Annihilating creation.

An acquaintance recently became sharply annoyed during discussion of the controversy over so-called genetic terminations at Calgary hospitals. The fellow had suggested people were deeply disturbed by the recent revelations because they compound the sense of crisis within the health care system.

The euphemistic "genetic terminations" are late-term abortions of babies with physical handicaps so severe they would not survive more than 30 days outside their mothers' wombs.

Fine journalism by Alberta Report magazine has exposed the reality that a number of the babies so "terminated" have lived for hours, and simply been allowed to die by hospital staff. In some cases, mothers have held the still living little ones.

My acquaintance blamed the local reverberations of this story on years of budget cuts to Alberta's hospitals.

"People have lost faith in the system because of the cuts. This seems like another example of it not being able to do the things it is supposed to because of the financial pressures," he said.

I pointed out that the system had, in fact, achieved exactly what it set out to do, albeit in an even more prolonged and revolting manner than planned. Having failed to immediately kill unborn children through abortion, it had let them die through neglect. The means varied. The end was the same.

"I think this story affects people," I said, "because it brings them face to face with what abortion is. There's no chance for denial. The abortion itself produces not a 'dead lump of cells' but a living child."

The other man tensed, and a testy edge came into his voice.

"Don't start your pro-life lectures," he snapped. "I'm not getting into that."

We were in a social setting. I let the topic slide. We switched to sports scores and other daily news trivia. Yet the sudden, barely controlled, nature of his indignation stuck with me.

Angered by the truth

All who profess pro-life views, and particularly those active in pro-life work, are familiar with this kind of instantaneous anger. It is different only in degree from the rabbling fury I wrote about in my last column after witnessing the street demonstrations against Human Life International at its congress last April in Toronto. It is now extremely difficult, if not impossible, to have a civil discussion on the abortion issue without most of our friends on the other side of the question reacting as my acquaintance did.

Part of the cause is the smugness of temporary victory. For the moment, pro-abortion advocates have won the day in terms of public debate. They just want the discussion to go away.

Part of it is denial. When pro-life people won't let the argument go, it is a constant reminder to our friends of what they love to pretend abortion is not: the taking of a human life. This is graphically, inescapably so in cases such as the genetic termination controversy.

There is something much deeper, though. By and large, most of the vehement pro-abortionists I've met or read share this era's hostility not merely to unborn human life, but to the idea of creation itself.

Despite the tidal wave of technological invention that has transformed the world during the past 100 years, this has been a century that hates the very idea of a created order.

In our art, music, literature, and in the two great political schemes produced by the 20th century, the primary impulse has been to break down, tear apart, in short, to create only by annihilating.

It's true we prize "creativity" as an activity. But the result is invariably some form of dissonance; that is, the music of the self. We reject, angrily, any claim that creation comes from outside ourselves.

The abortion mentality is one of the bloodier-minded manifestations of this rejection of creation. When it is confronted with the very created being it seeks to disavow--that is, the God-given form of an unborn child--it reacts in confusion and anger that range from the socially annoyed to the publicly vituperative.

Having taken a century to form, this reaction will certainly not change with the millennium. It will persist just as 19th-century errors lingered into the first quarter of the 20th century. But it will change. There is a Creator who will see to that.

Peter Stockland writes for the Calgary Herald. His column appears here every other issue.