For more than a year the daily newspapers have been giving accounts of the death of people in Iraq. The number of military casualties due to the war are not available, or at least not accurately, but one website suggests the total number of combatants and non-combatants as somewhere between 11,000 and 15,000. This is certainly tragic news and the members of their families – wives, parents, brothers and sisters – are deserving of our sympathy and prayers.

However, having said that and meaning it sincerely, I cannot help comparing it to the “War on the Unborn” which is being waged all over the world and ignored by most of the media. Indeed, that war is often supported by the press. I have done a little research and the findings are staggering. I have confined myself to Canada and the only recent statistics are for 1999, 2000 and 2001. Here are the official figures for abortions in our country:

1999 – 105,666
2000 – 105,427
2001 – 106,418

That’s a three year total of 317, 511. In Ontario alone, in 2001, there were 38,827 abortions.

Each of these babies had exactly the same right to life as you or I or the Pope or the Queen of England. Of course, many people would reply, “But if they were not yet born, they were not human beings.”

As I am not a doctor or a scientist, I must defer to such authorities. Here is a quotation from a book entitled Handbook on Abortion by Dr. and Mrs. J.C. Willke of the United States, who wrote: “The most distinguished scientific meeting of recent years that considered the question in depth was the First International Conference on Abortion, held in Washington, D.C., in October 1967. It brought together authorities from around the world in the fields of medicine, law, ethics and the social sciences. They met together in a ‘think tank’ for several days. The first major question to be considered was ‘When does human life begin?’ The Medical Group was composed of biochemists, professors of obstetrics and gynaecology, geneticists, etc … their almost unanimous conclusion (19 to 1) was as follows: The majority of our group could find no point in time between the union of sperm and egg and the birth of an infant at which point we could say that this is not human life. The changes occurring between implantation, a six-week embryo, a six month foetus, a one week old child and a mature adult are merely stages of development and maturation.”

I challenge any doctor in Canada to publicly declare that human life does not begin at conception (implantation). I also challenge the media to take notice of the unreported deaths taking place here in Canada with the same care and attention they do deaths in Iraq. After all, they are all human beings with the same right to life.