Chilean man wakes at his wake
It's a Miracle!
Posted by Dianne at 2:50 PM 0 comments
The abortion debate has new life
Last week I had a letter to the editor published in the Hamilton
Spectator. Yes, that is really me. I wrote it in response to The City
of Hamilton, pulling LifeCanada's ad campaign - Abortion: Have We Gone
Too Far?
Below is Margaret Somerville's article from yesterdays Globe and Mail,
mentioning the City of Hamilton too. She makes some very good points.
Margaret Somerville is founding director of the Centre for Medicine,
Ethics and Law at McGill University
The debate has new life
Twenty years after R. v Morgentaler, there's lots to talk about
MARGARET SOMERVILLE
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
January 24, 2008 at 7:55 AM EST
A recent spate of articles in this and other papers argued that
society
should be more open in talking about abortion, not be embarrassed by
it,
including talking about having had an abortion. Author Judith Timson
wrote
that, in practice, abortion is "still kept very quiet."
I agree. Let's bring the talk out in the open.
In fact, the pro-life community also is wondering: What should be done
about
abortion becoming a prohibited topic of discussion and debate?
Just last week, the city of Hamilton, pulled LifeCanada's ad campaign
-
Abortion: Have We Gone Too Far? - from its bus shelters after a
handful of
complaints. The ad showed a pregnant woman with the statement: "Nine
months:
The length of time abortion is allowed in Canada. No medical reason
needed?"
and a tag line: "Abortion: Have we gone too far?"
The city councillor who asked that the ads be pulled said, "For me,
personally, it definitely was offensive."
In the past few months, there have been hostile encounters between
pro-choice student unions and pro-life student groups on several
Canadian
campuses. Pro-choice students want to restrict what pro-life students
may
say, want to ban the posting of anti-abortion materials, and want to
refuse
funding to pro-life clubs. Doug Diaczuk, a Lakehead University
student,
justifies this in the student newspaper on the grounds that "many
students
were upset by the [pro-life] poster campaign."
But what about respect for freedom of speech, especially in relation
to law
and public policy, and for freedom of religion and conscience?
A strategy for silencing pro-life supporters is to label them as
religious
and as proselytizing. It's unfortunate abortion can dismissed as a
religious
issue, because then we fail to identify the full range of reasons why
it's
still a source of such major conflict.
Here are some of the reasons.
Moral intuition
Harvard psychologist, Steven Pinker, reports how recent
neuropsychology
research is confirming that humans have an inbuilt "moral instinct"
that
seems to have some universal content. In ethics, we speak of an
ethical
"yuck factor." When we face the facts about abortion honestly, no
matter
what our views, most of us have such a reaction. Our moral intuition
tells
us that abortion is never a "nothing event." Some people deal with
their
disquiet by suppressing their moral intuitions. Seeing or hearing
about what
abortion entails makes that much harder to do.
Our choice of language also affects how we see the ethics of abortion.
As
Judith Timson noted, in the movie Knocked Up ("a ribald comedy," about
a
young career woman who gets pregnant after a one-night stand) abortion
is
"coyly referred to [only] as 'shmashmortion.' " The sound of this word
could
make us more aware, both factually and ethically, of what abortion
involves.
Or it could be a euphemism, which usually dulls ethical sensitivity.
Many use the term "therapeutic abortion" in explaining that, in
Canada, 58
per cent of teen pregnancies end in abortion. "Therapeutic" puts a
medical
cloak on abortion, which reassures our moral intuitions and provides a
possible justification for an act we might otherwise see as wrong.
Normalization
In finding abortion to be a Hollywood "taboo," Ms. Timson cites an
academic
who says that Knocked Up "side-stepped the abortion option ... which
seemed
out of touch with the modern hip audience that the movie was otherwise
directed toward."
This statement confirms an important insight of Rowan Williams,
Archbishop
of Canterbury: We have lost our sense that abortion involves "a major
moral
choice - it's been normalized," he said. "Something has happened to
our
assumptions about the life of the unborn child ... when one third of
pregnancies in Europe end in abortion."
The basic presumption that a pregnancy would result in the birth of a
baby,
unless, in rare cases, there was clear justification for preventing
that,
has changed to a presumption that there is a range of acceptable
options in
relation to pregnancy of which abortion is one.
Denial
Abortion advocates vehemently oppose any legal recognition that a
fetus even
exists. They want public square silence, legal silence and political
silence
in relation to fetuses, in order to maintain silence on abortion.
They are correct that shining a light on fetuses, rather than just on
pregnant women who want an abortion, makes many people very morally
uneasy
about abortion. That's what happened when the young pro-life advocate
in the
movie Juno called out to her schoolmate who was about to enter an
abortion
clinic: "It's got fingernails." That also personalizes the fetus. The
pregnant teenager changed her mind, deciding against abortion. Surely
- and
certainly ethically - we should deal with abortion by recognizing what
it
involves and then justifying whatever position we take.
The use of law
A recent Environics poll showed 62 per cent of Canadians (and
two-thirds of
Canadian women) think there should be some law governing abortion, at
least
at the point of fetal viability - that is, they disagree with the
current
situation in which abortion is never a legal issue. But a strong
majority
also believes abortion should not always be a legal issue. So, while
all
abortions raise ethical issues that must be addressed, when and how we
should use the law to govern it is a separate question.
Authentic choice
An authentic pro-choice stance requires all options to be on the
table, not
just that of abortion. It also requires that a woman give her informed
consent to the option she chooses. Informed consent means having all
the
information that would be material to a reasonable person in the same
circumstances in making her decision. Those circumstances include
facts
about the fetus and what an abortion involves, including its harms and
risks. These are routinely played down and research demonstrating them
derided by pro-choice advocates.
A woman's right to choose an abortion is often presented as a dignity
argument. Some scholars have defined two concepts of dignity:
dignity-as-liberty, which favours individuals' autonomy and
self-determination, and dignity-as-constraint, which preserves human
dignity, in general (the prohibition of sex-selection abortion is a
good
example). Abortion requires us to balance these two kinds of dignity,
No comments:
Post a Comment