Wednesday, May 19, 2004
The Non-Controversy of Life
Listening to the report I found it a very indicative summary of the sort of orthodoxy that has blanketed abortion and prenatal life issues in general. The report compared the costs of the morning after pill and a "regular" abortion, oblivious to the fact that the pill is a form of chemical abortion. Some obligatory remark was made about the fact that Health Canada's plan is "controversial", but made no actual reference to what the controversy actually is.
In fact, I have an objection to the whole idea of calling the morning after pill an "emergency contraceptive"; indeed the pill itself as a "contraceptive" is a misnomer (the morning after is just a massive dose of the usual pill hormones). Although preventing or disrupting ovulation does indeed prevent conception, disrupting the uterine lining to prevent implantation doesn't "contra" the "ception" at all; human life has already been created and it is being flushed out to starve.
As an aside, it's worth noting that the pill used to be heavier on the anti-ovulation hormones, but it was found to create too many uncomfortable side effects for the woman. Hence the targetting of implantation as well.
And the idea that preventing implantation isn't even abortion is a suggestion that implantation is the bare minimum prerequisite for being a "person" is implantation (although pro-aborts would like to push it further away from conception). Which, obviously, makes all those embryos in deep freeze and embryonic stem cell research not a "controversy" at all.
The language of the prenatal life debate has been so twisted around to deny the human reality of who we're dealing with that I must admit to the political impossibility of enacting major legal restrictions on abortion any time soon, and the assault on restrictions on cloning, embryonic stem cell research, etc. will only become fiercer with time. But as Ted Byfield wrote in the Western Standard a few issues ago, it is up to us grassroots groups to continue pushing the debate back in our favour.
