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Late term abortion and imagination

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This link will take you to a commentary written by a CBC French service journalist on an investigative report he filed for TV show Enquêtes (French for “investigations”).

I caught the end of this report last week on Radio-Canada. They interviewed a Quebec-based abortion provider on the practice of late term abortions in the province. He told the camera that women needing abortion services (I dislike writing these two words together: I don’t think abortion is doing women any service) after 24 weeks are flown to American clinics all expenses paid by Quebec’s health insurance plan. At some point in the interview, journalist Alain Gravel asked Dr. Guimont about the ethics of ending the life of fetuses who are viable and who basically look like full term babies. The question went a little like this: “But here you have this baby … – catching himself – uh, fetus …” I said “Ah-Ha!” and my husband thought I was watching some kind of game show. The abortion doctor replied: “In Canada, to have a crime of murder, you need a person, a legal subject. The Supreme Court was clear: the fetus is not a person, therefore, there is no murder, no crime.” He added: “The dimension that is missing from your analysis is the dimension of the women. Whether late term abortion is right or wrong is irrelevant: women who want it need it and this is all that should matter. The woman has rights, the fetus doesn’t.” (I am translating quite freely here).

Dr. Guimont intervention made me reflect on imagination in the abortion debate. Dr. Guimont’s imagination forms reality according to its legal definition. His eyes may see a viable, fully-formed, human baby but he has trained his brain to see something else, something disposable, an infringement on women’s rights to life and security. My pro-life eyes see a zygote and imagine a baby. But my zygote will turn into a baby. No amount of magical legal thinking will turn a late-term unborn infant into a legal construct.

Watch your language

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Headline: “Girl Once Comatose and Scheduled for Euthanasia Will Testify against Attacker”

“Scheduled for euthanasia?” In Massachusetts, USA?  (Did I miss a news item on the legalization of euthanasia in Massachusetts?)

The story explains. Ventilator-dependant Haleigh Poutre was not “scheduled for euthanasia,” however, they were going to remove her from life support.

Haleigh was in fact scheduled to be left to die of her injuries by the child protection services who had authority over her medical care. In short, there is a lot to condemn in that decision without labeling it euthanasia.

LifeSiteNews reporter Thaddeus M. Baklinski’s use of the word “euthanasia” is wrong. To win the euthanasia debate we use terms correctly. If pro-life advocates call every questionable death “euthanasia” we will not meaningfully engage proponents of euthanasia.

We can debate whether Haleigh’s planned withdrawal of life support was premature, unjustified or motivated by administrative rather than medical imperatives. But it was not “the intentional killing of a person by another for compassionate motives,” which is the definition of euthanasia.

Calling removal of life-support “euthanasia” is a concern for critically ill patients and their families. In Canada for instance, euthanasia is not legally different from murder. Where life-support is often needed to help a patient survive a critical event, it was never meant to maintain life at all cost. Equating withdrawal of life-support – however unjustified it was in Haleigh’s case – with euthanasia may cause families to refuse life-support for their loved ones because of fears over over-treatment. On the flip side, families may request over-treatment for fear of “euthanizing/murdering” their loved ones.

The indiscriminate use of controversial words like euthanasia causes suffering. (See “Thad’s” comment on systemic concerns about addiction to pain killers in dying cancer patients.) Let’s be aware of it.

Finally!!! (Another view)

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My, oh my… The Ottawa Citizen’s front page about Catholic politicians being refused Communion in light of their public pro-abortion positions. But this is not what I’m shaking my head about. As with many newsworthy Catholic positions, who would you think the paper would ask for commentaries? Not the Catholic men and women who support the Archbishop’s position (there are at least a couple). No, the coordinator of Catholic for Free-Choice Canada and David McGuinty, a pro-choice Catholic (writing these two words together feels very weird in the fingers, not to mention the brain) politician.

In a bid to gain better understanding, I have a few questions for pro-abortion Catholics who might be reading this blog. When Rosemary Ganley writes that Canada is a country “with a Charter of rights that has been interpreted to protect a woman’s right to choose” does she mean that immoral laws should never be challenged? Whether or not you consider abortion immoral is not the point. The point is about the incontestability of law. I’m asking because abortion used to be illegal and abortion laws were successfully challenged by abortion advocates who thought it was immoral to impose one’s pro-life views on women. According to Ganley’s myopic view of law, women shouldn’t be persons and we should be allowed to own black people (oops, my mistake, blacks wouldn’t be people…). Or is there a point in history where law, who has always been malleable, became fixed? Maybe the day it coincided with Ganley’s personal views? Just trying to understand here…

My second question concerns the separation of church and state, on which I am no expert. But, if there is indeed a separation of church and state, wouldn’t that be an argument upholding Archbishop’s Pendergast’s position? There are state positions (abortion is a legitimate personal choice in a free and democratic society) and church positions (life begins at conception and belongs to God). Who gets an abortion is state matter. Communion is a Church matter. I don’t understand why Ganley thinks the State should be allowed to meddle with who is receiving a Catholic Sacrament… not if she wants to declare in the same breath that the Church has no business meddling with who is receiving an abortion.

Finally, my last question maybe should have been the first. Why care so much about the Catholic Church? With the number of Christian churches and denominations that support abortion, contraception, women pastors, divorce and same-sex marriage, why so upset about the Catholic church? I just don’t get it. Don’t you want to be happy when you go to Church? Spirituality through disgruntlement. Never heard of it.

Celebrating the tube

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Most debates on futility considerations revolve around mechanical feeding and ventilation. If I had a dime for every time I heard “feeding tube” and “futility” in the same sentence, I would be laughing at my student loan by now. This is why I was compelled to share this little nugget of everyday life with you.

One of my friends suffers from a degenerative disease that attacks her muscle tissues. She has difficulty feeding herself since her caloric intake is entirely consumed by her degenerating muscle mass. I recently asked her husband how she is doing this winter (the cold season is never a happy time for people who have a hard time breathing) and he got really excited telling me about her new feeding tube. She gets all these extra calories with the push of a syringe; she’s getting better colour and putting on weight. She hasn’t been that sick at all this winter.

Quality of life improved by feeding assistance… Think about it, it happens.

Down Syndrome and misinformation

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Enthusiastic as I am about the information campaign lead by the Down Syndrome Society, I can’t help but wonder to what extent their efforts aren’t compromised by their unwillingness to face the abortion debate head-on. Not wanting to state that abortion can be wrong, their argument is based on a contradiction: How can you explain to a family facing a prenatal diagnosis of Down Syndrome that any selfish reason is enough to abort any fetus except for theirs? Is their decision less right than that of a 30-something who forgot to take her pill?

The problem with the whole information campaign is that it does not address the root of the problem — which is, incidentally, the root of the abortion argument — that is, rampant individualism. As long as we uphold rampant individualism as the flagship of liberal society, we can inform people until we are blue in the face, nothing will make self-sacrifice palatable, as “Paul” so aptly demonstrated on our Comments page. Not even calls for more diversity.

Don’t get me wrong: I believe eugenic abortion is as wrong as any abortion, and I also believe that expecting parents are misinformed. But I wish that pro-abortion advocates who feel squirmy about genetic abortions would say something against abortion, at least in the one regard. Have the courage of your convictions–it’s liberating.

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Patricia adds: I agree with Véronique that, if abortion is wrong, then it’s wrong, whether it’s for eugenic reasons, for reasons of “sex selection” or because I have a beach holiday planned. For most feminists, the right to abortion is a great cause for celebration, except when the fetus aborted is a girl and it’s aborted because it’s a girl. For the pro-choice parent of a child with DS, the objectionable reason for abortion is the DS. Neither is a morally coherent position.

That said, as a parent with a child with Down Syndrome, I understand why the people who run the CDSS are so particularly appalled with the eugenic effect of maternal screening and prenatal testing programs that are offered as part of good prenatal health care in Canada. I think that for most of these parents, it’s one thing to recognize a generic “woman’s right to choose” out there somewhere. After all, for most of their lives, they’ve been told that the only reasonable enlightened position. But now, all of a sudden, that right to choose is being exercised to eliminate kids like yours from the face of the earth. Suddenly, you find that it’s your child who is treated as a mistake who somehow slipped through the cracks of good prenatal care. (I know, I’ve used that phrase before.) And your status is “freakish” as you realize that there are fewer and fewer parents like you around. That is an eye-opening experience for many people, I think.

And also, I think that there is a bit of an epiphany that happens when you have a child like this, especially if it’s not something that you ever anticipated touching you personally. You realize that this thing that everyone seems to think is so awful, that should be avoided at all costs, is probably one of the better things that ever happened to you. As one parent writes about his daughter with DS “she has enriched my life to a degree I didn’t think was possible. She changed my whole focus on life, on what has value and what doesn’t have value, and what we consider valuable.” Not surprisingly, you get a bit evangelical about it. (There was an article on just this point in the Ottawa Citizen on the weekend.)

 Now, obviously, I’m hoping that this epiphany will make these parents and other people realize that they should reconsider their whole position on so-called “unwanted” human beings. It is, to me, the only logical conclusion that can be reached from this starting point. But even if they don’t get any further on that road, at the very least, it seems to me that their stories help to undermine the whole ethos of “kids as lifestyle accessories” and the rampant individualism that underpins this view of children.

Proper palliative care is a right, not a privilege

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Heard an interview on my local CBC morning show with Loïse Lavellee. The interview began this way: “Robert Latimer. To some he is a monster. To others, he is a kindred spirit…”

The essence of the interview was that Lavellee sympathized with Latimer on a very personal level: She also lost a disabled child, her daughter Éloïse. If I heard correctly over the morning chaos of my house, Éloïse died of natural causes after being denied life-sustaining treatment. “Latimer,” Lavellee said, “didn’t get that chance. So he had to take his daughter’s suffering into his own hands.” When asked what she had to say to disabled people who felt threatened by the whole Latimer affair, Lavellee said she understood their fear but that “the issue with Tracy was not her disability, it was her pain.”

But can Tracy’s pain and disability be so easily separated? I have read that Tracy’s pain control consisted of Tylenol. Whether that’s all she was able to take or all she was allowed to take is irrelevant. Either way, Tracy’s unrelenting pain could not have been so easily ignored had she not been disabled.

I once asked one of my teachers in bioethics how much of the euthanasia debate hinged on improper research, investment and education in palliative care. He thought about it for a minute and said: “Most of it.” 

Tracy didn’t have a right to die. But she did have a right to proper, effective, medical care which included adequate pain control. The system failed her and she paid with her life.

That’s your imagination keeping you up

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When I am not posting on ProWomanProLife, I am doing graduate research into decision-making in neonatal intensive care. Came upon this in an academic article on prenatal decision-making, that is, medical management decisions made when a woman is threatened by premature labor and delivery at the margins of viability (22 to 24 weeks gestation):

In Canada, a foetus is not legally considered to be a person. It is only once born that a neonate becomes a citizen with full rights. Therefore, [parents] are engaged in a decision concerning a person that does not yet legally exist and that cannot be considered a medical patient by neonatologists. The situation is even more so ambiguous when the foetus is not yet a reality for parents who, in anticipating their parenthood, have only imagined their baby.” (From Payot et al., 2007)

If nothing ever highlighted the hypocrisy of a system that delivers and treats infants at the margins of viability on one floor while aborting them on another, this should.

I have yet to meet a family in neonatal intensive care that considers the non-personhood of their baby when making medical management decisions. And what is that bit about the baby being “only imagined”? I’ll bet any pregnant woman who has ever been kept awake at night by a tossing and turning fetus would describe her baby as anything but “imagined”.

Everything’s relative… absolutely!

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The recent posts on the uproar caused by bill C-484 among abortion advocates made me reflect on the philosophical implications of opposing a bill that gives a different legal status to fetuses that are expected than to those that are not. I always thought that the entire edifice of choice arguments rested on moral relativism. In other words, whether something – ending the life of a fetus – is right or wrong depends on what you think it is. There is no absolute yardstick of morality and, consequently, what you see depends on what you choose to see.

So what should be the big deal about a bill that gives a special legal status to fetuses that are expected and wanted? If abortion is relatively moral, supporting an initiative that upholds this relativity should strengthen the choice rhetoric, shouldn’t it? Well apparently no. The “free abortion on demand” slogan cannot withstand any suggestion that the fetus is relevant because doing so would be admitting some abortions as unwarranted or unnecessary. And when the rightness of an action – ending the life of a fetus – won’t withstand the challenge of circumstances, it’s called an “absolute.” We pro-lifers have long argued that some things are absolutely wrong. It is time to start reflecting on the implications of holding abortion as absolutely right.

Celebrating selective abortions

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Maclean‘s Mitchel Raphael reported on the pro-abortion celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Morgentaler decision back in January:

Bloc MP Nicole Demers found the evening particularly moving. Now a grandmother of two, she had four abortions in the years after giving birth to her second son, who had hemophilia, in order to avoid passing the disease onto other male children. (Females are rarely susceptible to hemophilia.)

Four abortions? Because of hemophilia? Reading pieces like this one always makes me think of the line that keeps being re-drawn. Where does the buck stop? (As in, this life is not worth living, this person is better off dead…) And the line is never drawn by those whose life is, well, on the line. In this case, all those Canadians who have hemophilia.

In 2002 I gave birth to a cleft-affected child some asked if I would have had an abortion had I known about her condition in advance. But how can knowing only one thing, albeit a challenging thing, about a child in utero compare to everything else that makes each life unique? I could have spared my daughter the pain of plastic surgery but I would also have denied her all the joys she gets from being a sister, a bright student, a cherished friend and a gifted gymnast. And I would have denied myself the delight she brings into my life, surgery and all.

This is how selective abortion keeps moving the line: We care not a bit about the million things that make each person unique and worthwhile. Because of one illness, we don’t bother finding out.

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Andrea adds: Such a short report and I see even more problems. First of all, it’s as though the story’s spin is to say an abortion because of hemophilia is AOK. Then there’s that number: Four. Four abortions. That’s a special kind of failure to grasp how birth control works. (Oh wait, she did use birth control, except she calls it abortion.) Finally, though not entirely clear, it appears she took those babies’ lives pre-emptively–as in, they might have hemophilia, if they were boys. Words fail.  

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Rebecca adds: I’ve always wanted to ask people who opt for eugenic abortions: If you found out your baby had hemophilia only after he was born, would you want him dead? What, after all, is the difference, but for a few weeks’ gestation?

How can it be right if it feels so wrong?

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A translation of a short article published in yesterday’s La Presse:

Julie, in her early thirties, should have given birth to her third child in the middle of winter. Instead, she went to the hospital in the fall. Her daughter was born but never lived…

You think miscarriage or premature delivery followed by death. But the article continues:

Faced with a pessimistic diagnosis, Julie and her husband decided to end the pregnancy after 5 months. While she is certain she made the right decision, Julie is nonetheless overcome by a profound distress…

No kidding. This is turning the old “How can it be wrong if it feels so right?” on its head. Please help me find other examples of right decisions causing profound distress because as things are now, I feel like abortion activists have successfully taken over the minds of Canadians.

That nagging feeling of distress, could it possibly be your conscience telling you that terminating a disabled life was likely a selfish decision based on your needs rather than compassion for the child?

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Andrea adds: The Thought Police have been out and at ’em…for years… “Your decision is right, your decision is right. Because it was your choice and it was therefore right. And abortion is a right. And right. Thank you for listening and please don’t reflect on any profound distress you may be feeling.”  (This decades-long public service announcement is brought to you by assorted pro-abortion groups.)    

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