Someone moaned to me recently about the reversal of Roe v. Wade --- the unjustness of it. Around the same time I heard a radio interview with someone else who lamented that we have so few abortion facilities in Canada, and they told of a guy that drove home in northern Saskatchewan from his remote work site in Alberta to drive his wife to Regina for an abortion. He had to stay awake that whole time, and then he had to drive her home and back to work to start his shift. The interviewee tried to elicit sympathy from the listeners, one of whom was me, except I was thinking “Poor murderers. How sad for them.”
The news from the USA prompted numerous politicians here to assure the sheeple that they will still be able to get an abortion in Canada anytime during the pregnancy. They make the process seem antiseptic --- no thought of scalpels sawing limbs off of babies or of saline solution burning off their skin and eventually killing the child if it’s lucky. They don’t tell us that the central nervous system can be seen to be developing from day 10. I explained my concerns to the person mentioned in the first line above, and added that a country where the population pyramid looks like ours, because the replacement rate is under 1.5 children per female, needs to be encouraging births.
We need to make it easier to want and to raise children. I don’t often praise the Canadian government, but I do appreciate the efforts being made to make child care more available and to make immigration easier than it sometimes has been. We need more of that. We need to help parents. We need to particularly help single parents. Doing so is good for our children and good for the future of our country.
Gordon,
ReplyDeleteI share your aversion to abortion. I too believe that life begins at conception (I think that is consistent with science and Scripture). That is my moral conviction - my conscience on this topic.
Even so, what gives me or you the right to impose our moral convictions/conscience on others? What about the folks who point to the second chapter of Genesis and numerous other passages of Scripture and say that life begins when we take that first breath? Society has reached a consensus about pulling out a gun or a knife and killing someone in cold-blooded fashion, but no such consensus has been reached relative to the termination of a pregnancy.
Unfortunately, most of the folks on our side of this issue choose not to address the fact that there are also other moral issues related to abortion. I was glad to see that you favor helping folks to afford and take care of their offspring - thus ameliorating one of those other moral concerns. There is, however, the issues that arise from rape and incest. How can we force a person to carry a baby to term that was introduced into their body against their will and/or nature? Fortunately, most folks see the life of the mother as a legitimate exception, but what about those who don't?
Bottom line, I would like to see us work to persuade others of the validity of our moral perspective on this issue rather than coercing them to adopt our convictions on it.