Mulroney and Machiavelli.

Two editorials of the June and July/August 2000 editions of Catholic Insight have drawn attention to the changed situation in Canada's political scene that few readers will be unaware of. On the one hand the Liberal party has reiterated--via Prime Minister Jean Chretien's March 17, 2000, declaration--that it continues to champion the idea that every child-bearing mother must be given the opportunity to kill her unborn baby if she so wishes. Other parties such as the Conservatives, the PQ, and the NDP, also remain committed to this position.

But on the other hand, for the first time in over 40 years, Canadians are confronted by the Canadian Alliance Party, which has declared that it wants to revisit and re-examine several social policies of the previous governments. These policies include capital punishment, which many people, including us at Catholic Insight, do not wish to see reinstituted. But they also include abortion and "gay" equality which we and many Canadians are anxious to see restricted or eliminated.

So far, nothing much has been stated beyond the leader's declaration that he is personally pro-life, and that he first wants to test public opinion through a referendum. The moment is opportune, we believe, for Catholic Insight to call to mind for our readers some of the details of previous legislation and also decisions of the Supreme Court which affect present-day thinking.

Over the next three months Catholic Insight will publish articles which will place the abortion issue in its wider ethical and religious contexts. We begin with Bill C-43 (1990-1991), the last failed attempt to legislate on abortion.

Editor

In Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part I, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, reflects on the many lives standing between him and the crown, and then on the talents he can use to satisfy his ambition to reach the throne in spite of all the obstacles in his way:

Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,

And cry "Content" to that which grieves my heart,

And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,

And frame my face to all occasions.

In fact, he says that he can "set the murderous Machiavel to school."

Machiavelli was not a murderer, but the cynical advice on statecraft which he gave in his book The Prince (1509) struck Shakespeare's contemporaries as so immoral that they used the term "Machiavellian" to denote someone who despised all the laws of God and man. The prince has to combine the cruelty of the lion with the deceit of the fox. The man whom Machiavelli took as his model was Cesare Borgia, who summoned all his enemies to a meeting at Senigallia and then had them all strangled. This was not wanton cruelty but cruelty with a purpose: he was ruthlessly following a plan which might bring unity and peace to central Italy. In Machiavelli's mind, the end justified the means.

Bill C-43

In 1990, the Conservative Government of Brian Mulroney (1985-1993) introduced Bill C-43 into the House of Commons. For two years, since the Supreme Court struck down the existing legislation in January 1988, Canada had been without an abortion law; and Mulroney prided himself on this new bill, which he called a typical Canadian com promise, a tribute to moderation and good sense. It declared abortion a criminal offence in principle but legal in practice when a doctor certified that it was necessary to protect the life or health of the mother.

Pro-abortionists disliked the bill because it made abortion a criminal offence; pro-life supporters regarded it as cynical, in fact hypocritical, in fact Machiavellian, because it pretended to make abortion illegal but ensured open access to it. The vote on it in the House of Commons, which was enforced by party discipline, was very close: 140-131. When it went on to the Senate in January 1991, there was a tie vote (43-43) and consequently the motion was defeated. The Prime Minister decided to leave it at that and not pursue the matter any further.

Criticisms

So Canada was left without an abortion law. A large majority of those actively involved in the pro-life struggle approved of the pro-life stand. A few did not, including some staff members and bishops at the Conference of Canadian Bishops in Ottawa. These, amazingly enough, even supported the Mulroney Bill after the Prime Minister flatly rejected their request for amendments, which, the Conference had said earlier, were essential in order to make the Bill acceptable. After everything was over, these same people then argued that the legislation should have been supported because it might have reduced the number of abortions instead of leaving the country with abortion on demand and no restrictions whatsoever. They didn't explain how this would have occurred.

This criticism lives on. During a panel discussion at a University Faculty for Life conference in Toronto in the spring of 1998, Suzannne Scorsone, information officer for the Archdiocese of Toronto, departed from her discussion of the need for laws governing reproductive technology in Canada to launch a blistering attack on the pro-life Catholics who had helped bring about defeat of Bill C-43. Aside from the assertions, no evidence was provided for the charges themselves.

More moderately, F. L. Morton, Professor of Political Science at the University of Calgary, thought that pro-life leaders had been too intransigent, too unwilling to compromise. He wrote in his book Morgentaler v. Borowski:

Bill C-43 was, as the government repeated constantly, a compromis measure. It said abortion was wrong in principle but available in practice. It still treated abortion as a crime but created a broader and more efficient exemption procedure than the old abortion law. As one legal expert put it: "It [was] anti-choice but it [was] not pro-life." It was, in fact, the kind of compromise solution that is found in most Western European nations.

Are Dr. Scorsone and Professor Morton right? It seems to me that they are not. This so-called compromise was not the kind of compromise which Christians could accept. Why not? Because they have never accepted the Machiavellian principle that the end justifies the means.

What principles are involved?

A clear and effective discussion of the principles applying to decisions about abortion can be found in the book No Exception: A Pro-Life Imperative, by Charles Rice, Professor of Law at Notre Dame University. The book is particularly useful because of the authoritative pronouncements it includes, especially statements by various popes, none of whom permits a compromise when it comes to abortion.

A Declaration on Procured Abortion, issued with the approval of Pope Paul VI in 1974, states that

a Christian can never conform to a law which is itself immoral, and such is the case of a law which would admit in principle the liceity of abortion. Nor can a Christian take part in a propaganda campaign in favour of such a law, or vote for it.

Speaking in Washington on October 7, 1979, Pope John Paul II declared,

"If a person's right to life is violated at the moment in which he is first conceived in his mother's womb, an indirect blow is struck also at the whole of the moral order.... When the sacredness of life before birth is attacked, we will stand up and proclaim that no one ever has the authority to destroy unborn life."

In 1987 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued, with papal approval, the authoritative document Donum Dei (Gift from God): an Instruction on Bioethics. It stated:

"The fruit of human generation, from the first moment of its existence, that is to say from the moment the zygote has formed, demands the unconditional respect that is morally due the human being in his bodily a n d spiritual totality. The human being is to be respected and treated as a person from the moment of conception.

Among the fundamental rights which must be recognized and respected by the civil law, the instruction specified first of all "every human being's right to life and physical integrity from the moment of conception until death."

In his encyclical letter on The Splendour of Truth (1993) the Pope repeated the Vatican Council's list of acts which, independently of circumstances, are always wrong, including.

"Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide... "(Lumen Gentium).

He added a quotation from Paul VI's Humanae vitae to the effect that "it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it...."

The Holy Father has also said (in the encyclical The Gospel of Life, 1995, #79), that, where there is a law in place, a Catholic legislator may legitimately support a measure which would not eliminate abortion but mitigate the legislation in support of it. Since there was no legislation in place in Canada when Bill C-43 was under discussion, this provision obviously did not apply. What did apply were all the stern warnings against approving abortion which we have just looked at, such as "When the sacredness of life before birth is attacked, we will stand up and proclaim that no one ever has the authority to destroy unborn life."

The person whom Brian Mulroney had appointed to see Bill C-43 through the House of Commons, Kim Campbell, was a feminist and a strong supporter of abortion. Moreover, the Prime Minister did not contradict her when she declared that the purpose of the bill was to guarantee access to abortion. Nor did he remove her from the Justice portfolio when she sent a long memorandum to physicians to assure them that none of them would ever be prosecuted under this law for performing abortions.

The purpose of Bill C-43 was perfectly clear. It wanted abortions to be legal without any restriction of time, place or person, that is, up to 36 weeks, whether it was done in hospital, clinic, or doctor's office; whether by a medical doctor or any person assigned by the doctor.

So Bill C-43's declared intention to bring abortion back under the Criminal Code was only a subterfuge, mere smoke and mirrors. Since abortion would have been lawful when one physician declared that a woman had the right to terminate her pregnancy, the sacredness of life before birth was certainly being attacked, and any calculations about the number of lives which might have been saved through seemingly making abortion illegal were utterly beside the point. The bill was hostile to life itself in its very heart.

Even if it had produced some good--which is very unlikely--we must remember Paul VI's admonition that it is never lawful to do evil that good may come of it. Machiavelli cannot serve as an ethical guide for Christians.

Dr. David Dooley is professor emeritus of English at St Michael's College, University of Toronto, and associate editor of Catholic Insight.