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Outstanding presentations to Federal Joint Committee

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Two outstanding presentations were made to the Joint Committee on Assisted Suicide.

Leading ethicist and director of McGill’s Centre for Medicine, Law and Ethics, Margaret Sommerville told the Federal Joint Committee that “…future generations will look back on the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia as the most important social-ethical-legal values decision of the 21st century, and the decisions that Parliament will make about the legislation and regulations to govern those interventions are an integral part of that decision.”

According to this Ottawa Citizen article, she said the harms and risks can be limited if government adopts certain recommendations.  These would be to avoid the future “normalization” of physician-assisted dying, by making it clear that it is an exception, should only be used as a last resort, and used rarely. “If Canada had the same percentage of total deaths of deaths by (physician-assisted dying) as the Netherlands and Belgium currently have (about 4 per cent and 4.6 per cent, respectively) we would have between 11,000 and 12,000 deaths each year.”

Also appearing before the Joint Committee, made up of 6 Senators and 11 Members of Parliament was Ottawa’s Cardinal Collins.

“The strong message from the Supreme Court is unmistakable: some lives are just not worth living. We passionately disagree,” said Collins, who presented on behalf of the Coalition for HealthCare and Conscience.

LifeSite News quoted that Cardinal as saying that

“The right to be put to death will, in practice, become in some cases the duty to be put to death, as subtle pressure is brought to bear on the vulnerable.”(…) “Often, a plea for suicide is a cry for help. Society should respond with care and compassionate support for these vulnerable people, not with death.” Collins emphasized that, “those called to the noble vocation of healing will instead be engaged in killing.” This will have a “grievous effect both on the integrity of a medical profession committed to do no harm, and upon the trust of patients from whom they seek healing.

Catholic hospitals, for example, are “not ‘things.’ They’re communities of people,” Collins said. “They have values and that’s why people come to them,” and they are “funded by the government because they do immense good work.” “If you undermine the institution for what it is, our society would be very, very much harmed,” he cautioned. “Our whole community would be a lot harsher, colder, crueler, without the witness given by community who are on the ground, on the street, day by day, caring for the most needy.”

LifeCanada presented a brief to two members of the Joint Committee at a special hearing in Langley, BC.  The brief can be found here.

The Joint Committee is wrapping up it’s hearing February 4th. To learn more, you can go to the Joint Committee webpage here.

All things in moderation?

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The Center for Disease Control in the States is telling any sexually active woman who is not on the Pill to not drink. Ever. Our tax dollars at work, as one American friend put it.

I’m surprised that feminists are not publicly annoyed about this. After all, it’s a little degrading to presume that women need to either be on a daily regime of hormones OR never touch alcohol, rather than assuming the best, that people can drink in moderation and that this is fine.

Instead, the press piles on, writing a sidebar about a 43-year-old woman whose mother “drank” while pregnant and now she has the mental age of a first grader. One might presume this means the mother had the odd glass of wine or a beer. But no:

Kathy again drank throughout her pregnancy, but usually just with friends. She’d put away a bottle of wine, or four to five beers, during a weekend.

Drinking wasn’t her only risky behaviour: “The fact is, I had poor nutrition, smoked cigarettes, worked in bars and drank alcohol. None of this was conducive to a healthy pregnancy.”

In 1973, just a few months after turning 18, she gave birth to Karli.

More reasonably, one might offer up this story not as an admonition not to ever drink while sexually active and not on the Pill, but rather, to get help if you are struggling with alcoholism, particularly as a teenager.

Women are made to be fearful about so many things during pregnancy. The list grows and grows and if the shadow of a birth defect shows up in some early ultrasound, abortion is immediately offered as a “solution”.

I’m against abortion. I’m also against treating women like children. I’m against drinking to excess such that you cloud good judgment on a regular basis. And finally, I’m against making pregnancy so ridiculously difficult and angst-ridden simply because the culture of the age assumes no one can be reasonable. Here ends the rant.

Me and a glass of wine. Don't worry, I wasn't pregnant.

Me and a glass of wine. Apparently in an empty restaurant. But don’t worry, I wasn’t pregnant.

As it happens: From fetus to baby in one interview

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CBC’s Carol Off interviewed a Brazilian abortion activist who is using the onset of the Zika virus to promote abortion in Brazil. You can listen to the interview here.

Some thoughts:

These are wanted children, presumably. In the contested science of psychological effects for women after abortion, there is an area of agreement and it’s this: aborting a wanted baby leaves women at greater risk for later problems.

Secondly, many women might be right to wonder why there isn’t an all out attack on fixing the virus, finding a cure, finding a vaccine and controlling the spread by controlling mosquitoes. Even the abortion activist alludes to this as a problem in the interview.

Finally, it’s only where you are not thinking of babies that abortion can be a solution. You’ll notice the interview starts with reference to the “fetus” and ends with reference to the “baby.”

Carol Off’s last question is about whether abortion is even an effective solution since microcephaly is only diagnosed later in pregnancy.

According to the CDC “Microcephaly is most easily diagnosed by ultrasound late in the 2nd trimester or early in the third trimester of pregnancy.”

I’m against abortion, so it’s pretty clear where I stand on abortion as a solution to anything. But even if you are not against abortion in principle, second or early third trimester means women have been pregnant for many weeks, are bonded with their babies–furthermore, their babies look like babies, very clearly.

So I believe that advocating for legal abortion in response to the Zika virus gets an epic fail on the feminist front regardless of whether you are against abortion or not.

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Feminism today vs. feminism of yesteryear

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Early feminists were against abortion. Later feminists, including Planned Parenthood, were too. (They thought pregnancy prevention was important, but distinguished between preventing a pregnancy and getting rid of one that was already there.)

This article discusses the early feminists.

Indeed, Anthony and Stanton believed something like the reverse: give women the right to vote so that women might have the power and the influence to do away with the ghastly practice of abortion. Here is Stanton herself: “There must be a remedy for such a crying evil as this. But where shall it be found, at least where begin, if not in the complete enfranchisement and elevation of women?”

The early American feminists presumed that the evil of abortion would be abolished by the elevation of women. Today’s feminists maintain that women’s elevated status depends upon easy access to abortion.

Erika Bachiochi

Erika Bachiochi

I am pro-hope

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“Don’t close the book on me yet.”

That’s a line from this song and video, which I thought was beautifully done. The concept of being pro-life is not that it is easy in the moment but rather that things will get better.

All of our stories are unfinished.

The song writer mentions life is a gift. This is true not merely for cute kids with blonde braids. It’s true for the annoying or acerbic adult you just ran into, too.  I think we forget that, because we stop being cute at some point. If we don’t value our own lives–how can we value those of unborn children, people we never met?

Perhaps I shall stop saying I’m pro-life, which most people are, but only in the limited framework that they grasp of that.

I am pro-hope–the life that is today a burden could be a gift later on. It’s happened so many times. There’s evidence for this idea that I hold so dear.

BrownEyedGirl

 

“The psychological burden of infant loss”

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Interesting article. I’m pretty sure we don’t mourn prenatal loss as we should, given that up until the point of birth, children are choices in this culture.

Priscilla Coleman, PhD, reflects on this issue:

The idea of induced abortion being promulgated by the medical community as a preventable loss seems like quite a stretch when it is seldom acknowledged by the major professional organizations as even carrying the potential to bring harm in the first place.

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Priscilla Coleman, PhD, Professor at Bowling Green University in Ohio and Director of WECARE, World Expert Consortium for Abortion Research and Education

What if animals acted like we do?

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Frederica Mathewes-Green:

This issue gets presented as if it’s a tug of war between the woman and the baby. We see them as mortal enemies, locked in a fight to the death. But that’s a strange idea, isn’t it? It must be the first time in history when mothers and their own children have been assumed to be at war. We’re supposed to picture the child attacking her, trying to destroy her hopes and plans, and picture the woman grateful for the abortion, since it rescued her from the clutches of her child.

If you were in charge of a nature preserve and you noticed that the pregnant female mammals were trying to miscarry their pregnancies, eating poisonous plants or injuring themselves, what would you do? Would you think of it as a battle between the pregnant female and her unborn and find ways to help those pregnant animals miscarry? No, of course not. You would immediately think, “Something must be really wrong in this environment.” Something is creating intolerable stress, so much so that animals would rather destroy their own offspring than bring them into the world. You would strive to identify and correct whatever factors were causing this stress in the animals.

The same thing goes for the human animal. Abortion gets presented to us as if it’s something women want; both pro-choice and pro-life rhetoric can reinforce that idea. But women do this only if all their other options look worse. It’s supposed to be “her choice,” yet so many women say, “I really didn’t have a choice.”

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Jane Roe’s baby is alive…

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…and likely doesn’t know how the question of her life was a legal battle:

Norma McCorvey is “Jane Roe.” She claimed then that her pregnancy was the result of a rape, although for over a decade now she has been outspokenly pro-life and publicly admitted that this, and virtually every fact on which her case was built, was a lie. Both McCorvey and Sandra Cano, the Doe of Doe v. Bolton—Roe’s companion case from Georgia decided the same day—[became] outspoken pro-life advocates who have sworn that their cases are built on lies (Cano unfortunately passed away in October 2014). […]

It is unknown to me whether the adoptive family ever even knew that their daughter was the supposedly unwanted child who was the subject of Roe. As far as we know, they raised her not knowing who she was and certainly never telling her.

I can’t imagine carrying the knowledge that the value of my life was a national (and international) debate, and where, in the end, it was justified that I should die. I wonder if Daughter Roe knows, and if she’s pro-life herself. At least, if she has, she has managed to maintain a private life all these years.

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