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The doctor’s choice

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“Doctors in every branch of medicine were asked ‘What cigarette do you smoke?” The brand they named was camel!”Sometimes, just sometimes, the average pro-lifer feels like some have elevated “choice” above substance.Let the record stand: This anti-choicer believes everyone, even doctors, ought to be allowed to choose their favourite brand of cigarette. If that’s what they so desire.

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Tanya offers up a bit of trivia fun:  The National Cancer Institute acknowledged a link between tobacco smoking and lung cancer in 1957.  In what year did the first study show such a link?  Answer: 1929.  “Really?  It took almost 30 years for NCI to begin warning the public?”  Yes, really.

I object!

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I received this link from a good friend who is, incidentally, a pro-life physician.

I am always puzzled by statements that uphold freedom of conscience while denying the ability to act upon it. What worries me is not that our freedoms and liberties would be limited, but the absence of discussion as to why this particular freedom (conscience) should be limited and how.

In the case of pro-life physicians, they think that abortion is wrong and this thought is expressed by their refusal to have anything to do with it. This is socially relevant because abortion is legal in Canada and women are free to request one.

Many pro-life physicians don’t only believe that abortion is wrong for them but wrong period. Morally wrong, yes. But also medically wrong and this is where the issue gets really sticky: Physicians are never forced to perform procedures that would go against their patient’s best medical interest. If I suffer from arthritis and want my arm amputated and my physician thinks it can be controlled with acetaminophen, she is under no obligation to cut my arm off. If I want to treat my clinical depression with high doses of morphine, no physician has to give it to me. Yet, amputation and morphine are legal in Canada, and women are free to request them until the burly men in white come to escort them out of the building.

Now, what if a physician thought abortion was not in the best medical interest of a woman? The more I reflect on this question, the more the ACOG’s position starts looking like a pro-life doctor witch hunt. If you oppose abortion on medical grounds and are pro-choice, you are acting within the parameters of ethical medical practice. But if you oppose abortion on medical grounds and are pro-life, we will get your license. Troubling.

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Rebecca adds:

Quite right. Roy Eappen at torydrroy.blogspot.com frequently writes on abortion, freedom of conscience, and doctors and has discussed this in the past.

Look, the whole point of doctors is to evaluate what treatments are medically necessary or appropriate. One reason antibiotics aren’t sold OTC is that most laymen without access to a lab don’t know if they actually need them. If you walk into a doctor’s office with a cold, whether or not you want antibiotics, the doctor shouldn’t give them to you. And if birth control pills, which are ethically and medically much less problematic than abortion, are subject to a doctor’s prescription to ensure that they’re medically appropriate for the woman who wants them, how on earth can abortion not be?

Or, we can dispense with the fiction that abortion on demand has anything to do with medical necessity. Even if terminating a pregnancy had the same moral status as getting breast implants or a nose job, we would have no business forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for it. Since it is on a different moral plane, to all but the most die-hard Pete Singer types, it is increasingly barmy that we ask medical professionals and taxpayers to treat abortion as if it were as neutral and necessary as a tonsilectomy.

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Tanya is reminded: Dr. Chris Kempling has been on this bandwagon for several years. He’s quite adamant that the Canada Health Act is violated when abortion is covered by our tax dollars.

“The Canada Health Act says that to qualify for public funding, a health procedure must

1) be medically necessary,

2) be beneficial,

3) have benefits that outweigh the risks, and

4) be the result of informed consent.

Abortion, as it is currently practiced in Canada, meets none of the four requirements of the Canada Health Act. http://www.chp.ca/forum/Kempling/Abortion.htm

I rather tend to agree.

Physicians and conscientious objections

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According to a recent document published by the U.K.’s General Medical Council, physicians will be required to post any ethical objections they may have toward morally charged medical interventions such as abortion, sex reassignment surgery, artificial procreation and certain cosmetic surgeries.

While I oppose any attempt to obligate physicians to refer for these procedures, I agree that objections should be advertised. It is an essential part of informed choice and a recognition of women’s ability to choose their care providers. A refusal to refer to an abortion provider or to prescribe the birth control pill should never come as a surprise to a patient, particularly if that patient is facing a personal crisis. There are no winners when personal values end up in court and a little choice in one’s caregiver spares imposing an arbitrator’s choice on whose values are more right than other’s.

In cases such as these, it is always helpful to turn the tables around and wonder what would happen if we were denied a medical procedure based on our physician’s religious beliefs (or lack thereof). Say, if my physician was opposed to blood transfusions or organ transplant. Like abortion, these procedures can be inadvisable for a variety of medical reasons. But what if my physician’s only basis for refusal was a religious position I didn’t share? Wouldn’t I want to know? Say, before I was exsanguinating?

Let me be clear. As Andrea wrote so eloquently, I don’t think that opposing abortion is exclusively a religious view. But if a physician is to oppose abortion systematically for religious reasons her patients should be aware of it.

Late term abortion and imagination

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This link will take you to a commentary written by a CBC French service journalist on an investigative report he filed for TV show Enquêtes (French for “investigations”).

I caught the end of this report last week on Radio-Canada. They interviewed a Quebec-based abortion provider on the practice of late term abortions in the province. He told the camera that women needing abortion services (I dislike writing these two words together: I don’t think abortion is doing women any service) after 24 weeks are flown to American clinics all expenses paid by Quebec’s health insurance plan. At some point in the interview, journalist Alain Gravel asked Dr. Guimont about the ethics of ending the life of fetuses who are viable and who basically look like full term babies. The question went a little like this: “But here you have this baby … – catching himself – uh, fetus …” I said “Ah-Ha!” and my husband thought I was watching some kind of game show. The abortion doctor replied: “In Canada, to have a crime of murder, you need a person, a legal subject. The Supreme Court was clear: the fetus is not a person, therefore, there is no murder, no crime.” He added: “The dimension that is missing from your analysis is the dimension of the women. Whether late term abortion is right or wrong is irrelevant: women who want it need it and this is all that should matter. The woman has rights, the fetus doesn’t.” (I am translating quite freely here).

Dr. Guimont intervention made me reflect on imagination in the abortion debate. Dr. Guimont’s imagination forms reality according to its legal definition. His eyes may see a viable, fully-formed, human baby but he has trained his brain to see something else, something disposable, an infringement on women’s rights to life and security. My pro-life eyes see a zygote and imagine a baby. But my zygote will turn into a baby. No amount of magical legal thinking will turn a late-term unborn infant into a legal construct.

Finally!!! (Another view)

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My, oh my… The Ottawa Citizen’s front page about Catholic politicians being refused Communion in light of their public pro-abortion positions. But this is not what I’m shaking my head about. As with many newsworthy Catholic positions, who would you think the paper would ask for commentaries? Not the Catholic men and women who support the Archbishop’s position (there are at least a couple). No, the coordinator of Catholic for Free-Choice Canada and David McGuinty, a pro-choice Catholic (writing these two words together feels very weird in the fingers, not to mention the brain) politician.

In a bid to gain better understanding, I have a few questions for pro-abortion Catholics who might be reading this blog. When Rosemary Ganley writes that Canada is a country “with a Charter of rights that has been interpreted to protect a woman’s right to choose” does she mean that immoral laws should never be challenged? Whether or not you consider abortion immoral is not the point. The point is about the incontestability of law. I’m asking because abortion used to be illegal and abortion laws were successfully challenged by abortion advocates who thought it was immoral to impose one’s pro-life views on women. According to Ganley’s myopic view of law, women shouldn’t be persons and we should be allowed to own black people (oops, my mistake, blacks wouldn’t be people…). Or is there a point in history where law, who has always been malleable, became fixed? Maybe the day it coincided with Ganley’s personal views? Just trying to understand here…

My second question concerns the separation of church and state, on which I am no expert. But, if there is indeed a separation of church and state, wouldn’t that be an argument upholding Archbishop’s Pendergast’s position? There are state positions (abortion is a legitimate personal choice in a free and democratic society) and church positions (life begins at conception and belongs to God). Who gets an abortion is state matter. Communion is a Church matter. I don’t understand why Ganley thinks the State should be allowed to meddle with who is receiving a Catholic Sacrament… not if she wants to declare in the same breath that the Church has no business meddling with who is receiving an abortion.

Finally, my last question maybe should have been the first. Why care so much about the Catholic Church? With the number of Christian churches and denominations that support abortion, contraception, women pastors, divorce and same-sex marriage, why so upset about the Catholic church? I just don’t get it. Don’t you want to be happy when you go to Church? Spirituality through disgruntlement. Never heard of it.

That’s your imagination keeping you up

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When I am not posting on ProWomanProLife, I am doing graduate research into decision-making in neonatal intensive care. Came upon this in an academic article on prenatal decision-making, that is, medical management decisions made when a woman is threatened by premature labor and delivery at the margins of viability (22 to 24 weeks gestation):

In Canada, a foetus is not legally considered to be a person. It is only once born that a neonate becomes a citizen with full rights. Therefore, [parents] are engaged in a decision concerning a person that does not yet legally exist and that cannot be considered a medical patient by neonatologists. The situation is even more so ambiguous when the foetus is not yet a reality for parents who, in anticipating their parenthood, have only imagined their baby.” (From Payot et al., 2007)

If nothing ever highlighted the hypocrisy of a system that delivers and treats infants at the margins of viability on one floor while aborting them on another, this should.

I have yet to meet a family in neonatal intensive care that considers the non-personhood of their baby when making medical management decisions. And what is that bit about the baby being “only imagined”? I’ll bet any pregnant woman who has ever been kept awake at night by a tossing and turning fetus would describe her baby as anything but “imagined”.

Everything’s relative… absolutely!

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The recent posts on the uproar caused by bill C-484 among abortion advocates made me reflect on the philosophical implications of opposing a bill that gives a different legal status to fetuses that are expected than to those that are not. I always thought that the entire edifice of choice arguments rested on moral relativism. In other words, whether something – ending the life of a fetus – is right or wrong depends on what you think it is. There is no absolute yardstick of morality and, consequently, what you see depends on what you choose to see.

So what should be the big deal about a bill that gives a special legal status to fetuses that are expected and wanted? If abortion is relatively moral, supporting an initiative that upholds this relativity should strengthen the choice rhetoric, shouldn’t it? Well apparently no. The “free abortion on demand” slogan cannot withstand any suggestion that the fetus is relevant because doing so would be admitting some abortions as unwarranted or unnecessary. And when the rightness of an action – ending the life of a fetus – won’t withstand the challenge of circumstances, it’s called an “absolute.” We pro-lifers have long argued that some things are absolutely wrong. It is time to start reflecting on the implications of holding abortion as absolutely right.

Perverse, and boasting about it

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I was just reading a two-day old column about Emma Beck by Michelle Malkin. And came across this jaw-dropper:

And who gets premium op-ed space in America’s newspaper of record to talk about abortion? Idiots like University of Iowa adjunct assistant writing professor Brian Goedde, who shared his festive thoughts surrounding the New Year’s Eve before his girlfriend’s abortion in an essay a few months ago in The New York Times. “The abortion is scheduled for two days from now, and we’re holing up,” he reminisced. “We do the dishes brush our teeth, climb into bed and have unprotected sex. ‘I’m not going to get more pregnant,’ Emily says. I’ve never felt pleasure more guiltily.”

So the good thing about an unwanted pregnancy is that it allows a guy to enjoy unprotected sex without consequences while his girlfriend waits for the abortion appointment? Is this what they mean by a woman’s right?

Boy, I’d hate to see a woman’s wrong.

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Rebecca adds: There are so many awful things about the Emma Beck story, but this quote stands out for me: “I should never have had an abortion. I see now I would have been a good mum,” Beck wrote. “I told everyone I didn’t want to do it, even at the hospital. I was frightened, now it is too late.”

In what universe did Beck give informed consent for this abortion? For any other elective surgery, I’d bet the medical staff would ask you to take a day or two to think it over. Do you think if a woman seeking breast implants said, about to go under, “I don’t want to do this,” they’d just proceed against her will, or assume she didn’t really mean it? The doctor who carried out Emma Beck’s abortion shares in the responsibility for her death. I wonder if he’ll get away with it.

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Andrea adds: Emma Beck’s story deserves more play than it got. Apparently we need abortion, because otherwise women would die in back alley abortions. My point all along has been that women are hurt, and yes, they die in “safe and legal” abortions. Providing abortion as a solution is a bit like having firefighters show up with a match…(“Hey- we notice something over here that’s still standing. Light her up!” Solution, indeed.)

Celebrating selective abortions

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Maclean‘s Mitchel Raphael reported on the pro-abortion celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Morgentaler decision back in January:

Bloc MP Nicole Demers found the evening particularly moving. Now a grandmother of two, she had four abortions in the years after giving birth to her second son, who had hemophilia, in order to avoid passing the disease onto other male children. (Females are rarely susceptible to hemophilia.)

Four abortions? Because of hemophilia? Reading pieces like this one always makes me think of the line that keeps being re-drawn. Where does the buck stop? (As in, this life is not worth living, this person is better off dead…) And the line is never drawn by those whose life is, well, on the line. In this case, all those Canadians who have hemophilia.

In 2002 I gave birth to a cleft-affected child some asked if I would have had an abortion had I known about her condition in advance. But how can knowing only one thing, albeit a challenging thing, about a child in utero compare to everything else that makes each life unique? I could have spared my daughter the pain of plastic surgery but I would also have denied her all the joys she gets from being a sister, a bright student, a cherished friend and a gifted gymnast. And I would have denied myself the delight she brings into my life, surgery and all.

This is how selective abortion keeps moving the line: We care not a bit about the million things that make each person unique and worthwhile. Because of one illness, we don’t bother finding out.

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Andrea adds: Such a short report and I see even more problems. First of all, it’s as though the story’s spin is to say an abortion because of hemophilia is AOK. Then there’s that number: Four. Four abortions. That’s a special kind of failure to grasp how birth control works. (Oh wait, she did use birth control, except she calls it abortion.) Finally, though not entirely clear, it appears she took those babies’ lives pre-emptively–as in, they might have hemophilia, if they were boys. Words fail.  

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Rebecca adds: I’ve always wanted to ask people who opt for eugenic abortions: If you found out your baby had hemophilia only after he was born, would you want him dead? What, after all, is the difference, but for a few weeks’ gestation?

The ultimate goal

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Tanya, a contributor to our Comments page wrote in response to my post on criminalization. Her comment:

“Even though the criminalization of abortion is not, for you, an immediate goal, the question begs to be asked; is it not reasonable to have its criminalization as an eventual goal?

Let’s parallel this human rights issue (abortion) with another one from another era, when William Wilburforce first introduced a bill to criminalize the slave trade. He was ridiculed and success seemed far off. He was always up-front with his ultimate goal. Through creative and gradual measures, by more means than simply introducing his annual bill, his goal was eventually realized.

I understand that there is much to accomplish in the mentality and practices of Canadians before a legal ban on abortion would even be beneficial. However, I would hope that every person who speaks out for the right for the unborn would have as an ultimate goal that these tiny humans’ rights be held up as equal to our own.

The point is well taken. Arguing against criminalization from a fetal rights’ perspective offers no wiggle-room and I can be accused of taking the easy way out by avoiding the question altogether. Either the fetus is a human being and deserves the same protection from harm as other human beings, or fetuses are not human and have no claim to a protected right to life and integrity. The third option, well described on our Comments page by Dave, involves getting into philosophical contortions to justify killing some human non-persons in a discourse reminiscent of 19th century slavery rhetoric. Our dismal historic track record in deciding who – or what – is human suggests that we should stop the circus act and recognize that determining humanity based on human-made criteria has embarrassed more than one civilization. Will our treatment of the unborn shame us in a few generations? I have no doubt about it, particularly in light the demographic decline of Western civilizations.

I do think criminalization is the ultimate goal. But I also think that it will happen naturally as mentalities change to recognize the humanity of the fetus. Our role as pro-lifers is not, in my view, to push for criminalization but to change mentalities. If mentalities change, criminalization will naturally follow. The same cannot be said about the reverse.

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