Big article in the National Post today, a book excerpt from Mighty Judgment: How the Supreme Court of Canada runs your life:
There were respectable legal arguments on both sides in the Morgentaler case. McIntyre and La Forest were no mean jurists, and they disagreed with the majority decision. There were three separate judgments from the justices in the majority, each significantly different from the other two. The conclusion may have been clear, but there was no clear reason for the conclusion. The decision was five to two. Richard Posner has written of the U.S. Supreme Court, “Many of the landmark decisions were decided by close votes and would have been decided the other way had the Court been differently but no less ably manned.” The same is true of Morgentaler.
Parliament is where decisions of this sort should reside, not the Supreme Court.
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I disagree that “there were respectable legal arguments on both sides…” The pro-abortion arguments are simply atrocious because they deny the humanity of the unborn child. “Everyone” in section 7 *must* include unborn babies if our Charter is to make any logical sense.
The law compels parents to provide the necessities of life for their born children, for very good reasons that are based on the children’s natural rights as persons. To deny the same rights to unborn children is irrational and unjust, and the injustice in this country is compounded because we are all forced to participate in this atrocity through our taxes and our publicly funded “health care” system.
It’s high time that we stop pretending that pro-abortion or “pro-choice” arguments are respectable. We should not hesitate to treat them with the contempt they truly deserve.
Well said, Dan. I say “Amen to that”.
Matter of constitutionality, however, reside precisely in the Supreme Court. The Court found that the existing abortion law violated women’s right to security of the person.
Your side has consistently FAILED to come up with an abortion law that does NOT violate constitutionally guaranteed rights. So-called fetal rights are in basic conflict with women’s rights. Sane people agree that women’s rights prevail.
“So-called fetal rights are in basic conflict with women’s rights.”
No, the kinds of conflict that arise in this context are no more “basic” than other conflicting rights that arise among human beings every day. Furthermore, since every adult woman was once an embryonic human being, what you are really saying is that “a woman’s rights can conflict with another woman’s rights”. Yes, I agree, but we have to deal with those conflicts rationally on a case by case basis, and never by directly and intentionally killing one of the people involved in the conflict.
“Sane people agree that women’s rights prevail.”
No, all the sane people I know agree that human rights prevail.
“Your side has consistently FAILED to come up with an abortion law that does NOT violate constitutionally guaranteed rights.”
The first and most fundamental right is the right to life. The Charter is not worth the paper it is written on if it cannot guarantee this most basic of human rights.
Key here is verb tense: ‘every adult woman was once an embryonic human being’.
Adult woman’s rights vs. ‘fetal’ rights. No brainer. No logical difficulty either.
‘Right to life’ of persons, yes. That is in Charter. Right to life of ‘non-persons’, no.
A constitutional abortion law can NOT be written.
Or it would have been, doncha think? After twenty-some years of caterwauling by anti-choicers.
Instead, your side comes up with sneaky back-door attempts to limit abortion, like C-484 (harm to fetuses) and C-510 (coerced abortion), which are no-go’s either.
Probably the reason behind PWPL’s non-legal mission is the acceptance that a law that could pass constitutional muster is just NOT possible.
The reason for PWPL’s non-legal mission is to work on the hearts of the unconvicted and unconvinced in the framework where it really matters: the culture. A law can sit on the books and constitutional or not, it won’t matter if people don’t follow it.
The reason why the justices in 1988 decided against the right to life for all human beings is because the culture told them the sort of ideas Fern is putting forward (a rights conflict between women and their children, for example). I wholly reject that a woman’s rights are in conflict with those of her living or unborn children. The idea of PWPL is predicated on the notion that where women thrive so do their children *and* where women’s children thrive, so too do the women who have them.
Being pro-life or pro-choice today is not about constitutionality. It’s about world view. And thankfully, world views can change, as we see through the historical currents of time. I want to change those worldviews that might make up the laws of this country and that is why PWPL is focussed on the culture, not law.
Fern and her “side” appear to be unaware of the inherent danger of their reliance on the Charter to guard their right to end the lives of unborn human beings. For if the right to security of the person or to life itself rests solely in the gift of the State, the same rights can also be denied by the same State. So, as victory in the battle for hearts and minds (rather than the search for and defense of truth, which is my preference) increasingly falls to the side of protecting the unborn, this will in turn be increasingly reflected in the elected and unelected members of Canada’s government. Eventually power and popularity will lead to constitutional changes and it will be “pro-choicers” who will argue for constitutionally unacceptable laws. And the cycle will continue.
On the other hand, if human rights transcend political systems and societies, if they belong to every human being merely because they are human beings, then any constitution of any nation that denies any of these rights, either in whole or in part, is wrong and indefensible.
Lauri: In this case (not always) the battle for hearts and minds IS the search for and defense of truth.
I agree: being pro-choice or anti-choice is about world view. But practically, a woman’s right to obtain a legal and safe abortion relies on law and the constitutionality thereof.
All advanced secular countries accept that a woman’s rights trumps those of a wholly dependent growth.
And I’d trust a panel of learned judges over the moronic, uneducated (see Gary Goodyear) oafs in Parliament who pander to their fundamental base’s ignorance.
My latest blogpost: Religion Makes You Stupid and Violent. ¡Viva rationality!
Easy, Fern. I assume you are on this site because you want to make an impact on my readers/the debate. You might like to consider that calling them (by proxy) “moronic and uneducated,” or “stupid and violent” isn’t a bridge builder. Come to think of it, not very “learned” either. Didn’t see the use of those words in the SCC decision when I read it.
If the ‘battle’ is for hearts and minds, I’m just offering something for the mind — facts, studies, reports, expert opinion. All that elite stuff.
I called oafs like Gary Goodyear moronic and uneducated. He’s a creationist and a reader here?
I thought you eschewed religion in your arguments.
You don’t need religion to make an argument against abortion, Fern. The secular arguments stand just fine on their own. Nevertheless many (not all) supporters of the prolife movement are deeply religious, and calling them (us) stupid and violent, or moronic and uneducated is not a way to win an argument. It’s a way to alienate people. If you want to be taken seriously, you would do well to stay away from ad hominem attacks.
Nevertheless, I have a question for you: were you ever an embryo? If not, when did you become a human being?
Did you read the study, Melissa? The report said that highly religious societies had higher rates of anti-social behaviour, i.e. murder, rape, suicide etc. The authors speculated that the reason was that religion demands unquestioning faith, or lack of curiosity and reason. No ad hominems there.
Your question is flawed. I became a legal person when I drew breath. No other question is pertinent.
Strawman, Fern. Any study that equates not believing in evolution with religiosity isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.
So you are saying that not all human beings deserve the right to life. That is interesting. I disagree most vehemently, and I think we’ve reached an impasse here where we can’t come to any further agreement. If we keep going on, we’ll just go round and round in circles. I’ll let any bystanders and lurkers decide who has the better arguments.
I took a look at that “study” quoted by Fern on her very own blog. It’s own author denies that any causation between belief in evolution and “anti-social” behaviours has been proven. Rather, he cautions against drawing such conclusions before sufficient study and research has been done. I, for one, think a principal flaw of this study is linking that the high homicide rate in the USA to people who profess creationism. Rather, many homicides in the USA are much more easily and credibly linked to membership in criminal organizations, whether mafia or street gangs. These types of organizations are less prevalent in the societies so admired by Fern and the study’s author. And I don’t imagine criminal gangs care much, one way or the other, on the whole question of whether human beings evolved from apes or were specifically created by God.
“I became a legal person when I drew breath”.
You seem to be unaware of the flaw of this logic – depending on flawed people (be they legislators or judges or even just citizens) to interpret who should belong to the category of ‘legal persons’ is a sure way to ignore the inherent rights of a group of people – all that’s required is that a loud minority bully the decision-makers to keep the status quo the way it is (and to ignore the fact that it was through political bullying that it became that way as well). It’s not all that long ago that supreme court justices (in more than one culturally ‘advanced’ society) decided that both women and blacks were non-persons, legally. To rely on those kinds of semantical arguments for this human rights issue seems profoundly disingenuous (although I’m prepared to accept this it probably isn’t, in many pro-choicer’s cases – to give you the benefit of the doubt).
“‘Right to life’ of persons, yes. That is in Charter. Right to life of ‘non-persons’, no.
A constitutional abortion law can NOT be written.
Or it would have been, doncha think? After twenty-some years of caterwauling by anti-choicers. ”
Yes, it can be written. Justice Bertha Wilson wrote in the Morgthaler decision, that the state had a “perfectly valid legislative objective” in seeking to protect the fetus, particularly in later stages of pregnancy.
“The situation respecting a woman’s right to control her own person becomes more complex when she becomes pregnant, and some statutory control may be appropriate.”
The Mulroney government passed Bill C-43, which the Senate eventually struck down with a tied vote.
A new law has not been enacted and therefore hasn’t been tested in court. That doesn’t mean one could not be constitutional.