Dr. Roy stole my thunder this morning when he highlighted Jonathan Kay’s summary of Joseph Ben Ami’s case for coming up with an abortion law or some kind of legal restrictions here in Canada. As anyone who has been following the debate knows, there is no law at all concerning abortion at the present time – nor is there any legal reason not to have one.
Some people make the argument that Canada’s abortion rates are going down, so why bother?
I guess my answer to that would be if crime rates in general are going down, should we therefore remove existing laws? Maybe we don’t need them anymore.
But the item that really caught my attention was #6:
6. Given the manner in which social revolutionaries are changing the face of bioethics, it is only a matter of time before an enterprising lawyer or activist judge is able to get an infanticide suspect off the hook on the grounds that (as described in point #1, above) what he did was little different from late-term abortion, a perfectly legal practice.
In Guelph a precedent-setting case is unfolding, and the judge is clearly perplexed . A woman has been accused of killing her seven-week-old son in Kitchener in 1998 and nine-week-old son in Guelph in 2002:
...Defence counsel Craig Parry is arguing his client is instead guilty of the rare charge of infanticide because her mind was "disturbed" by the effects of childbirth at the time of each killing…
The Crown is pushing for a murder charge, but Justice Cas Herold is unsure and is now wrestling with the "legal definition of infanticide."
Parry is urging a wider interpretation of the law, saying that for example breastfeeding can lead to sleep deprivation and this could alter a woman’s state of mind.
All this makes me wonder what would have happened if the woman had killed someone else in her ‘disturbed’ state, rather than just her infant sons. Should the charge then be lessened too?
Or do infants that have less value than older human beings?
And if we have a sliding scale of human value, then who’s next?
* * * *
More background on the Guelph case – Disturbing letter shown at trial for mom accused of killing sons (Record.)
Luca weighs in here.
And Morton from Liblogs muses on the usefulness of the summary, which causes the fake Cherniak to utter some amusing comments.
New Poll up! – Does Canada need some kind of abortion law?
