Ugly entanglements (legal aspects of abortion).

Some recent horrific episodes have brought renewed public attention to the legal entanglements caused by allowing abortion. The events:

* Ottawa woman Brenda Drummond allegedly shooting herself in the womb prior to giving birth two days later to a baby boy with a pellet lodged in his brain.

* A Winnipeg woman five months pregnant and addicted to solvents being ordered into custody under the court's parens patriae power (care for those who cannot take care of themselves). The mother, who cannot be named to protect the identity of her children, has three other children, two of whom are handicapped as a result of her solvent abuse.

* The destruction of 3,300 frozen embryos in Britain.

* A British woman aborting one healthy twin because she claimed she couldn't afford them both. (She proved to be affluent but killed her baby anyway.)

* A British woman pregnant with eight babies being warned by her doctor to embark upon a selective killing of most of them.

These situations reveal the bizarre and ludicrous caprices of a law unleashed from the moorings that guarantee its incorruptibility: namely natural law and a recognition of the inalienable right to life of each person from conception to natural death.

Ottawa case

Speculation on the possible outcome of the Drummond case has centred on Section 223 of the Criminal Code. This states that a child in the womb is not a person until he or she has emerged completely from the birth canal. The preborn baby has no legal status in Canada, and therefore, argue some, no one can be convicted of harming it.

But in Section 227, the Code also states that action an unborn child that results in the baby's death (after the child is born alive) is indictable as homicide. So what to do now? Was it an attempted homicide or not? Ironically, the case would have been more clearcut if baby Jonathan Drummond, after being born alive and gaining thereby personhood and protection under Canadian law, had subsequently died as a result of the wound inflicted upon him in utero.

Winnipeg

The case of the Winnipeg mother addicted to solvents, who was first committed to a drug treatment centre by one judge and then ordered released by the Manitoba Appeal Court, has likewise revealed the perversity of Canadian law, not to mention the perversity of the news media. The press lauded Judge Perry Schulman's decision to place her under treatment, but then insisted that the case has no connection to abortion. Its reasoning is that it is all right for a mother to kill her child in the womb, but if she decides not to kill it, she should be restrained from harming it!

Mr. Justice Schulman said as much in his reasons for judgement released August 15. While he did point out the need for legislation to protect the child in the womb, he also carefully conformed to the "right" of a woman to abort. Accordingly, he said, "there is a significant difference between the circumstances in which a woman chooses to abort a fetus and one where the fetus will develop to full term and be born." The parens patriae powers, he said, should be broadened to include defence of the unborn child "provided the court can be satisfied by adequate means that the child will be born." This could be a step forward in the case of assaults on pregnant women, but whether it will or not remains to be seen.

New legislation

Canada's present legal quagmire will soon be enlarged to include legislation governing reproductive and genetic manipulations. Federal Health Minister David Dingwall tabled a bill in June which details and bans thirteen unacceptable practices. So far, so good. But he also intends to license the production of embryos and experimentation on embryos up to fourteen days. This therefore continues to allow the practice which many people say must be halted (see News in Brief, p. 12). The Minister has given the end of September as a deadline for public input.

We are witnessing in these events and in the cases in England, especially the extinction of 3,300 frozen human embryos, that is, of 3,300 human persons, the increasing fury and darkness of the culture of death. Everything is becoming unhinged.

A shaft of light--admittedly feeble--in all this is the subdued consternation in the press over the plight of the child in the womb. The absolute right of a mother to do what she wants with her preborn child has come under unprecedented scrutiny, and in this there is a basis for hope.

Meanwhile Canadians should look upon Prime Minister Jean Chretien's fully conscious refusal to introduce legal protection for the child in the womb as a most serious political matter. It disqualifies him and the party, and those members who support it, as a legitimate choice for political office.

Do we look like fools for saying this? Perhaps. But we prefer to be fools for Christ and the Truth than to be wise according to the world (1 Cor 3:19 ff).