Last Tuesday, supporters “celebrated” the 35th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, that opened America to abortion on demand. Tomorrow will be the anniversary of the even more radical decision of Canada’s Supreme Court, on Jan. 28th, 1988, to strike down all the little that remained of our own restrictions on abortion. It went farther than that, for in making the decision in the Crown v. Henry Morgentaler, our Justices went beyond overturning the last vestiges of common law and precedent. They effectively ruled that male human beings had no right to an opinion in the matter, and that radical feminist precepts obviated any previous considerations of justice, right, and decency.
In the reasoning of the late Justice Bertha Wilson, no man could respond to the abortion dilemma, “even imaginatively … because he can relate to it only by objectifying it, thereby eliminating the subjective elements of the female psyche.”
But which women decide? For polls have fairly consistently shown, that women are more troubled by abortion than men; and few women are radical feminists.
The 1988 ruling was the most significant in a string of cases in which the same Puisne Justice and others wrote this principle—that a woman’s subjective judgement may trump objective facts—into the heart of Canadian law. In the Crown v. Ang?lique Lavallee, 1990, she extended this reasoning to hold that a woman who had been abused by a man could be excused for killing him, even if the man was defenceless and she came to the encounter armed. In such a case, the courts could employ the testimony of feminist experts on “battered wife syndrome” to discount witnesses whose view of the facts might be contaminated by “myths” and “stereotypes.”
I hate writing about this topic. I’m sure most of my readers hate reading about it. But abortion is an issue that will not fade, and the price of ignoring it is a moral hardening by which we all die to the truth.
For twenty years, under five prime ministers, Parliament has failed to reinstate any restrictions, with the result that Canada continues to have the world’s most radical abortion regime. The unborn child has, in this country, to this day, no protection in law whatever. This child is ruled a “foetus” who may be disposed of at any point up to and including the moment of live birth—a moment that can be as vague as any that occurs after the precise moment of conception.
Beyond Parliament, no effective challenge has been mounted to the reasoning that was employed to create this horrible reality. Indeed, the late Puisne Justice went to her grave last year with the adulation of Canada’s “liberal” elites, and opposition to abortion has been mounted only by a tiny minority of devoted souls.
“After all, women do not give birth to cats.” That is the irresistible argument against abortion on demand. I once attributed the remark to the late Canadian philosopher, George Grant, who with his wife, Sheila, campaigned selflessly and courageously against this murderous affront to justice and reason. Let me now correct my record, however, by mentioning that Grant was quoting George Jonas, the journalist with perhaps Canada’s finest legal mind.
There has been no end, there will be no end, to the carnage that results when a legal system abandons the principle that all human life is sacred. This principle had traditionally been extended in law, throughout Christendom, to the protection with special enthusiasm of the helpless, from the unborn, to all those enfeebled by mental and physical conditions, illness, and old age. The idea of eugenics is directly opposed to everything formative of Western civilization.
A “brave new world” yawns before us, in which all kinds of eugenic intervention can be justified, now that this “antiquated” principle is removed. We may instinctively recoil from a society that extends the contrary principle from abortion to infanticide and “euthanasia,” to genetic tampering that will systematically elide distinctions between human and animal life. We may recoil from our historical memory of an earlier triumph of eugenics, symbolized today by Adolf Hitler’s ideal of a “master race,” with the power to enslave or slaughter all “lesser” human beings at will.
Yet we no longer have an argument against it, for that argument perished when we legalized abortion. And that argument can only be resuscitated when we find a way to restore, in law and in our hearts, the sanctity of all human life.
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