Legal Fact: Canadian Women Don’t Have a ‘Right’ to Abortion

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Jan 302013
 

Muddying the waters with selective quotes in an attempt to support an untenable position is not conducive to fruitful discourse.

Edmonton, Alberta – January 28, 2013 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of R. v. Morgentaler. While many Canadians grieve the loss of a full quarter of their generation, others are celebrating the day with exuberance, calling all pro-choice Canadians to protect the rights they’ve earned.

“I cannot believe some of the things written and said in the media today. It is a complete misconception that women have a ‘right’ to abortion and it’s certainly not what the Supreme Court said twenty-five years ago,” said WeNeedaLAW.ca campaign director, Mike Schouten.

“While abortion defenders enjoy referencing Justice Bertha Wilson – the first woman appointed to the Canada’s Supreme Court – they all too often choose selective quotes that completely misrepresent what Justice Wilson said,” continued Schouten.

Here follows an excerpt from Justice Wilson’s concurring opinion. It should be noted that Justice Wilson’s opinion was not shared with the other six judges – she wrote alone – and the other judges were all more “conservative” in their three written opinions:

“As Professor Sumner points out, both traditional approaches to abortion, the so-called “liberal” and “conservative” approaches, fail to take account of the essentially developmental nature of the gestation process. A developmental view of the foetus, on the other hand, supports a permissive approach to abortion in the early stages of pregnancy and a restrictive approach in the later stages. In the early stages the woman’s autonomy would be absolute; her decision, reached in consultation with her physician, not to carry the foetus to term would be conclusive. The state would have no business inquiring into her reasons. Her reasons for having an abortion would, however, be the proper subject of inquiry at the later stages of her pregnancy when the state’s compelling interest in the protection of the foetus would justify it in prescribing conditions. The precise point in the development of the foetus at which the state’s interest in its protection becomes “compelling” I leave to the informed judgment of the legislature which is in a position to receive guidance on the subject from all the relevant disciplines. It seems to me, however, that it might fall somewhere in the second trimester. Indeed, according to Professor Sumner (p. 159), a differential abortion policy with a time limit in the second trimester is already in operation in the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, Sweden, the Soviet Union, China, India, Japan and most of the countries of Eastern Europe although the time limits vary in these countries from the beginning to the end of the second trimester (cf. Stephen L. Isaacs, “Reproductive Rights 1983: An International Survey” (1982-83), 14 Columbia Human Rights Law Rev. 311, with respect to France and Italy). -R. v. Morgentaler 1988 (Emphasis added)

“Justice Wilson was abundantly clear – abortion should not be legal throughout all the stages of foetal development, and it is in the hands of the Legislature, not the courts, to decide at which stage it should be restriced,” continued Schouten.

“I think it is great that after twenty-five years we are still having this debate. However, we should be properly informed of the legal facts. Muddying the waters with selective quotes in an attempt to support an untenable position is not conducive to fruitful discourse,” concluded Schouten.

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WeNeedaLAW.ca is a national campaign with a goal to create a groundswell of support for federal abortion legislation.

For interview requests and/or further comment please call Mike Schouten @ 778.321.2457

Contact Information

Jessica, Media Relations

587.777.4654

media.relations@weneedalaw.ca

Not a Natural Situation

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Jul 222011
 

By Terry O’Neill – The Tri-City News

Once upon a time, there was a people — an entire country, moreover — that professed a great love of all things natural. Except, that is, for one of the most important natural processes of all.

The people, let’s call them Canadians, praised the natural beauty of their great land. They looked in awe at the magnificent mechanisms of the natural world around them.

They passed laws against pollution, carbon emissions, and the dumping of toxic wastes in order to protect nature. They preserved great expanses of natural eco-systems.

Why, they even bought natural foods and natural remedies in copious quantities.

But these nature-loving Canadians had a blind spot. While they loved, adored or even worshipped the many natural things around them, they ignored a vital aspect of their own natural beings.

You see, nature has chosen to give we humans an equal number of baby girls and baby boys. It’s only natural, since one woman and one man come together to procreate.

One would think that Canadians, of all people, should recognize this essential, natural balance. Instead, they have willingly allowed a decidedly unnatural process to take place—the gender-based culling of unborn baby girls.

In fact, Canada has no law whatsoever regulating abortion, with the result that gender imbalances are beginning to show up in some communities, according to a 2006 report, “Canada’s Lost Daughters,” by investigative journalist Andrea Mrozek, now with the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada.

The problem is more acute overseas, where hundreds of thousands of female fetuses are aborted every year in countries such as India and China, according to a recent Maclean’s cover story. Nevertheless, Canada has no official foreign policy opposing sex-based abortion.

My colleague on the other side of the page is ready to sacrifice these unwanted baby girls on the altar of feminism and choice, and also professes to see my opposition to the rampant purging of unborn girls as a none-too-subtle pro-life initiative.

I cannot claim to be without convictions in this matter. But I would rather be guilty of defending the natural goodness and intrinsic beauty of newly created human life than be responsible for abetting the destruction of a class of humanity because of prejudice, ignorance or misguided ideology.

VSB’s ‘diversity’ policy lacks understanding of what words mean, exposing the decay of public education

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May 022011
 

The proposed new Vancouver School Board ‘diversity’ policy, recognizes that “race” is an arbitrary social categorization—correctly, for the Human Genome Project has informed us that the physical characteristics which we have customarily called “racial characteristics” comprise only 0.012 per cent of the human genome. There is, in fact, only one “race”: the human race (GASP!: a position consistent with biblical ethics, which proclaims that “God has made all men on one blood.” (Acts 17:26) )

However, the Social Responsibility and Diversity (SR&D) team that drafted the proposed new policy then blithely proceeds to re-introduce “race” as a policy concept, adding “racial and” to the phrase “cultural diversity”. And the Aboriginal Educational Enhancement Agreement, to which the SR&D team says the VSB is committed, of course, defines the target beneficiaries by traditional concepts of “race”, which this paper correctly says are obsolete.

Of course, the distinctions implicit in the Aboriginal Educational Enhancement Agreement can be, and should be, understood to be rooted in culture, not race.

The prohibited grounds of discrimination under the BC Human Rights Code, which provided the basis for this draft, urgently need to be reviewed in light of three decades of study that now reveal that some of the protected categories and practices are in fact harmful to society and to the individuals who engage in them.

Some of the terms used in this report require definition – e.g., “ethnocentrism”. What, exactly does that mean? The roots of the word would seems to mean a focus on ethnicity—but the implication of its use here is that one ethnicity is given preference, and that’s bad. Well, if ethnicity means “race”, we have already demonstrated that such a focus would be wrong; but if it means culture, then the SR&D team has descended into the absurdity (very popular in some circles today) of declaring that “all cultures are equal.”

But clearly, they are not: some cultures embrace cannibalism, female genital mutilation, “honour” killings, child marriage, forced marriage, and slavery. Those cultures are demonstrably inferior to others which have transcended such savagery.

Again, the policy statement that “welcomes diversity” is not clear about what aspects of cultural or behavioural diversity are to be welcomed. Some behaviours are vectors for lethal diseases; others are rich artistic expressions. Some are barbaric; some add welcome dimensions to our own culture. In both parallels, the former should be discouraged, and the latter welcomed.

But the proposed VSB policy does not seem willing to make such distinctions, fearing to appear “Euro-centric”; but there are cultural divides according to which some cultural practices conform to or enhance Canadian society, and others are deleterious or even criminal.

The failure to make such distinctions is the result of a common and widespread misunderstanding of the word “discrimination” – a misunderstanding that is vividly apparent in this proposed policy statement.

Discrimination is, at its heart, the ability to tell good from bad, and better from best. In previous generations, discrimination was regarded as a good characteristic; we spoke of “a discriminating gentleman,” and it was meant in praise. Today both words are considered terms of opprobrium.

Prejudicial “discrimination”, of course, is wrong: to pre-judge without information, and then arbitrarily to classify people as “good” or “bad” is, in fact, the very obverse of true discrimination. True discrimination is beneficial, to both the individual and society. Prejudice, meaning pre-judging, or judging before the facts are known, is wrong; discrimination is good. This policy statement wrongly equates the two words. Such inability to use words correctly is one of the results of the deterioration of public education in recent decades, or a wilful attempt to deceive).

The policy draft falls into a similar trap when it mandates an “inclusive and multi-centric” curriculum.

But a primary goal of education is to transmit the national culture from one generation to the next, thus providing a moral framework from which other cultures can be evaluated when they are encountered later in life.

There’s a classic example in a story from the days of the British Raj in India. The Governor wanted to abolish the custom of suttee, by which, when a man of rank died, his widow was consigned, alive, to the flames of his ghat. When the British Governor sought to outlaw the practice, one of his Indian advisers cautioned him, “This is an established tradition in our culture.”

The British Governor replied, “It is an established tradition in our culture that whoever does such a thing is to be hanged.”

Suttee was eventually stopped.

The British Governor’s moral values were rooted in his culture, and he sought to guide India into governance that conformed to those values. He was also able to appreciate Indian art and cuisine; he was a discriminating gentleman.

Today’s “multi-culti” and post-modernist administrators – and the graduates of curricula such as the VSB is proposing – would not be able, with consistent cultural logic, to say that burning a widow alive was wrong; they would fear being considered “judgemental”. To them, suttee would be defensible because “all cultures are equal.” But they are not.

The SR&D team would probably excoriate the British Governor’s actions as “Euro-centric bias”, and would teach our children that he was wrong. But simple humanity screams that he was right.
This faulty perception of culture extends, in this policy statement, even to staff development: the proposed policy says, “All staff members need the knowledge, skills and attitudes to understand and accommodate diversity and difference.” That is fatuous, errant nonsense.

They need the knowledge, skills and attitudes to enable them to discern between diverse ideas and practices, to select the good and eschew the bad.

If the attitudes proposed in this policy proposal become the template of public education, there will be no people in the future equipped with the necessary discernment between good and bad cultural practices. If the Vancouver School Board wishes to destroy our society and culture, then let them campaign clearly on that theme rather than impose a regulatory agenda by bureaucratic deception.

~ Ron Gray