On February 12, 1988, the eve of the eve of St. Valentine, the patron saint of love, Global TV aired what was billed as a “debate” on abortion, reporter Richard Brown acting as M.C.
The pro-life side is easily summarized Rev. Ken Campbell said that compromising one human life was an attack on all human life, and lawyer Angela Costigan said similarly that the mere mention of abortion as a thinkable procedure was an immeasurable affront to all humanity.
Those who favoured prenatal infanticide as an option under certain circumstances were three: Henry Morgentaler, Bernard Dickens, a law professor from the University of Toronto, and Joan Wright, a female counselor from Women’s College Hospital.
Had these three been honest, they would have shown us the charms of what it is they support, namely, the hanging, drawing and quartering of babies in their mother’s womb. But, as usual, they gave that point a pass, and pretended to be concerned about the law, and even morality.
National Film Board
The “debate” began with the showing of the (1985) National Film Board piece on Morgentaler, Democracy on Trial. The M.C, warned that it might well prove infuriating. He was right, not least of all because, as Rev. Campbell pointed out later, it was paid for with tax money.
The Debate
At long last, however, we came to the debate.
Hear this apologia by Henry Morgentaler: “All the effects (of prenatal infanticide) have been beneficial: women do not die; infants are more healthy; infant morality is less.”
“Women do not die.” Sometimes they do die. More often they become sterile. But psychologically and spiritually their state is a mirror image of what happens to their baby physically.
“Infants are more healthy.” If they are, it is no thanks to abortionists, and this is not to mention the unspeakable innuendo that unhealthy children are not fit to live.
“Infant mortality is less!” The poor man obviously lacks all sense of irony. Infant mortality has skyrocketed to 62,000 per year in Canada since 1969, and those are only the official figures. I suppose if you tell yourself often enough that an unborn child is not a child, you may come to believe it.
Global’s offering was supposed to be a “debate.” What did one find? Plants in the audience! Richard Brown bends over a female figure to say, “Now let’s ask a lady who has had an abortion.” How did Richard know that she had had an abortion? And how did he know that she would defend her action? And where did he discover that her unrepentant bitterness is representative of those unhappy women, condemned of their own choice to live their lives through with the nightmare of having hired someone to kill their own child? Richard would have us believe that prenatal infanticide is sad, perhaps, but certainly defensible and even necessary at times. On what basis? On the evidence of some spontaneous testimony? Quite the reverse. On the testimony of a plant in the audience! In court a lawyer is not supposed to lead the witness. What do you call it when the witness is a plant?
Similarly, when Angela Costigan got a chance to speak (three quarters of the way through the programme), and said pointedly and powerfully, “There is one person who has not even been mentioned so far here tonight, and that is the father!”
Richard Brown hurried over to a certain man saying, “We just happen to have a father here! Sir, what do you think?” And the man just happened to hold the view that a wife ought to be able to have her husband’s unborn child killed if she wants to. And the man ended his amazing testimony with these words, “It’s her decision and I gave my wife that choice!”
Contradictions
The spokesman for fatherhood does not even know that he is contradicting himself, that it cannot be her decision if he is giving her that choice.
Nor did the moderator notice the self-contradiction, or, if he did, he ignored it. Perhaps if he had not planted the man in the audience to begin with, he might have had ears to hear what he was saying.
Nor did the feminist pro-abortionists seem to hear. They would have screamed their execrations if he had been speaking on behalf of the life of the baby, say, or of the Church, and had had the effrontery to speak of himself, a man, giving a woman anything, let alone some right to choose!
But the implications of that man’s statement, plant though he was, are immensely more significant than any of the above, for they are a microcosm of the current scene. “It’s her decision, and I gave my wife that choice!” All night long the abortionists had cried, “It’s the woman’s decision!” But that right to choose is given to her from outside. By whom? By Henry Morgentaler and the Supreme Court of Canada. It cannot be her decision if the right to choose is being given to her by somebody else.
Unless that somebody else is God.
Free decision?
Notice the difference between a decision to have somebody else kill your child and something that really is her decision. A woman is free to marry. It is her decision. It is not something given to her by any human agency, not even Morgentaler and the Supreme Court. It really is her decision. But a choice granted her by her husband, or a court, or a doctor, or a counselor, is not in the same category at all, and the much-vaunted talk of the pro-abortion feminists about pro-choice-ism” and “freedom of choice” is spurious. Morgentaler is going to obtain for Canadian women their rights! If they really are rights, they were there long before Morgentaler came along, and will be there long after he is gone. Meantime, however, he can do and is doing uncounted harm with his pretence that women have a “right” to have the lives of their children “terminated.”
Richard Brown
Richard Brown, on the evidence, does not recognize a self-contradiction when he sees one.
Richard yells at Rev. Campbell: “If you’re not going to answer the question, I’ll ask somebody else!” (It was not Richard’s question, it was Norma Scarborough’s.) But Richard did not say, “Answer the question!” to the woman who had had the abortion when the latter greeted a woman who had asked her about her case with, “It’s none of your business.”
In fact, when she was justifying her abortion to Richard, she had said, “It’s a long story,” and Richard said, “We don’t want to hear it.” If the big-hearted woman who asked about her case had said anything remotely resembling that, she would have been shouted down as “violent,” “mean,” “just like all anti-abortionists.” But Richard had other fish to fry. What was her justification? If only there would come to light some justification for prenatal infanticide, and we could convince Parliament, what a blessed place this world would be!
Bernard Dickens
The law professor, attempting to explain away Morgentaler’s lawlessness, said that not every decision is made through the democratic process, and one of those decisions was the termination of pregnancy, a euphemism for prenatal infanticide. As noted above, however, this “right” is conferred on the mother through, allegedly, the democratic process.
Some pro-abortion doctor in the audience, whom Richard Brown kept calling on, thought that the matter of prenatal infanticide. As noted above, however, this “right” is conferred on the mother through, allegedly, the democratic process.
Some pro-abortion doctor in the audience, whom Richard Brown kept calling on, thought that the matter of prenatal infanticide should be settled by consensus, meaning, presumable, the democratic process, a claim which made a poor fit with the professor’s assertion that not every decision is made through the democratic process.
Joan Wright
Joan Wright, the counselor from Women’s College Hospital, found herself saying, “Most of us will never forget those young dead bodies,” a reference to an alleged death of a girl as the result of an abortion that killed both victims physically. Again, no sense of irony. Joan seems to forget that it is the dead bodies of the children that litter the landscape. What litters the landscape as far as their mothers are concerned are the emotional basket-cases left by the abortionist doctors.
This same lady said that it was insulting to women to say that it was callous of women to have their babies killed.
“There is no right or wrong in her mind,” she said, referring to the mother contemplating an abortion. She is a counselor; she is confronted with a woman whose moral sense is dead, she says. And she counsels nothing! “It’s her decision,” she kept saying. Then what is a counselor for? It had all the earmarks of Pontius Pilate’s saying, “I am innocent of this just man; look thou to it!”
Joan Wright said, “It is my hope that women will be treated honourably, not greeted with a law that simply tells women what they must live with!” This in reference to the new law promised by Parliament.
One wonders first of all what she is concerned about. If Morgentaler does not like the law, he will break it and brag about it, and there are enough cynical officers of state to back him up. At least, there have been so far.
But what is it that women must live with? In this context, it is a child. If pregnancy were a disease, and Parliament outlawed the treatment of the disease, Joan Wright’s claim would make sense. As it is, her claim implies that it is dishonourable for women to bear children. It rather looks as if the sexually liberated feminists have pushed us back into a Puritanism that even the Puritans would eschew.
Ken Campbell
Someone in the audience tried to put Rev. Campbell on the defensive by asking about the destruction of property in clinics by people opposed to prenatal infanticide. There have been a few such incidents in the U.S. The speaker did not seem to realize that it is the clinics that are in the business of destruction, and not of property, but of human lives.
When Campbell made reference at one point to a mother and her unborn baby, Norma Scarborough said, “Why ‘mother’? You’re not a mother until you’ve given birth!” Ms. Scarborough seems to think that motherhood begins at birth, not conception.
Henry Morgentaler says an unborn baby is not a baby, and Norma Scarborough says a mother is not a mother. All this pretence is nothing more than the thrashing about of a cast of mind which tries to make a case by saying that things are something different from what they are.
Angela Costigan
Such is the intellectual sterility begotten, as Angela Costigan intimated, by the entertainment of thought that the slaughter of innocents can be something good. Only let the reader realize that this description of the “debate” fails utterly to capture the ugliness of such desecration of the mental landscape. The only image that captures the spirit of it is the mangled body of an infant torn from the womb of a mother who forgot her baby.
Henry Morgentaler proclaims himself of the champion of Canadian women. He is right about one thing: Some Canadian women need help. They are not the pregnant, however. If the latter need help, it is available, for example, from Birthright, and in abundance. From Henry Morgentaler they can get the destruction of themselves and of their children.
Feminists
No, the Canadian women who need help are the advocates of prenatal infanticide as a solution to something, the Norma Scarboroughs and the Judy Rebicks and the Michele Landsbergs who are now rejoicing in the triumph of their devouring detestation of innocence. Of them Henry is the champion, and they do not even seem to realize that Henry is not of their sex.
Far worse than that, however, is the fact that they do not seem to realize where Henry’s claim to be champion of Canadian women comes from. Henry does not, he says, believe in God. That cast of mind makes straight the path to Henry’s setting himself up as a replacement for God. Is there evidence that he has? Indeed there is. It is Henry who confers on women their rights. “It’s her decision” only because Henry (and the Supreme Court) permits it to be.
Henry, however, goes further than God. God gave Abraham the right to sacrifice his own son, but He stayed his hand from going through with it. Henry’s hand is not stayed. Parliament has the self-evident – and awful – obligation to stay it – it and every other hand raised against the innocent.
I am only sorry that training cameras on this darkness seems to have blinded Global TV along with those who walk in the darkness.
