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Watch your language

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Headline: “Girl Once Comatose and Scheduled for Euthanasia Will Testify against Attacker”

“Scheduled for euthanasia?” In Massachusetts, USA?  (Did I miss a news item on the legalization of euthanasia in Massachusetts?)

The story explains. Ventilator-dependant Haleigh Poutre was not “scheduled for euthanasia,” however, they were going to remove her from life support.

Haleigh was in fact scheduled to be left to die of her injuries by the child protection services who had authority over her medical care. In short, there is a lot to condemn in that decision without labeling it euthanasia.

LifeSiteNews reporter Thaddeus M. Baklinski’s use of the word “euthanasia” is wrong. To win the euthanasia debate we use terms correctly. If pro-life advocates call every questionable death “euthanasia” we will not meaningfully engage proponents of euthanasia.

We can debate whether Haleigh’s planned withdrawal of life support was premature, unjustified or motivated by administrative rather than medical imperatives. But it was not “the intentional killing of a person by another for compassionate motives,” which is the definition of euthanasia.

Calling removal of life-support “euthanasia” is a concern for critically ill patients and their families. In Canada for instance, euthanasia is not legally different from murder. Where life-support is often needed to help a patient survive a critical event, it was never meant to maintain life at all cost. Equating withdrawal of life-support – however unjustified it was in Haleigh’s case – with euthanasia may cause families to refuse life-support for their loved ones because of fears over over-treatment. On the flip side, families may request over-treatment for fear of “euthanizing/murdering” their loved ones.

The indiscriminate use of controversial words like euthanasia causes suffering. (See “Thad’s” comment on systemic concerns about addiction to pain killers in dying cancer patients.) Let’s be aware of it.

Celebrating the tube

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Most debates on futility considerations revolve around mechanical feeding and ventilation. If I had a dime for every time I heard “feeding tube” and “futility” in the same sentence, I would be laughing at my student loan by now. This is why I was compelled to share this little nugget of everyday life with you.

One of my friends suffers from a degenerative disease that attacks her muscle tissues. She has difficulty feeding herself since her caloric intake is entirely consumed by her degenerating muscle mass. I recently asked her husband how she is doing this winter (the cold season is never a happy time for people who have a hard time breathing) and he got really excited telling me about her new feeding tube. She gets all these extra calories with the push of a syringe; she’s getting better colour and putting on weight. She hasn’t been that sick at all this winter.

Quality of life improved by feeding assistance… Think about it, it happens.

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.

Poll results worth repeating

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More women than men are pro-life. 34 per cent of Canadian women believe a baby should be protected from conception, as compared with 26 per cent of men. Read it here.

Now why bring out this news from October? Because information and good, old-fashioned logic are the main defence against those in favour of extreme choices, like abortion. And they’ll be out, guns a blazin’, to celebrate Morgentaler this month. [Editor’s note: “Guns a blazin'” is an idiom. No human rights tribunals, please, on how I have hurt some downcast feminist’s feelings over her passionately non-violent stance on everything but abortion. Thank you.]

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Rebecca adds:  

That’s interesting. I wonder what the reason is for the discrepancy. I think one function of readily available abortion, though, has been to weaken the link between sex and reproduction in a way that particularly lessens men’s responsibilities toward an unplanned child.

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