“Freedom of conscience can be adequately accommodated in a society characterized by a plurality of moral and political viewpoints if appropriate distinctions are made. The first of these is the distinction between the exercise of perfective freedom of conscience: pursuing an apparent good - and preservative freedom of conscience: refusing to participate in wrongdoing. The state can sometimes legitimately limit perfective freedom [...]
Some Canadian physicians are anxious that regulatory changes will pressure doctors to prescribe marijuana. Dr. William Pope, the registrar of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba, told the Winnipeg Free Press in January that the college is worried that federal reforms will lead more patients to ask doctors for marijuana. “As far as most of us are concerned, there is [...]
Sara Omaiche Editor’s Note: Essay contest administrator Dan DiRocco provided translation from French to English for this essay. Sara Omaiche is from Windsor and was third in the Fr. Ted Colleton Scholarship contest. A society that strives for utopia, should it not promote life over death? It took several centuries of heated debate to establish a movement uniting people and [...]
Three family doctors at an Ottawa health clinic are being criticized for refusing to prescribe birth control to their patients. The controversy started when Kate D. went to CareMedics Elmvale Acres walk-in clinic to get a prescription. She was surprised when the receptionist handed her a letter by the attending physician, Dr. Edmond Kyrillos, stating that he only provides Natural Family Planning [...]
Bishop Pearce Lacey The Most Reverend Pearse Lacey, auxiliary bishop emeritus of Toronto, died on April 2 at the age of 97. Campaign Life Coalition national president Jim Hughes remembered Lacey as a late-comer to leadership in the pro-life movement, but said once he came on board he was a staunch friend to the cause. Born in Toronto on November [...]
The British Columbia Teachers’ Federation provides a variety of resources undermining traditional pro-life and pro-family values. The BCTF authored a Reproductive Rights Lesson Plan, which includes a timeline with historical information about birth control and abortion. The lesson plan incorrectly attributes adolescent “reproductive rights” such as access to contraceptives and abortion to Article 24 of the UN Convention on the Rights of [...]
Sex and pro-gay education is finding its way to British Columbia students through the B.C. Ministry of Education, beginning in kindergarten. Its 2006 Health and Career Education curriculum dictates that kindergartners “use appropriate terminology to identify female and male private body parts” for “safety and injury prevention.” Students use diagrams and models to name the “nipples/breasts,” “vulva/vagina,” “penis,” “testicles,” and “buttocks (bottom, [...]
The Love Market: What You Need To Know About How We Date, Mate and Marry by Marina Adshade (Harper Collins, $18.99, 272 pages) The paperback edition of Dollars and Sex: How Economics Influences Sex and Love by Marina Adshade, a UBC economics professor, comes with a new title but it’s still the same book providing the same insights and the same shortcomings. [...]
At a conference in February, geneticist Dean Hamer presented new findings about a region of the X chromosome that he’d claimed in 1993 was associated with male homosexuality. The concept of the “gay gene” continues to be bandied about in popular discussion as if it were an established fact. Other scientists have been unable to replicate Hamer’s original findings, and his new [...]
Canada On April 1, NDP MP Charlie Angus’ motion M-456, seconded by Conservative pro-life MP Maurice Vellacott and seven other MPs, to create a national palliative care strategy had its first hour of debate in Parliament. “Support for human dignity and quality of life, with investments in pain management and other palliative tools, is where the Canadian conversation should go,” Vellacott told [...]
Arguments have begun in what, for faithful Christians, is one of the most important cases ever to come before the Supreme Court of Canada: at issue, is the fundamental right of Canadians to have their children educated in accordance with the basic principles of Christian faith and morality. This matter has been brought before the Court by the relentlessly secular government of [...]
Joseph Cassar On April 19, Joseph Cassar passed from this earthly life, succumbing to heart disease. His inscrutable but faithful approach to promoting the pro-life cause will be sadly missed by his friends at Campaign Life Coalition in Toronto. Cassar, born in Malta in 1919, arrived in Canada in the early 1950s. He had served in the British merchant marines, [...]
Dr. William Pope of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Manitoba recently expressed concern that new federal medical marijuana rules would lead to patients requesting from doctors prescriptions for pot. Dr. Pope’s comments came at the same time that the Ottawa Citizen reported that three Ottawa physicians were being publicly chastised for refusing to prescribe artificial birth control. These stories vividly [...]
On March 27 MP Steven Fletcher (CPC, Charleswood–St. James–Assiniboia), who is a quadriplegic, tabled a pair of private members bills, C-581 and C-582, that would allow euthanasia and assisted-suicide in Canada. Considering that Fletcher is far down the order of precedence, at #240, it is unlikely his bill will be considered in the House of Commons before the October 2015 federal election, [...]
Two members of the Campaign Life Coalition delegation at the Cairo +20 commission at the United Nations, Matt Wojciechowski (centre) and Tanya Allen (right), talk to delegates from two Latin American countries during the proceedings. The 47th Commission on Population and Development (CPD) at the United Nations concluded in the early morning hours of April 12 following a week of [...]