The media are bombarding Canadians with the false idea that a new federal law must permit abortions. The government, they say, must comply with the January 28 Supreme Court decision. The solution, they claim, should be some kind of compromise.
People who do not have sound fixed principles, or who believe that tolerance is the only principle, will talk this way. No matter how irrational their solution to a controversy may be, they will declare it to be the “golden middle road” acceptable to all.
Few seem able to withstand media, political and other pressures to isolate the pro-life stand as being too “rigid,” too “inflexible,” even “extremist.” In early June the Anglican, the Lutheran, and the Roman Catholic Bishops of Southern Alberta issued a joint warning about the abortion debate getting too heated. Their rebuke seems to imply that there is something to be said for both sides of this issue.
Again, the editor of a Saskatchewan Catholic monthly, Our Family, June 1988 edition, writes: “the abortion question can become too narrow if it is only concerned with the rights of the unborn.” Here, too, the implication is that there are certain justifying conditions which may overrule the right to life of the unborn.
In Ottawa, some influential Catholic bureaucrats are spreading it about that the February 29 stand taken by Toronto’s Cardinal Carter is much too rigid. This, presumably, is in preparation for letting Catholic MPs off the hook when party pressure demands a vote in favor of some abortion measure or other, even though their confession of faith utterly rejects such a step.
Let us not give in to compromisers. At the moment there is a true pro-life option in Parliament. Senators Stanley Haidasz (Liberal) and John MacDonald (PC) have brought before the Senate Bill S-16 – a piece of legislation that extends to unborn children the same legal protection accorded to all Canadians. Efforts are underway to have a similar bi-partisan bill introduced into the House of Commons. Large numbers of the MPs want a pro-life law, just as large numbers of Canadians want it.
Pro-lifers should support Bill S-16 and its equivalent in the House of Commons. They should not capitulate to those who say that pro-lifers should lay off, or that they should stop bothering MPs, or that they should be “reasonable” and understand that politics is the art of compromise. There is nothing “reasonable” about killing unborn babies, and no compromise is possible with death.
