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Only a symbolic win in New Brunswick?

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Jonathan Van MarenAccording to Jonathon Van Maren, who is actually quite nice,

Gallant did scrap the regulation stipulating that women get the approval of two doctors before obtaining a taxpayer-funded abortion. This is a victory for abortion activists, but an almost completely symbolic one, as women were virtually never refused an abortion. If women were being refused abortions based on the two-doctor rule, you can rest assured that the abortion activists would have been making these women the star of every press release, media appearance, and sparsely attended rally they held. So there’s no reason to expect a sudden dramatic jump in the abortion rate.

The abortion activists did not get what they were pushing for in the first place, which was funding for the Morgentaler Clinic in Fredericton. That clinic recently closed down, citing a lack of funding. Activists were demanding that the provincial government provide the cash to get the clinic up and running again, and raised over 100,000 dollars to help things along. However, Gallant’s decision specifically limits abortions to hospitals, denying abortion activists the one concrete victory they were actually seeking.

He makes a few more points in his blog post. Read it here.

So this is actually encouraging. Maybe that’s the wrong term. Less depressing? I’ll take it though. Let’s be clear on our actually wins and losses. If we’re going to be strategic about things, we can’t afford to do otherwise.

UK MPs vote to ban sex-selection abortion

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In Canada, we can’t even have a Parliamentary motion on this topic, but thankfully the UK is making progress where we’re unable to:

The vote of 181 to 1 for the Abortion (Sex-Selection) Bill tabled by pro-life Conservative MP Fiona Bruce will now go to second reading in January.

Bruce tabled the bill in an effort to end confusion over the legal status of sex-selective abortion in the UK.

“It is a shame that this clarification is needed. Successive health ministers and even the Prime Minister have been very clear … that abortion for reasons of gender alone is illegal. The Prime Minister has described the practice as appalling but they are being ignored,” Bruce told the Commons.

It remains appallingly controversial in Canada to state in Parliament that killing female pre-born children simply because they are female is wrong.

Canada, we can learn something from the UK about human rights. Wake up and get with the times.

Baby girl

On Brittany Maynard’s suicide

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I’m saddened for Brittany and her family. Both battling cancer and losing a loved one to cancer is so very difficult. I’m sorry for their loss.

The coverage of Brittany’s death has addressed the national and international debate regarding assisted suicide. I thought this piece was quite balanced.

One of the interviewees noted the actions of an insurance company with offices in a state that had legalized assisted suicide.

Tim Rosales, spokesman for Patients Rights Action Coalition based in Princeton, N.J., said that for every Brittany Maynard, there’s a Barbara Wagner, an Oregon woman who fought her insurance company when it said it would cover drugs for her suicide but not for chemotherapy to fight her lung cancer.

“We have to look at assisted suicide in much broader terms,” Rosales said in a phone interview Sunday evening. “Obviously, we’re very saddened to hear the news about Brittany Maynard. However, that being said, suicide or assisted suicide sends the wrong message to a lot of young people are the country, particularly those who are dealing with psychological or physical challenges or serious illnesses.”

I hope this was an isolated incident. And if assisted suicide is decriminalized in Canada, which it may very well be, I hope we don’t see insurance companies mailing out letters like these to Canadians. As someone who has struggled with cancer and chronic illness, these actions hit far too close to home.

Holding Hands

The grass is not always greener

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We are, I’m convinced, as a human species, always playing the comparison game. So-and-so is happier, healthier, prettier, smarter. Here my friend and former PWPL blogger Véronique definitively explains why and how we shouldn’t do this. Another thing: We shouldn’t take social media as evidence of how life is or is not going. (I personally have written upbeat and funny posts before whilst feeling depressed.)

Pro-lifers believe every life is unique. Special. Sacred, even, and that no two people are exactly alike, and so we won’t tread the same paths. Then we go away and fall prey to precisely the secular tendencies we claim to reject.

[TWEETBLOCK text=”Tweet this”]Fill your 24h with purpose and hold your head up high.[/TWEETBLOCK]

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Just say no to intentional killing of the innocent

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Mark Penninga writes about the ongoing legalization of assisted suicide debate in the National Post. 

One need not be healthy or strong to be protected equally under the law. As long as you have human DNA, you qualify for protection. Euthanasia and assisted suicide violates this principle of no intentional killing. I was shocked by how little the lawyers and judges in the Supreme Court hearing discussed this. The inviolability of life, which is a foundation for all law, was brushed aside as if it was a pesky house fly that distracted the lawyers and judges for a brief moment.

If we cross the line where the right to life moves from objective to subjective, we undermine the entire foundation of human rights.

In my mind, anyway, we already crossed that line round about the time we legalized abortion. So nowadays, (for many other reasons as well) life is not objective. It is not an objective good to defend, encourage and support. It is purely subjective–because individual people, particularly suffering people, have good reasons very often, to end their own lives. We used to stand up consistently against that, but today we don’t anymore. Could it be that abortion normalized the idea of killing others–precisely because it has been so routinely framed as difficult, but necessary and even compassionate, alongside being paid for by the government?

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“Euthanasia’s damage to the human soul”

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Screen Shot 2014-10-14 at 3.17.13 PMTomorrow, Wednesday, October 15, Canada’s Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether the criminalization of euthanasia is constitutional. The results won’t be known for several months. It’s good to remember the many reasons why euthanasia should never be sanctioned. Here, National Post columnist Barbara Kay explains one of them:

The essay goes on to describe each step – with copious facts and figures – along the way from euthanasia for “unbearable suffering” to involuntary euthanasia (a distressing number over there) to, in bio-ethicist Margo Somerville’s words,  “institutionalizing murder in the medical profession.” It’s an excellent essay, but what haunts me most is the “glazed eyes” of her uncle at learning that a sad 50-year old asked for and received death at the hands of a psychiatrist. Glazed eyes, glazed hearts, glazed souls. That’s the real slippery slope.

 

Under Construction

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