PUBLICATION:
Calgary Herald
DATE:
2004.09.18
EDITION:
Final
SECTION:
Opinion
PAGE:
A22
COLUMN:
Nigel Hannaford
BYLINE:
Nigel Hannaford
SOURCE:
Calgary Herald
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Where
Morgentaler and I see eye-to-eye
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An
abortion Dr. Henry Morgentaler doesn't approve must be a miserable business
indeed. In his eagerness to ensure women have the right to what he views as a
simple medical procedure, he has built clinics, challenged Canadian law,
browbeaten reluctant provincial health ministries into paying for abortions, and
even spent time in jail. Call him names -- and pro-lifers do -- but he isn't on
the fence.
So,
if he thinks so-called partial-birth abortions are unethical, maybe they are.
Interestingly, Canadian doctors won't touch the procedure. Why then, does the
Quebec provincial government want to offer them?
Cathy
Rouleau, spokesman for Quebec Health Minister Philippe Couillard, told The
Canadian Press: "The right to an abortion is well-recognized in Quebec and
Canada. We have an obligation to get a patient the help that she needs."
Because
Canadian doctors disdain these procedures, Canadian women are sent south. At
least three provinces, B.C., Ontario and Quebec, pay the roughly $5,000 US cost.
(For comparison's sake, in 2000, the Calgary Health Region reported that it had
contracted with a private Calgary abortion provider to perform 1,500 abortions
up to 20 weeks, at a cost of $600,000 -- $400 each.)
So,
what exactly is it that Canadian doctors won't do, some American doctors will,
and Quebec feels it must? The Merriam Webster Medical Dictionary defines
partial-birth abortion thus: "an abortion in the second or third trimester
of pregnancy in which the death of the fetus is induced after it has passed
partway through the birth canal."
As
babies born prematurely during the second trimester have survived -- 23 weeks is
viable -- the dictionary definition means a partial-birth abortion is not just
extracting unwanted fetal tissue, but babies.
Thus,
to speak blandly of "inducing death" veils a harsher reality.
Ontario
Consultants on Religious Tolerance, by the look of their website hardly a front
for blinkered fundamentalists, offers more detail on dilation and extraction,
one procedure regarded as a PBA: "It is usually performed during the fifth
month of gestation or later. The woman's cervix is dilated, and the fetus is
partially removed from the womb, feet first. The surgeon inserts a sharp object
into the back of the fetus' head, removes it, and inserts a vacuum tube through
which the brains are extracted. The head of the fetus contracts at this point
and allows the fetus to be more easily removed from the womb."
Sharp
objects? Brain-sucking? What ghoulishness is this?
Speaking
from his Toronto clinic, Morgentaler told The Canadian Press, "We don't
abort babies, we want to abort fetuses before they become babies. Around 24
weeks, I have ethical problems doing that."
Glad
to hear it, though he sets the bar too high. At 12 weeks, the foetus has arms,
legs, a pumping heart, can suck its thumb -- and has the capacity to feel pain.
Morgentaler says past 24 weeks, his clinics counsel women to continue their
pregnancy and go for adoption. Glad to hear that, too.
Alberta
does not regard partial-birth abortions with the kind of insouciance displayed
by the Quebec spokesman, thank God. (There have been none funded this year. Last
year, there were two, when the life of the mother was endangered and "there
were no other medical options.")
However,
that they might be performed in any part of Canada is a national disgrace. To
me, this looks like a medical procedure the way a robbery performed by a doctor
would be a medical procedure.
Sadly,
since a deadlocked Parliament could not agree on a new law after the Supreme
Court of Canada declared the old abortion law unconstitutional in 1988, nothing
prevents Quebec from pursuing its dreadful intention. Here is no silent scream:
Even pro-choice MPs should be able to visualise a knife in the neck of a baby --
and shudder.
It's
this simple: Regulating late-term abortions should be a centrepiece in Paul
Martin's fall legislative agenda. If Morgentaler thinks they're too much, they
are.
nhannaford@theherald.canwest.com
PROVINCIAL
FUNDING OF PRIVATE ABORTION CLINICS http://www.cssa-cila.org/garryb/publications/PrivateAbortionClinicsFunding-%202004-09-24.doc