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What Bill Clinton thinks about pro-lifers

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Hear Bill Clinton lash out at pro-life students:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XfmJeIJpns] 

The sound is not great. I will spare you the joy of listening to bad audio several times. He says:

I gave you the answer. We disagree with you. You want to criminalize women and their doctors and we disagree. I reduced abortion. Tell the truth, tell the truth, if you were really pro-life, if you were really pro-life, you would want to put every doctor and every mother as an accessory to murder in prison…

Is that a fact?

As a pro-life advocate, I find the issue of criminalization anything but straightforward. On the one hand, I do not share concerns about imposing my morality on others since the purpose of criminal law is to impose a minimal morality on those who might not have it. When we live law-abiding lives and expect others to do the same, we impose our morality on others. When John Robin Sharpe tells us that child porn is a valid form of self-expression, we impose our morality on him by not putting up with it. On the flip side, the Supreme Court of Canada imposed their morality on me in Morgentaler and again in Tremblay v. Daigle.

When people say that they don’t want to impose their morality on others in the context of abortion, what they really mean is that they don’t want to do it in that particular context. This is problematic because it recognizes abortion as a legitimate choice in some cases thereby seriously undermining the pro-life position.

On the other hand, I also find myself at odds with calls for the criminalization of abortion. Not because I think that abortion is a legitimate choice but because I believe that in our present socio-cultural environment, criminalizing abortion would further victimize women. And I am not talking about clothes-hangers. Bear with me:

I believe that criminal law serves its most important purpose as instrument of social ordering not by its coercive force but by the general sense that the limits it imposes on free choice are legitimate and necessary. Unfortunately, abortion has been seen as a necessary and legitimate choice in Canadian society for many years.

As things stand now, abortion is not seen as an anti-social act from which society needs to protect itself. Even worse, right now Canadian society benefits from the (induced) infertility of its women. We all benefit from the strong economy fueled by the presence of women on the labor market. We all benefit by the consumer prices driven down, in part, by not paying the real cost of having mothers in the labor force. And we will not pay the real cost of having women in our labor force as long as our fiscal and social policies cast childrearing as a personal choice that women must assume.

In Canada – indeed, in most Western societies – women who get abortions do not behave in an anti-social manner. I will go even further and say that women who have no children or few children act as our stuff-hungry, profit-making, economically-growing, materialist society expects them to.

Pro-life reader, we have some work ahead of us before abortion could be made illegal. It is simply not enough to say abortion is wrong. Women need to be convinced that it is.

“Did you feel this?”

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A reader directed me to this New York Times article, which sent me on a research frenzy. As a lawyer/ethicist, I am out of my league commenting on the state of fetal neuro-science. But I have some observations.

Given what goes on during an abortion procedure, I am quite desperate to believe the American Medical Association when it tells me that fetuses – pardon my Latin – are unable to process a painful stimulus until the third trimester of pregnancy. I find it difficult to do so because:

The topic of fetal pain has received the same polarizing treatment as all other matters of abortion, meaning that whether or not fetuses feel pain now depends on where you stand on the pro-life to pro-abortion continuum. Which is scientifically and academically troubling since:

Brain structures are not political. Either fetuses feel pain and abortion hurts them or fetuses don’t feel pain and abortion doesn’t hurt them. The question is: does it matter? Is the legitimacy of abortion affected by whether or not fetuses feel it? Is abortion wrong because it hurts or is it wrong because it kills? Would those who don’t object to ending fetal life object to causing fetal pain? I wonder.

Why I killed my first child

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A mother explains why she killed her first child here. She refrains from using the standard euphemisms, referring to her baby as a baby throughout. She then explains some of the results of her abortion: a (temporary) split with her husband, guilt, feelings of inadequacy and relief, a lack of desire for more kids.

But above all, the decision was right for her.

The new frontier of the pro-choice movement is to fully acknowledge the unborn child. But then to add that killing that child is a mother’s right.

Aaaah, progress.

____________________________

Patricia adds: Andrea, that’s a horrifying article. Maybe I’m naive but I can’t believe that stories like that are going to reconcile people to these kinds of “choices”. At least not in the long run.

There are about a dozen glaringly obvious and really disturbing aspects to this story.

For example, on learning that her child has Down Syndrome, there is not even the briefest consideration of any other possible alternative to abortion:

“Going ahead with the pregnancy wasn’t even up for discussion. Neil [the husband, oh, of course, the concerned husband] stayed strong [strong???!!!] and made all the necessary arrangements.

I saw a consultant the following day [the very next day??!! That Neil really stayed strong and wasted no time] and talked through the abortion procedure.”

There was a lot of “choice” going on there.

The description of the abortion procedure is stomach churning. Women should realize by instinct (and I believe that some part of each woman does) that anything that involves something so horrendous and unnatural has got to be contrary to their fundamental dignity.

No surprise then that the procedure leaves her with “guilt, I realise now, [that] I will have for ever. I pass Down’s children on the street and think, ‘I killed mine.’

… There is no escaping the reality of what I did, or the way I mentally rejected my baby. …

Abortion can never be described as an easy option. I still cry as though mine were yesterday.”

Naturally, I find it particularly horrifying that the justification for all of this is the fact that the child who was killed had Down Syndrome. But I would ask any woman if they would like their story to be that of the woman in that awful awful article or, in contrast and not to leave you on a completely depressing note, that of any one of these women.

Madness takes its toll

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[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdu7xoHU9DA]

I know I enjoy a good walk down memory lane so whilst you are enjoying this clip from the 1973 cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show, let me discuss today’s news. Today Judith Timson in The Globe and Mail writes an article called The unthinkable shmashmortion: When did abortion become a dirty word again? It’s another article despairing that Hollywood has not put enough effort into glamorizing “women’s choices” (read abortion) and has made movies like Juno and Knocked Up, showing other options. To quote:

When I was a teenager in the mid-sixties, an unwanted pregnancy was a nightmare. One girl I knew who did not want to tell her parents travelled secretly to a small town to visit a semi-competent abortionist. Another 17-year-old friend had an abortion performed on her family’s kitchen table by two women who injected a saline solution into her as her wealthy mother stood by. She delivered a fetus into the frilly wastebasket in her bedroom.

She also touches on the gritty 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a film about an abortion in communist Romania, which had Timson “protectively pressing my legs together, thinking back to those comparatively benign but still bad old days in Canada.”

Someone send this woman a history book: Comparing communist Romania with Canada in any fashion is hopelessly naive and historically untenable. Did I say “hopelessly naive”? Back to the topic at hand.

Abortion has not become a dirty word “again.” It was always a dirty word. She’s cheering the normalization of death that never happened, the women’s right that never materialized, because whether into a wastebasket or a sterilized hospital dish, women, girls, none of us, are comfortable with delivering our unborn children–dead.

Timson says she feels like she’s living in a time warp. How to put this delicately-that’s because she is. Her own 1970s time warp. Since then, time has shown the supposed liberation of abortion to be nothing more than science fiction–a cast of eccentric characters dancing over graves. The modern and hip know how abysmal the whole affair is.

A revolution in Britain?

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A story in the Daily Telegraph explains how an overwhelming majority of British GPs do not wish to perform abortions.

Family doctors are threatening a revolt against Government plans to allow them to perform abortions in their surgeries, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

Four out of five GPs do not want to carry out terminations even though the idea is being tested in NHS pilot schemes, a survey has revealed.

The findings will throw doubt on Government trials to provide medical abortions – using drugs in the early stage of pregnancy – outside hospitals.

In a survey for The Daily Telegraph that was carried out by Doctors.Net, an online organisation representing GPs in England and Wales, only 14 per cent of the 2,175 GPs who responded were willing to undertake the procedure.

More than three quarters said they were not willing to carry out abortions and 54 per cent of these strongly objected to the idea.

The comments at the bottom of the news story are quite interesting. Most seem strongly against the idea of forcing doctors to abort babies.

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