It could be me. Those vacation days have a way of softening the noodle (I blame Chimay; nobody ought to make beer this good). But I must say I have very little idea what Colby Cosh is saying in this piece.
I am amazed a hundred times a year that pro-life Christians get away with claiming that they stand on eternal principles when it comes to abortion, even though, if you prod them, they will start talking rot about DNA (whose existence and nature somehow went undisclosed through centuries of religious revelation) and will admit that it was the progress of scientific understanding which obligated them to suddenly promote abortion in the panoply of sins, circa 1968. They faced a choice concerning which principles they chose to modify under the pressure of technological change, and opted for the direction that allowed them to signal resistance to modernity. Their stance is about as deserving of deference as the Western Church’s 12th-century ban on crossbows, and no more tenable.
I guess it shows how much I don’t go out, but I have never been confronted with rot about DNA while discussing abortion-related issues (“a hundred times of year”? Gosh, Colby, where do you hang out?). Most of the pro-life folks I know are pretty keen on modernity – at least, the parts of it that gives us flush toilets, laptop computers under $1,000 and awfully cool gadgets like the “smarter smartphone” I just got. I’m also cool with crossbows.
I admit I don’t go to great lengths to justify how I became pro-life (or, as I prefer to call it, anti-casual-abortion). It’s quite simple, really: As a rule, it is wrong to end the life of innocent human beings. And I side with Rod Bruinooge whe he says it’s at best bizarre that a country would outlaw the sale of my own individual body parts but allow me to terminate the life of an unborn child at any point in a pregnancy for any reason whatever.
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Andrea adds: I wish I had written this before now, because now you won’t believe me, but I absolutely knew when Bruinooge said the bit about kidneys that some clever individual would come forward to say “Indeed! And this is why we must deregulate organ sales.” If I had thought about it harder, I might have guessed Colby Cosh—as I know his stuff and read it with interest, because he’s a good writer and I like him. Today’s offering isn’t really his best, in my opinion. It’s really… emotional. I recognize the visceral hostility to Christians–and by extension, Christian pro-lifers–because, er, I used to share it. So he’ll have to get over that, somehow, because being pro-life is not a religious stand, or rather, need not be. This column reads like a host of unresolved personal issues in national columnist clothing.
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Tanya adds: Good, so I wasn’t the only one to pick up on the bitterness vibe in this editorial.
Mind you, he lost me way before that. He lost me at:
I don’t claim to know what most Canadians think about kidney donation; my guess is they don’t think about it at all.
Cosh followed that up with his own opinion of what he believes most Canadians would think of organ-selling on e-bay if they ever gave much thought to the issue at all, which they don’t.
(Not my fault. That sentence was only as confusing as his thought process.)
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Andrea adds: And Tanya, we are not alone in picking up the bitter vibe. So did Charles Lewis in this quick rebuttal. (You’d have to be a rock not to notice. Compare and contrast God and Morgentaler? Really?)
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Colby Cosh may be interested to know about Nat Hentoff, recently laid-off Village Voice columnist and outspoken atheist pro-lifer. I just read about it today, on the First Things blog. I recommend following the links in that post– makes for some interesting reading.
http://www.firstthings.com/blog/2009/01/02/selective-memory/
Colby says, “it has only been in the last 40 years that there has been any real controversy about the ethical status of abortion.” Um… what?
The ethical status of abortion was never in question, at least in the Catholic Church. The question was “when does life begin?” or “when does the soul enter the body?” (and no one seriously suggested birth), not “is it right to end a human life?” Modern science clarifies that question — conception.
I don’t understand what Cosh is trying to suggest…
He also says, “medieval thinkers generally considered that it did not become homicide until (at least) the first exterior signs of activity in the womb.” Well, “the first exterior signs of activity in the womb” come well before legal protection does in Canada.
The Conservative government’s Bill C-51 sought to legalize the sale of human body parts. Bill C-51 proposed legislation that would define ‘cells, tissues and organs’ as ‘therapeutic products’ that could be sold.
Andrea of this board is an ardent supporter of Harper’s conservative government. Why? When it tries to commercialize the sale of human fetal tissue through Bill C-51? When it has moved so many women to do abortion through it’s irresponsible childcare policies that have made childrearing too expensive for so many? When Harper publicly states that he does not want abortion to even be discussed?
Why, Andrea, are you a Conservative?