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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.

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

Anti-semites in, pro-lifers out?

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It’s Israel Apartheid Week at my alma mater right now. Most universities allow an astonishing latitude to bigots, provided they are of the socialist, left-wing variety. I  fondly recall those university moments when students would hand out the The Socialist Worker… but enough reminiscing.  

My thought is this: Let freedom reign. Only where the ideas have merit will they take hold. Where bad ideas take hold, fight them.  

Freedom has not reigned for pro-life groups on campus.

And don’t go equating pro-lifers with anti-semites, either. I just find it odd that the former have trouble expressing themselves on campus when the latter don’t. If the argument against pro-lifers is that their point of view is offensive, surely we ought to apply that same criterion to people who think The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a reliable work of non-fiction.

Update, February 16, 2008: George Jonas eloquently gets at my point in this column. He translates UofT’s attempt to explain the anti-semitic event away:

Political fashion is our middle name. We know which side our fatwa is buttered on. We know racism that’s in demand, racism that’s tolerated and racism that’s anathema. U of T’s approach succeeds because we’re in touch with the times. We know who are likely to riot, and it isn’t the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies. You’re listening to the Voice of the U of T. Shalom. Salaam. Peace. Boycott Israel, and have a nice day.

Sounds about right to me.

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.

Failing to see the forest for the trees

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A reader, Brian, thought we needed to read this. So I did–most of it, anyway.

There’s a lot of disagreement on how and when abortion causes psychological damage to women. One area of solid agreement is that when the woman herself harbours grave misgivings over the act, that woman is indeed more likely to experience personal damage.

So what upsets me about the link above is not that there are hypocrites out there, even pro-life ones–surely we all knew that. What upsets me is that the abortion providers document these examples and in only one case that I found, did they decline to do the abortion. One of these stories even documents a 16-year-old who the abortion providers describe as “not quite right.” But she too, got her abortion.

It also upsets me that someone would chronicle these horrible examples with an obvious sense of schadenfreude. Well done: You have exposed some maliciously dishonest pro-lifers.

It’s hard to see the hypocrites for all the other hypocrites. So I’ll ask a question. What is the bigger problem? The 16-year-old who is “not quite right” and pro-life but asks for and gets an abortion, or abortion providers who say they care about women but clearly don’t have a problem putting someone who is mentally incompetent under the knife?

Still, I thank the reader for drawing my attention to that piece.

Why I killed my first child

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A mother explains why she killed her first child here. She refrains from using the standard euphemisms, referring to her baby as a baby throughout. She then explains some of the results of her abortion: a (temporary) split with her husband, guilt, feelings of inadequacy and relief, a lack of desire for more kids.

But above all, the decision was right for her.

The new frontier of the pro-choice movement is to fully acknowledge the unborn child. But then to add that killing that child is a mother’s right.

Aaaah, progress.

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Patricia adds: Andrea, that’s a horrifying article. Maybe I’m naive but I can’t believe that stories like that are going to reconcile people to these kinds of “choices”. At least not in the long run.

There are about a dozen glaringly obvious and really disturbing aspects to this story.

For example, on learning that her child has Down Syndrome, there is not even the briefest consideration of any other possible alternative to abortion:

“Going ahead with the pregnancy wasn’t even up for discussion. Neil [the husband, oh, of course, the concerned husband] stayed strong [strong???!!!] and made all the necessary arrangements.

I saw a consultant the following day [the very next day??!! That Neil really stayed strong and wasted no time] and talked through the abortion procedure.”

There was a lot of “choice” going on there.

The description of the abortion procedure is stomach churning. Women should realize by instinct (and I believe that some part of each woman does) that anything that involves something so horrendous and unnatural has got to be contrary to their fundamental dignity.

No surprise then that the procedure leaves her with “guilt, I realise now, [that] I will have for ever. I pass Down’s children on the street and think, ‘I killed mine.’

… There is no escaping the reality of what I did, or the way I mentally rejected my baby. …

Abortion can never be described as an easy option. I still cry as though mine were yesterday.”

Naturally, I find it particularly horrifying that the justification for all of this is the fact that the child who was killed had Down Syndrome. But I would ask any woman if they would like their story to be that of the woman in that awful awful article or, in contrast and not to leave you on a completely depressing note, that of any one of these women.

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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