On August 22, at its annual meeting in Vancouver, the General Council of the Canadian Medical Association once more repeated its outrageous betrayal of the physician’s vocation. From the CMA Council’s point of view, it “merely” did the following:
- Approved abortion on demand up to the twentieth week of pregnancy, declaring it to be a decision between a woman and her physician.
- Declared that abortions should be uniformly available to women across Canada.
- Declared that abortion should be permitted outside hospitals (in facilities meeting approved standards).
- Declared that health care insurance should cover the cost.
Seven recommendations were accepted, and the first reads as follow:
“The decision to perform an induced abortion is a medical one, made privately between the patient and her physician, within the confines of existing Canadian law, and is made after conscientious examination of all other options.”
The council then reaffirmed existing policies providing that there should be no discrimination against doctors who do not want to perform or assist at abortions. Doctors whose moral or religious beliefs prevent them from doing the procedure should inform patients so that they can consult their physicians.
What can be simpler than this? Consequently, the position was praised by one paper as “thoughtful common sense on a very difficult issue” and by another as a resolution that reeks of good sense (emphasis added).
Moral abyss
Nothing illustrates better into what moral abyss our Canadian society has fallen than these recommendations by the Council of Canadian Physicians and the commentators’ evaluation of it all as “good sense.”
Controlling one’s rage at the immensity of this venality, insanity and blasphemy, several comments need to be made about these “common sense” proposals:
1. The statement that abortion is a medical decision is a lie. Abortion is not a medical decision, but a moral one. Canadian Physicians for Life has said repeatedly that there is no medical indication for an abortion today. The classic dilemma “save the mother or save the child” has not existed for decades. The 1975 survey of abortion in Canada, the Badgley Report says (p.211), that most “therapeutic” (sic) abortions in Canada are being done for reasons of “mental health” Then years ago the Canadian Psychiatric Association publicly acknowledged that diagnoses of mental health were given “for purposes of expediency” and that “they could not be considered as a valid assessment of an abortion patient’s state of mental health.”
2. The discussion was a farce.
The resolutions passed in about an hour. Modifying amendments were dismissed immediately, such as the suggestion that a committee be set up to define when human life beings and another to rule out abortion for non-medical reasons. Probably no other “difficult issue” has ever been rushed through the CMA Council so quickly.
3. The CMA treated the unborn with utter contempt. The CMA had no reasons for selecting the 20-week limit, rather than, say, 21 or 19. It has none, of course, but this didn’t disturb the 200 or so delegates. They just wanted to get the thing over with.
In 1985, the last year for which statistics are available, over 60,000 abortions were committed in hospitals, of which (supposedly) only 160 were performed after the twentieth week. In other words, the CMA stands for the unrestricted killing of so-called unwanted unborn babies.
4. The fifth recommendation reads, “No discrimination of any kind should be directed against doctors who provide abortion services.”
As Dr. Carmelo Scime, past president of Canadian Physicians for Life, says, “You mean I should give a cup of coffee to a doctor with blood on his hands?”
Many Canadian physicians detest abortion and all it stands for because they respect human life and they respect the vocation of healers. But the Council of this our medical professional association stands on a par with the scientists and doctors of the Nazi holocaust: contemptuous of life and willing to kill. The cold-bloodedness of it all makes one fear for the future.