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Thursday, August 28, 2014

When writers drool

I'm no fan of Stephen Harper. Not since he threw social conservatives over the cliff, down the embankment, and into the river.

And I think that Justin Trudeau will probably be the next prime Minister of Canada. Not because he's got anything to offer as a leader, but for reasons that I or anyone else, can't seem to quite figure out. Never mind that pro-life persons need not apply to be a Liberal candidate in the next election--discrimination by any other name.

But then I read Heather Mallick's gushing compliments about Trudeau. It makes me yearn for a political leader who isn't even on the political scene: anyone else.

Mallick thinks Trudeau is fantastic because he is/has
"intelligent, humane, self-confident, a Québécois, a most marvellous family, a sophisticated career-minded wife, three adorable young children with interesting names, an English degree, a UBC teaching degree, intellect, wit, good looks, warmth, can wear a suit."
Oh. And Mallick also likes that he can dance. All very important qualities for the next leader of Canada. Especially the dancing part. And that English degree and suits. Important stuff for sure. Now I know why I would never vote for Trudeau.

But when Mallick then proceeds to personally attack Stephen Harper, it makes me want to vote for him next time round. I actually feel embarrassed for Mallick.

Does she actually read what she writes? Does she have an editor? Or does she do this all on her own?

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Pro-abortion reasoning isn't logical

Richard Dawkins recent remarks regarding the morality of aborting children with Downs syndrome (he thinks it is immoral not to abort them), laid bare another truism about abortion--when you try and give a reason as to why abortion is okay, it does the exact opposite. You realize that it is not okay.

The other recent controversial reason for abortion that fell flat, was of course, sex selection abortion.

In this article Peter Franklin speculates about what other factors might be a trigger to abort, and ultimately where will it end.
"Before long, we might have the ability to test for all kinds of genetic traits. So, how many congenital disabilities would we put on the kill list – some of them or all of them? And what about other potentially detectable conditions – a predisposition to depression for instance? Mental illness certainly adds to the sum of human suffering, but in relentlessly enforcing a standard of psychological normality what would we be losing? 
And what about other characteristics that can’t be described as medical conditions of any kind, but which might be associated with lower levels of happiness compared to the norm – for instance, membership of a minority defined by, say, ethnicity, sexual orientation, degree of physical attractiveness or IQ level?"

So I am pleased that Dawkins has chosen to put his abortion thoughts to paper or more accurately, the twittersphere. When the pro-abortions do this, it always helps the pro-life position. Because when they have to explain those beliefs instead of getting away with their usual "abortion is a woman's choice", their reasoning ultimately falls apart. When forced to defend their beliefs, people quickly grasp how incongruent they are.

In fact one could say the pro-abortions are helping us. 

Saturday, August 9, 2014

Leaving morals at the door is not possible

Below is a submission one resident of Ontario sent to the College of Physicians and Surgeons regarding CPSO's recent policy review on conscience rights.

Re: Physicians and the Ontario Human Rights Code

Thank you for the opportunity to provide input to your policy review process.
As a resident of Ontario, I urge you to uphold physicians’ freedom to practice medicine in
Ontario according to their deeply held conscientious beliefs. To quote Murphy and Genuis,
willingness to do what one believes to be wrong must never be made a condition for
participation in public life or for membership in professional organizations.”1

If we coerce physicians into violating their consciences, I am concerned about the emotional
harm that could be inflicted on these physicians.

In their paper, Murphy and Genuis discuss how a sense of shame and guilt often haunt people
who have been forced into doing what they believe is wrong. It seems to me that such shame and
guilt could end up having significant detrimental effects on physicians’ health. While we often
hear from opponents of conscience protection that patients have the “rightto various non emergency
medical treatments (e.g. abortion, the birth control pill, etc.), in practice, how severe
and long-lasting is the harm, if any, that is actually done to patients when they are unable to
obtain that treatment immediately from a particular physician? And how does this stack up
against the potential harm to the physician who is forced to consistently violate his/her
conscience? It would seem to me that the supposed harm to these patients is more in the nature of
a possible inconvenience and thus cannot outweigh the potential harm that would be suffered by
the physician whose sense of moral integrity is at stake.

It is worth pointing out that the very Supreme Court Justice who (alone among seven Justices)
found that women have a “right to abortion,” spoke strongly in defence of freedom of
conscience. Madam Justice Bertha Wilson, in her reasons for judgment in the 1988 Morgentaler
decision striking down Canada’s abortion law, believed that it was inappropriate for the state to
take sides in the abortion debate,2 as to do so “is not only to endorse but also to enforce...one
conscientiously-held view at the expense of another. It is to deny freedom of conscience to some,
to treat them as means to an end, to deprive them, as Professor MacCormick puts it, of their
essential humanity.’” 3

1 Sean Murphy and Stephen J. Genuis, “Freedom of Conscience in Health Care: Distinctions and Limits,” Bioethical
Inquiry (2013) 10:347-354.
2 Although it is debatable whether the state could ever be truly neutral on the abortion issue since by definition
abortion involves competing interests (that of the woman’s vs that of the fetus’s), Justice Wilson’s comments at least
would imply that she felt third parties should not be forced to facilitate a woman’s choice to have an abortion.
Because if a third-party is forced against their will to take part in carrying out the woman’s choice, then that
person’s conscientiously-held beliefs are violated.
3 R v Morgentaler [1988] at page 179, http://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/288/index.do

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By extension, then, to force physicians to engage in practices that violate their consciences
would be to enforce one conscientiously-held view at the expense of another. It would be to treat
these physicians as a means to an endand would deprive them of their essential humanity.

Not only is a physician’s “essential humanityat stake when freedom of conscience is denied,
but more broadly so is our democratic political tradition, as Justice Wilson notes:
...an emphasis on individual conscience and individual judgment also lies at the heart ofour democratic political tradition. The ability of each citizen to make free and informeddecisions is the absolute prerequisite for the legitimacy, acceptability, and efficacy of oursystem of self-government. It is because of the centrality of the rights associated withfreedom of individual conscience both to basic beliefs about human worth and dignityand to a free and democratic political system that American jurisprudence hasemphasized the primacy or "firstness" of the First Amendment. It is this same centralitythat in my view underlies their designation in the Canadian Charter of Rights andFreedoms as "fundamental". They are the sine qua non of the political traditionunderlying the Charter . (underlining in original)4

Not only is there potential for great harm to come to physicians, but I believe harm will also
come to patients, should CPSO decide to remove conscience protection. If a physician is
willing” to provide or refer for a treatment that the physician believes is harmful, and if the
physician does this over and over again, the physician’s conscience becomes dulled. What other
treatments in future will physicians be asked to perform or make referrals for? Without a
conscience to guide them, how can physicians ultimately practice good medicine? I for one
would not want to be treated by a doctor who was not guided by their conscience, who simply
provided a treatment in blind obedience to a state-mandated edict to “leave their morals at the
door.” 5 Conscience is a bulwark against oppression by the state.

In fact, “leaving morals at the door” is not actually possible. As Murphy points out, “...every
decision concerning treatment is a moral decision, whether or not the physician specifically
adverts to that fact.6 So the question becomes, since morality will always be a part of the
practice of medicine, whose version of morality will triumph?

Murphy explains that colleagues of the objecting physician may be disturbed by what appears to
them as a moral judgment, but those non-objecting physicians are also making a moral
judgmentthey judge the treatment to be good. This leads Murphy to conclude that “What
unsettles them is really not that the objector has taken a moral position on the issue, but that he
has made an explicit moral judgement that differs from their implicit one.”

4 R v Morgentaler [1988] at page 177. http://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/288/index.do
5 “I think it is outrageous that doctors have the right to deny things like birth control. I believe if they plan on being
in a profession that helps other people, they need to leave their morals at the door.” –Kate Desjardins as quoted by
the Globe & Mail in “Should doctors have the right to refuse to treat a patient,” June 27, 2014,
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/health/do-doctors-have-right-to-refuse-totreat/
article19383553/
6 Sean Murphy, “No more Christian doctors - Part 3: Religious Values,”
http://www.consciencelaws.org/background/procedures/birth002-03.aspx

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I think this is an important insight from Murphy. It can help us to understand not only the
objecting physicians colleagues, but also the strong negative (over?) reaction of a patient who is
denied a treatment she believes she is entitled to, as in the case of Ottawa woman Kate
Desjardins who was outraged for being handed a letter stating that the doctor on duty at a walkin
clinic would not prescribe the birth control pill.7 While Ms. Desjardins may not realize it
herself, it is certainly plausible that her strong negative emotions could stem from a belief that
her own moral judgment was being challenged. Was it disconcerting for her to think that
someone else might have moral concerns about the birth control pill? Was someone making a
moral judgment on her?

Whatever emotions Ms. Desjardins experienced (whether she was consciously aware of their
origins or not), it is clear that the physician who objected to prescribing the pill was not making a
moral judgment on her (or any other potential patient for that matter), but a moral judgment on
himself. He believed, for reasons of medical judgment, professional ethics, and religious belief,
that it would be wrong for him to prescribe the pill. But if Ms. Desjardins interpreted his reaction
as a moral judgment on her, well that is unfortunate, but we can hardly blame the physician for
doing what he believes he needs to do to maintain his own integrity and human dignity.

Some opponents of conscience protection believe that if physicians are not required to perform a
procedure (such as abortion), they should at least be required to refer the patient to another
doctor who will provide the service. But referring a patient for a procedure that the physician
believes would be immoral to perform, is also immoral because it involves complicity in the act.
This notion of complicity is already recognized in our existing laws. Aiding and abetting a
criminal offence is itself a criminal offence, according to section 21 of Canada’s Criminal Code.8
Not to apply the same logic in the case of what one deems to be a moral offence seems logically
inconsistent.

If physicians who object to providing/referring for controversial treatments such as the birth
control pill, abortion, (and euthanasia and assisted suicide if they are legalized) are punished for
doing what they believe is right and good, then physicians who object to providing such
treatments could eventually be weeded out of the profession. That would leave only those
physicians who support such controversial treatments remaining. Is this fair to all those patients
who hold similar values to the objecting physicians? Such patients will then only have access to
physicians who hold fundamentally different beliefs about what is good.

Morality cannot be separated from medicine, or any other discipline, no matter how much some
in our society wish otherwise. Everyone has a belief system that guides their behaviour. A doctor
who believes that abortion is as valid an option to an unplanned pregnancy as giving birth is

7 “Should doctors have the right to refuse to treat a patient,” Kelly Grant, The Globe & Mail, June 27, 2014,
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/health/do-doctors-have-right-to-refuse-totreat/
article19383553/
8 http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/FullText.html
21. (1) Every one is a party to an offence who
(a) actually commits it;
(b) does or omits to do anything for the purpose of aiding any person to commit it; or
(c) abets any person in committing it.

Page 4
simply not going to be able to relate in the same way to a pregnant woman who believes with all
her heart and soul that her baby is a human being, as would a physician who believes that child is
a human being and worthy of the same respect as a born human being. Or if the birth control pill
is not an option for a woman because of her religious beliefs, will she be able to access Natural
Family Planning as readily as Ms. Desjardins feels she is entitled to access the birth control pill?

If conscientious physicians, like the three in Ottawa who have been castigated because of their
refusal to provide some reproductive health services, are driven from the profession, then it
seems to me that such physicians would not be the only victims of discrimination – so would
countless patients in Ontario who would no longer have the opportunity to access physicians who
hold an ethical worldview similar to their own and thus to medical treatment informed and
guided by such ethical beliefs. Maybe that is the intention of Ms. Desjardins and some abortion
activists,9 but I do not believe it is the intention of CPSO. I would hope that the College would
respect the diversity of conscientiously held views amongst the people of Ontario and not enact
any policy that would effectively discriminate against an entire class of citizens.

For all of these reasons, I respectfully urge the College to uphold and protect physicians’
freedom of conscience.

Thank you once again for the opportunity to provide these comments.

9 “Doctors do not have the right to discriminate and deny basic health care,” Joyce Arthur, August 1, 2014;
http://rabble.ca/columnists/2014/08/doctors-do-not-have-right-to-discriminate-and-deny-basic-health-care

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

What if a human fetus developed outside instead of inside?

David Attenborough shows this remarkable film about the birth of a kangaroo.



It's a stunning analogy for the beginning of a human being. The only difference is that the kangaroo's gestation period is about 31-36 days when it is born. At which time it is about the size of a 7 week old human embryo. It then spends nine months in its mother's pouch.

Human embryo

Imagine for a minute, that a human embryo is born at the same time a kangaroo is born. And imagine that, it is then nurtured for the remainder of its gestational period on the outside of the mother, where you could actually see it growing, instead of on the inside where you can't see it?

David Attenborough says:
"The Kangaroo produces young without a protective shell. What comes out is a tiny undeveloped little worm. The fetus is expelled from the mother and weighs less that a lump of sugar (has no back legs, but it only fore legs). Just enough to pull it through its mothers fur. It's started on an extraordinary journey. To survive it must get to a pouch higher up on its mother's belly. Instinctively this tiny living particle climbs upwards against the pull of gravity and towards the smell of the pouch. After about three minutes it reaches the lip of the pouch, and clambers down safely inside. There it clamps its tiny mouth on its mother's nipple and takes its first meal of milk. As it grows, the ingredients of the milk changes, to make sure that it gets exactly what the infant needs for each stage of its development. By the time its nine months old, its getting a bit cramped. It's time to enter the outside world. It's almost like a second birth." 
It will be another year before it is fully independent."
What would it be like if we could actually see the baby as it developed, instead of not seeing it? Would it make a difference? Would pro-choice people still be okay with abortion?

Monday, August 4, 2014

Ireland cherishes life



Pope's Message to People of Ireland - Cherish Life

Posted on 31/07/2014 to 
Irish News - Catholic Church | Pro-Life |
In a special message to Catholics in Ireland and Britain for the annual 'Day for Life', Pope Francis has called on young Catholics in particular to work “to ensure adequate legal protection for the fundamental human right to life”.
 
The theme of this year’s Day for Life, which will be celebrated in Ireland on Sunday October 5, is #livelife Protect and Cherish Life from its beginning to its natural end. Pope Francis expressed his confidence "that this annual witness to the sanctity of God’s gift of life will inspire the faithful, and young Catholics in particular, to combat the culture of death, not only by working to ensure adequate legal protection for the fundamental human right to life, but also by seeking to bring the merciful love of Christ as a life-giving balm to those troubling ‘new forms of poverty and vulnerability’ (cfEvangelii Gaudium 210) which are increasingly evident in contemporary society.”

Sunday, August 3, 2014

Paying for abortions - why?

Why must Ontarians pay for their own eye exam, when all of us have to pay for someone else's abortion? Can someone please explain this to me?


Abortion counseling lacking for older women


And we don't know why. Because of course, abortion data collection in this country is woefully inadequate as I've written time and time again. And the reasons for abortions are unknown as well, because we don't track reasons either.

But here's something else that's interesting. You know how abortion clinics love to tell us they counsel women who are having abortions? Well it seems that with these older women, they may not be getting the counseling they need:
"That’s led to what some see as significant gaps in support services for older women who are dealing with unplanned pregnancies. For Carrie, the fact that she already knew the joys of motherhood made the decision to have an abortion particularly difficult. “I knew exactly what I was giving up,” she says. “I knew I was never going to get another chance.” 
She also felt the staff at the abortion clinic assumed that because she was in her 30s and already had three children, she didn’t require counselling to help make the decision to end her pregnancy. Clinic staff told her abortion was likely her best option because of the complications with her past pregnancies. 
Four years later, now 37, she’s still struggling with the emotional fallout. “[They] assumed I was old enough, mature enough to deal with it,” she says. “They were wrong. I very much needed help and was not given it. I think they focus on young girls and making sure they are okay with their decision. No one is doing the same for older women.”

It's too bad this poor woman hadn't gone to a crisis pregnancy centre instead of an abortion clinic.

Friday, August 1, 2014

Medical abortions done in Ottawa

I've done some further digging into the three Ottawa clinics that will do medical abortions.

All I've been able to come up with is the Shirely E Greenberg Women's Health Centre at the Riverside Hospital, the Morgentaler clinic on Bank St. and The Ottawa General hospital Civic campus.

No surprises there.

I have a feeling there are more clinics (as opposed to hospital settings) that do medical abortions in Ottawa. I'll keep looking.

Freedom of conscience is for everyone including doctors

I'm always dumbfounded by the inane and gloriously off-the-wall-and-off-topic-comments I often read on articles posted online on anything that could be even remotely associated with pro-life viewpoints.

To see what I mean check out Andrea Mrozek's thoughtful and coherant article posted on Huffington Post about doctor's freedom of conscience rights.

I think some of these commentors might want to stop talking about their disdain at doctors practicing freedom of conscience rights--which I might add are actual rights and not make-believe rights like "abortion rights"--and instead educate themselves on the subject.

But no. They'd prefer to hear themselves blather on instead. I think they just like to see their name in print. I guess it makes them feel important.

So here's the thing. Freedom of conscience is a right guaranteed under our Canadian Charter. That means everyone, including doctors have this right. It's not a right for the few, it is a right for all.

If you don't like the fact that a doctor won't provide you with your contraception, then you are free to go elsewhere for it. Nobody's forcing you to go to that doctor. The choice crowd is in love with the word "choice". So use it. Because I'd prefer to know my doctor bases his medical expertise in concert with his conscience, and doesn't ignore it. I imagine there were doctors who went against their conscience in the concentration camps in Auschwitz. Not something (I hope) we would ever want from our own doctors.

Here's something else to ponder for those who who like to hear themselves talk and say nothing. Joyce Arthur also thinks conscientious objection for doctors shouldn't be allowed. But surprisingly, not all of her compatriots agree with her: Global Doctors for Choice, bpas (The British pregnancy Advisory Service), and the International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics (IJGO), all believe that conscientious objection should be allowed.