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The ultimate goal

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Tanya, a contributor to our Comments page wrote in response to my post on criminalization. Her comment:

“Even though the criminalization of abortion is not, for you, an immediate goal, the question begs to be asked; is it not reasonable to have its criminalization as an eventual goal?

Let’s parallel this human rights issue (abortion) with another one from another era, when William Wilburforce first introduced a bill to criminalize the slave trade. He was ridiculed and success seemed far off. He was always up-front with his ultimate goal. Through creative and gradual measures, by more means than simply introducing his annual bill, his goal was eventually realized.

I understand that there is much to accomplish in the mentality and practices of Canadians before a legal ban on abortion would even be beneficial. However, I would hope that every person who speaks out for the right for the unborn would have as an ultimate goal that these tiny humans’ rights be held up as equal to our own.

The point is well taken. Arguing against criminalization from a fetal rights’ perspective offers no wiggle-room and I can be accused of taking the easy way out by avoiding the question altogether. Either the fetus is a human being and deserves the same protection from harm as other human beings, or fetuses are not human and have no claim to a protected right to life and integrity. The third option, well described on our Comments page by Dave, involves getting into philosophical contortions to justify killing some human non-persons in a discourse reminiscent of 19th century slavery rhetoric. Our dismal historic track record in deciding who – or what – is human suggests that we should stop the circus act and recognize that determining humanity based on human-made criteria has embarrassed more than one civilization. Will our treatment of the unborn shame us in a few generations? I have no doubt about it, particularly in light the demographic decline of Western civilizations.

I do think criminalization is the ultimate goal. But I also think that it will happen naturally as mentalities change to recognize the humanity of the fetus. Our role as pro-lifers is not, in my view, to push for criminalization but to change mentalities. If mentalities change, criminalization will naturally follow. The same cannot be said about the reverse.

What Bill Clinton thinks about pro-lifers

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Hear Bill Clinton lash out at pro-life students:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XfmJeIJpns] 

The sound is not great. I will spare you the joy of listening to bad audio several times. He says:

I gave you the answer. We disagree with you. You want to criminalize women and their doctors and we disagree. I reduced abortion. Tell the truth, tell the truth, if you were really pro-life, if you were really pro-life, you would want to put every doctor and every mother as an accessory to murder in prison…

Is that a fact?

As a pro-life advocate, I find the issue of criminalization anything but straightforward. On the one hand, I do not share concerns about imposing my morality on others since the purpose of criminal law is to impose a minimal morality on those who might not have it. When we live law-abiding lives and expect others to do the same, we impose our morality on others. When John Robin Sharpe tells us that child porn is a valid form of self-expression, we impose our morality on him by not putting up with it. On the flip side, the Supreme Court of Canada imposed their morality on me in Morgentaler and again in Tremblay v. Daigle.

When people say that they don’t want to impose their morality on others in the context of abortion, what they really mean is that they don’t want to do it in that particular context. This is problematic because it recognizes abortion as a legitimate choice in some cases thereby seriously undermining the pro-life position.

On the other hand, I also find myself at odds with calls for the criminalization of abortion. Not because I think that abortion is a legitimate choice but because I believe that in our present socio-cultural environment, criminalizing abortion would further victimize women. And I am not talking about clothes-hangers. Bear with me:

I believe that criminal law serves its most important purpose as instrument of social ordering not by its coercive force but by the general sense that the limits it imposes on free choice are legitimate and necessary. Unfortunately, abortion has been seen as a necessary and legitimate choice in Canadian society for many years.

As things stand now, abortion is not seen as an anti-social act from which society needs to protect itself. Even worse, right now Canadian society benefits from the (induced) infertility of its women. We all benefit from the strong economy fueled by the presence of women on the labor market. We all benefit by the consumer prices driven down, in part, by not paying the real cost of having mothers in the labor force. And we will not pay the real cost of having women in our labor force as long as our fiscal and social policies cast childrearing as a personal choice that women must assume.

In Canada – indeed, in most Western societies – women who get abortions do not behave in an anti-social manner. I will go even further and say that women who have no children or few children act as our stuff-hungry, profit-making, economically-growing, materialist society expects them to.

Pro-life reader, we have some work ahead of us before abortion could be made illegal. It is simply not enough to say abortion is wrong. Women need to be convinced that it is.

“Did you feel this?”

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A reader directed me to this New York Times article, which sent me on a research frenzy. As a lawyer/ethicist, I am out of my league commenting on the state of fetal neuro-science. But I have some observations.

Given what goes on during an abortion procedure, I am quite desperate to believe the American Medical Association when it tells me that fetuses – pardon my Latin – are unable to process a painful stimulus until the third trimester of pregnancy. I find it difficult to do so because:

The topic of fetal pain has received the same polarizing treatment as all other matters of abortion, meaning that whether or not fetuses feel pain now depends on where you stand on the pro-life to pro-abortion continuum. Which is scientifically and academically troubling since:

Brain structures are not political. Either fetuses feel pain and abortion hurts them or fetuses don’t feel pain and abortion doesn’t hurt them. The question is: does it matter? Is the legitimacy of abortion affected by whether or not fetuses feel it? Is abortion wrong because it hurts or is it wrong because it kills? Would those who don’t object to ending fetal life object to causing fetal pain? I wonder.

Something’s fishy

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I once read that abortion was the right to kill in order to protect the right to copulate. Since then, I have never ceased to be amazed at the lengths we are willing to go to protect these “rights.”

Case in point: We worry more about the effect of estrogen from contraceptive pills on the smallmouth bass of the Potomac river than on the women who take it daily.

Would that women’s hormonal health was as significant as that of the smallmouth bass of the Potomac watershed.

_____________________________

Andrea wonders: What happens to women who take The Pill and swim in the Potomac with the smallmouth bass? Now there’s a study.

Sticks and stones may break my bones

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Words can be violent and ugly, as these were:

“Two young girls who froze to death last week on the Yellow Quill First Nation reserve…”

“Froze to death,” I thought, have mercy on the parents: Do we really need to say they froze to death? Could we not write “died of cold-induced cardiac arrest”? I feel better thinking they died of cardiac arrest. Makes it sound quicker. But in the end, it still means they froze to death. And there is no way to wash-off the violence of dying alone in the cold.
It reminded me of a seminar I attended recently entitled “When is it ethical to withdraw nutrition and hydration from critically ill children?” or, in lay-person’s terms “When is it okay not to feed and give water to dying and/or very sick children?”

This time, the discussion involved a case study in neonatal intensive care where a chromosomal anomaly had not been diagnosed by prenatal genetic testing. One of my colleagues observed:

“This is problematic because the parents would have terminated the pregnancy had they known about the genetic anomaly. They had wide latitude to decide not to raise an impaired child while pregnant and lost that choice when the baby was born. One day, they could terminate the pregnancy for any reason. The next day they would be committing infanticide by withholding fluids and nutrition.”

The speaker, a well-known scholar and experienced physician, interrupted: “I don’t like using the word ‘infanticide.’” The conversation continued and I asked: “If food and water were discontinued, would death occur by starvation or would the baby die of its underlying condition?” Nobody seemed to see a material difference between the two but the speaker took issue with “starvation.” Apparently, he didn’t like that word either.

Words create images and form realities. We don’t like what “starvation” and “infanticide” suggest so we try to change their violent reality into something more manageable. In the end, there is no escaping the fact that denied food and water for long enough, genetically- impaired infants starve to death.

We can argue whether or not this is ethical but let’s not hide violence behind euphemisms. Sticks and stones may break my bones–and words can also hurt me. So be it.

That’s not funny

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One of the unfortunate side effects of graduate studies in biomedical ethics is that you find humor in things that are decidedly not funny. Such was the case when I heard Dr. Bill Pope interviewed on CBC’s The Current. The head of Manitoba’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, Dr. Pope was commenting on the College’s new statement on withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment. When asked if the statement addressed some of the cultural and religious issues involved in end of life decision-making, Dr. Pope replied:

“This is why we used strictly clinical criteria.”

I laughed.

I know this is, strictly speaking, not funny.

But one must be exceptionally naive or willfully blind to believe that clinical observations can, in and of themselves, guide a decision to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatment. Clinical criteria don’t have opinions, which is why we need physicians to interpret them. Something informs the decision on where the buck stops, things like culture, religion (including atheism), economics and personal preferences. Clinical information needs interpretation and I am more concerned about a physician who believes that she has no biases than about one who comes out clearly as a [fill in the blank].

What worries me most about Dr. Pope’s comment is not that people will be taken off life support. Death is, after all, a part of life. What worries me is that he wraps himself in a flag of moral neutrality. Deciding that a practice – abortion, withdrawal of life support, euthanasia – is morally neutral is not a neutral decision.

Obligation to refer: Fact or fiction?

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I realize that the democratic state allows citizens to have a hand in the legislative process. But the last time I checked, the course of a legal obligation involved a walk through Parliament and some semblance of a democratic debate. So how did it come to be that:

“Lorraine Weinrib, faculty of law at the University of Toronto, mused about why doctors should be protected from performing or referring for abortions.”

An obligation to refer women seeking abortions to abortion providers presupposes a right to abortion. Let’s turn to Canadian abortion laws… Wait a minute… There aren’t any!

Before 1988, abortions could only be performed in hospitals upon approval by abortion committees. Morgentaler struck down the Criminal Code’s provision that substituted a woman’s judgment for the decision of an abortion committee. It gave women the right to make an autonomous decision and it gave Henry Morgentaler the right to terminate their pregnancies in private clinics. Forgive me for thinking like a lawyer but the right to decide to have an abortion is substantially different from the obligation to provide or facilitate it.

Morgentaler did not close the door on any state-based initiative to regulate abortion and did not give women a positive right to abortion. Granting women a right to abortion – and obliging physicians to provide it – requires taking abortion back to Parliament and engaging in an open, democratic discussion about our national stance on abortion. And opening the legislative process on abortion would cause – Yikes! – a real debate! And that’s not something abortion advocates want.

The birth dearth

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I read about the “birth dearth” in last week’s Ottawa Citizen.

As a mother of five, I always get a kick out of suggestions that a baby cash-in can boost the country’s birth rate. Don’t get me wrong: as a stay-at-home mom with a monumental student debt, I could sure use the extra money. But the promise of a $ 1, 000 baby bonus pales in comparison with the $1, 200 I spend monthly on groceries. And that says nothing about the price of keeping my kids clothed, sheltered and happily busy with gymnastics, dance and other activities. My point is that maybe someone should tell left-leaning thinkers that there is only so much money the state can throw at declining birth rates until it must start making family cool again. And pictures of pregnant Britney, Gwyneth and Katie won’t cut it.

What then, is a government to do when it wants to proclaim that children are a personal choice that women must assume and ask them at the same time to have more, many more? It gives them more money and hopes they won’t notice the hypocrisy. Trying to turn childbearing into a money-making endeavor? Good luck…

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