appears to be growing, a major study showed yesterday.

The study, by Jacqueline Scott from the University of Cambridge, suggests that growing numbers of people are concerned about the impact of working moms on family life.

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“It is conceivable that opinions are shifting as the shine of the ‘supermom’ syndrome wears off, and the idea of women juggling high-powered careers while also baking cookies and reading bedtime stories is increasingly seen to be unrealizable by ordinary mortals,” Prof. Scott said.

It’s not like saying one should not, or could not, work outside the home and raise a family. But you can’t do both full-time, at least not for very long, and trying to do so anyway has a cost. The key is to have goals and ambitions that are reasonable and achievable, and that’s something each family has to figure out for themselves.

When winning means losing

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We are really awfully close to Newspeak around here, where government agencies claim you won even when you have, in fact, lost something. Talk about doubleplusungood.

Ezra Levant:

Some 900 days after I became the only person in the Western world charged with the “offence” of republishing the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, the government has finally acquitted me of illegal “discrimination.” Taxpayers are out more than $500,000 for an investigation that involved fifteen bureaucrats at the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The legal cost to me and the now-defunct Western Standard magazine is $100,000.

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And if I had been a defendant in a civil court, the judge would now order the losing parties to pay my legal bills. Instead, the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities won’t have to pay me a dime. Neither will Syed Soharwardy, the Calgary imam who abandoned his identical complaint against me this spring.

Both managed to hijack a secular government agency to prosecute their radical Islamic fatwa against me — the first blasphemy case in Canada in over 80 years. Their complaints were dismissed, but it is inaccurate to say that they lost: They got the government to rough me up for nearly three years, at no cost to them. The process I was put through was a punishment in itself — and a warning to any other journalists who would defy radical Islam.

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Of course I’m glad to be done with this malicious prosecution — though my antagonists can still appeal my acquittal.
But two years ago, the HRC told me if I paid a few thousand dollars to my accusers and gave them a page in our magazine, I’d be set free. Most victims of the HRCs accept deals like that, and it’s certainly cheaper than a 900-day fight. But getting the approval of the HRC’s censor is morally no better than their shake-down attempt. Whether I have to pay off a radical imam or appease a meddling bureaucrat, it’s still an infringement on our Canadian liberties.

Language issues

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I suppose linguistic kerfuffles are inevitable when you live in Canada. Or perhaps it’s something special to abortion-related matters, I don’t know. But I do find it difficult to believe how hard it is even to agree on the terms of reference to the debate. Like, what is an abortion?

I’m reasonably new to this stuff; I’ve always been opposed to casual abortion (even though I would not wish to recriminalize the practice) but up until this year I had been pretty much uninvolved in the ongoing public debate. When we launched PWPL in January one of the things Andrea would say in interviews was how much she wanted us to talk openly and freely about what abortion really is and what it does to women. And I remember thinking: “What do you mean, what abortion really is? Isn’t that obvious?” Now I think I know what she meant.

My attention was drawn recently to this website, which is a travelling portrait exhibit of women who have had abortions. “We want people to see the faces of reproductive choice in Canada,” they explain. Which I immediately thought was an awfully weird way to put it; after all, reproductive choice is a whole lot more than just abortion, isn’t it?

Then I realized, reading a few of the stories highlighted on the site, that the person who had sent us the link was right to notice how frequent it was for some of these women to “blame the guilt they experience on the anti-choice movement.” And here I was reminded of a few recent conversations with pro-choicers who seem to think that referring to abortion as “the killing of an unborn baby” is nothing more than a dirty political tool in the ongoing oppression of women by some particularly retrograde patriarchal ideology. Which only goes to show that some people spend way too much time in soi-disant academic seminars.

I don’t care how many euphemisms you wish to use. When all is said and done, abortion results in the death of something that, given a little bit of time, would have been a human baby. Me, I believe that even in the earliest stages of pregnancy we’re talking about someone, not something, who is undeniably human and deserves at least some protection and recognition. I understand many people see things differently – they either think it only turns into someone much later along during a pregnancy, or that it’s not entirely human until it looks the part, that it’s nothing more than unspecified “products of conception”, or that even though it’s human and alive it doesn’t deserve protection until the moment it emerges from the mother’s body. That’s fine; it’s a debate and it’s customary in debates to have disagreements about terminology. But surely it should be possible to agree that, however you define that thing/person/product of conception developing inside a pregnant woman’s body, a successful abortion stops that thing/person/product of conception from continuing to develop into something that is, or will one day become, human.

When you choose to have an abortion, you are choosing to end the development, or life, of something, or someone, that would have grown into a tiny humanoid, which most people call “baby” once it’s out of the mother’s body. Your choice of words to describe it is usually a good indication of how you view the procedure, but it doesn’t change what that procedure is and what it does to someone, or something, other than yourself.

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