CKNW Editorial
for January 3, 2001

If it were not a deadly serious business I would have a great belly laugh at the pro-choice people of the world.

Before I go on let me say that I am pro-life but with a difference. I would not make abortions illegal again but would pour substantial resources into preventing unwanted pregnancies. I realize that the real pro-life movement would reject me as one of them and do so on logical grounds. You cannot, they would rightly say, be a little bit pro-life any more that a woman can be a little bit pregnant. My position is based on religious beliefs but tempered with the reality that abortions will always be sought and that it is counter productive in the extreme to drive women back into the hands of illegal abortionists or self immolation.

Why the hee haw about those who approve of abortion and say that the decision is strictly up to the woman? (Oh they add the doctor to the equation but that’s rather like telling a child he can have something from the store if the proprietor consents.) Well, several things have happened, most recently in the Sunday London Times of December 24 last. There we learn that medical miracles are possible if enough embryo "stems" are acquired. These can be obtained either through an artificial insemination of the egg or, more conveniently by far, through a fetus. More conveniently because the ovum fertilization technique is a most unpleasant one, There is no end to the possible medical use of "stem" cells. Scarcely a disease or disorder exists that could be stalled or cured. Even my own diabetes could be cured.

Now comes the great moral debate. It would be wrong says one argument to get the "stem" from an embryo because that would take a life. A test tube fertilization is, however, quite OK. Somehow there is a distinction here between a fertilized egg in a womb and one in a test tube.

Others warn sternly against women donating through an induced miscarriage – that’s an abortion, folks – though they see nothing wrong with abortion on demand. You can have your abortion as you wish but throw all the medical miracles a fetus can create into the rubbish bin.

But there is more silliness to come. Many pro-choicers, including a former candidate for leader of the NDP, and now a Supreme Court Judge, hold that it is wrong to kill a fetus in order to prevent a mother bearing a child with Down’s syndrome or some other serious disability.

Many of the pro-choice persuasion are appalled at the aborting of fetuses on the basis of sex. Some religions favour boy children and women of the faith will predetermine the sex and have the fetus killed if it is female – that, it is said, is playing God and we can’t have any of that, now, can we?.

Now you can see where this has led, logically. Into a cleft stick, so to speak. For if a woman can abort a child just because she wants to, without needing to give anyone any explanation whatever, you can hardly argue that this right is restricted if she actually has a reason.

Or are we now going to require that a woman have a reason and give it. Must she make it clear that she wants the abortion because she is not married? Or already has too many? Or is too young to be a mother? Or too old? To do that would be a denial of all the Pro-Choice movement has stood for.

If you believe, as the Pro Choice movement avers at every available moment, that a woman is in absolute control of her reproductive ability, then how can you do anything to stop her from selling her ova when and where she pleases or having abortions in order to sell "stems" to the medical profession?

If we are in favour of abortions at the whim of the mother we must be in for a penny and in for a pound. You cannot have the process as something beyond society’s reach on the one hand and then controlled by society when it suits.

Given the state of our law and the commitment of most political parties to support a woman’s right to abort her fetus whenever she feels like it, we must surely, then, as a society, accept the reasonable and probable consequences of that policy, namely that women can abort to kill what would otherwise be a challenged child, to select the sex of her baby or to create spare parts for the medical profession.