Pro-lifers are frequently chastized by pro-choicers as being “behind the times.” I’d suggest we are really quite far ahead. In any event, get ready for that closed-issue, divisive abortion debate to be in the public square a whole lot more often. Richard Bastien says in the Ottawa Citizen today that in questioning sex selection abortion, Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal MP for Vancouver South, is challenging our elite political culture (he may not know it, but he is), which says that abortion is private and we can never, ever question it. Except that he is, if only in cases where the baby is a girl.
Canada’s Supreme Court has even gone so far as to declare that a baby is entitled to legal protection only once he is completely out of his mother’s birth canal, which means that as long as so much as one of his toes is still linked to his mother, the doctor may, with her consent, chop off the infant’s head with total impunity. This is the Canadian way. What is being questioned, in short, is a basic tenet of our contemporary political culture.
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Tanya corrects Bastien: Well, Section 238 of the CCC prohibits partial birth abortion. So, no, more than the toes need to be inside the mother, or else it is homicide.
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Andrea read the Criminal Code and Section 238 says this:
Every one who causes the death, in the act of birth, of any child that has not become a human being, in such a manner that, if the child were a human being, he would be guilty of murder, is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for life.
“…any child that has not become a human being… if the child were a human being…” Gosh. Must take a high falutin’ law degree or somethin’ to do those mental calisthenics.
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Véronique concurs: Yes, indeed, I pride myself in having reached this higher degree of academic education that allows me to see human beings not yet human beings as if they were human beings. This is why we have entrance selection in law school, 100% end terms and bar exams. It protects the profession from the kind of shallow thinking that would see any child not yet a human being as being human… but smaller.
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Brigitte worries about herself: I somehow managed to get a law degree and I still don’t get what S. 238 means. What kind of bizarre person does that make me?
