I’m a huge fan of Jackson Doughart. His position on the issue of abortion is well reasoned, and he writes about it with great clarity, civility and genuine intelligence. He also writes as a “non-believer”, that is, he has no religious affiliations and cannot be disregarded as a bible-thumping lunatic, or a “religious fanatic” (refer to my last post).
His National Post article on the New Brunswick situation is just one example of his genius. He exposes the errors of fact made by those who “believe that there are no relevant considerations in the abortion debate beyond the invocations of a woman’s equality and ‘choice’.” In the totally over-blown debate about funding in New Brunswick, he has this to say:
The legal reality, however, could hardly be more favourable to provinces that wish to limit their own culpability for Canada’s mass-abortion culture, which produces over 90,000 terminations of pregnancy annually. The Canada Health Act, which conditions the federal funding of provincial health-care programs upon the performance of medically-necessary procedures, leaves the interpretation of medical necessity to the provinces themselves. So while Ontario and Quebec are free to ascribe necessary status to abortion-on-demand, P.E.I. and New Brunswick are likewise free to place reasonable checks on elective abortions which are, in their view, not medically needed.
And he notes the behaviour of those who advance the cause of unfettered and fully funded abortion with this:
Apart from the profanity of their cause, the one trait that struck me of their movement was its lack of democratic respect. The members of “PRRO” that I dealt with personally in attempting to organize a public debate on the issue—in which they ultimately refused to participate—told me directly that they neither cared nor worried that people like me disagreed genuinely with them. Publicly funded abortion-on-demand, in all places, was their right that no one was going to take away from them, notwithstanding any convincing argument. They were wrong on the facts, then as now, but one worries that this has not deterred them or their many followers from advancing a thoroughly misguided cause.
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Andrea adds: This really bothers me. Always. “They maintain that abortion is a harmless medical procedure, with restrictions being the sole threat to women’s safety, despite the research indicating that induced abortions, and especially multiple induced abortions on a single woman, pose risks to the health of her future children.” He’s right. How this gets passed of as friendly to women does beat me. But I figure we are currently in the stage of the debate where tobacco companies claim that smoking cigarettes has absolutely nothing to do with cancer. How we all snicker at that silliness today…………… you get what I’m saying.
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Dandy article – argument based on fact – novel idea!