Blue Like You

Archive for November 6th, 2007

Excellent essay in today’s National Post by Dr. Margaret Somerville - New Life Matters.

The topic of pregnant women and their unborn babies being murdered is not going to go away. In Canada, however, we only recognize the murder of the mother in a legal sense. Dr. Somerville is challenging this concept along moral and ethical lines.

She cites statistics showing that a majority of Canadians support some kind of legal protection for the unborn:

In short, many Canadians’ moral intuition is that “there ought to be a law” — or laws — protecting fetuses from some harms, although we don’t all agree on what those laws should be, especially in the context of abortion. Presently in Canada, there is no express abortion law.

So given that the majority of Canadians feel that there should be some type of protection, but there is also the fear that abortion ‘rights’ may compromised.

Somerville delineates the ethical dilemma here:

But willful blindness is not an ethical approach to dealing with abortion.

Seeing the fetus as an unborn victim of crime strips away the medical cloak that abortion places on the taking of its life, a cloak that dulls our moral intuition as to what is involved. It causes us to see the fetus as what it is, an early human life. Those who support abortion must be able to square that fact with their belief that abortion is ethical in certain circumstances.

Regarding abortion, she suggests that at the very least we need to ensure that women who choose to have an abortion do so with eyes wide open as to the pain that could be inflicted upon the unborn:

A “Fetal Pain Awareness Act,” similar to those some American states have enacted, could require a physician to inform the woman, before performing an abortion, that scientific evidence suggests that after 20 weeks gestation the fetus can feel pain. Furthermore, she would have to be offered anaesthesia for the fetus, which it would be her choice to take or decline. This type of law would not prohibit abortion; rather, its goal is to try to prevent the fetus from dying in excruciating pain. After all, even jurisdictions that allow capital punishment prohibit certain forms of it on the grounds that they are cruel. Likewise, we have criminal laws that protect animals from brutal treatment.

Does this seem reasonable? Why wouldn’t we want to offer a woman the opportunity to terminate her child in a somewhat more humane manner?

Oh, I know. If we can’t see it, then it can’t feel pain, right?

I’ll really be interested to see what Ontario Health Minister George Smitherman comes up with to counter this problem - Cross border medicine - Christina Blizzard.

…Windsor family physician Dr. Albert Schumacher … worries that Canadians seeking care in the U.S. may be attracted by cut-rate clinics. Schumacher’s been working with DMC to provide quality care at affordable rates for cross-border health care shoppers.

“You have a lot of peripheral and suburban places not affiliated with brand name institutions that are doing a lot of stuff,” he says. Prices for MRIs, colonoscopies etc., at quality institutions in the U.S., are higher than those in Canada. An MRI can cost as much as $1,800. He’s working to get Canadians what he calls the “Montreal price.” If patients in this province are, in effect, bulk buying from DMC, then they get a better price than a one-off patient from, say, the Middle East would…

…He points out that despite the new satellite medical school in Windsor, the 2,400 doctors that will be enrolled starting in 2010 will still only give the country 80% of self-sufficiency for doctors.

“The simple math is for every five of me practising here, Western Europe has six and we are only training four to replace us, so the crisis gets worse on a daily basis,” he says…

But hey, our sacred public health care system is working, right? No two-tier health care for us, boy! That would sure be a slippery slope.

Yeah, George. You sure showed John Tory a thing or two.

Lemmings.

From this morning’s Globe - Harper would back Jack Layton’s bid to have a referendum on the Senate (H/T National Newswatch).

His preference is for reform with elected members:

The idea was broached by NDP Leader Jack Layton on the weekend. Tory Senator Hugh Segal has also put forward the notion of a nationwide plebiscite.

“If it came to the House, it would be hard not to support it,” a source told The Globe.

Sources were quick to add, however, that the Prime Minister’s preferred route is to elect members of the Senate. Mr. Harper has already introduced a series of bills designed to overhaul the Senate.