By refusing to guard the Morgentaler abortuary, did David Packet violate his sworn duty “to serve and protect?”
Those who answer in the affirmative claim that members of the police force have the duty to execute whatever orders they receive, regardless of personal, moral convictions. If one must make allowance for what an officer’s conscience dictates about protecting certain people and properties, they ask rhetorical, how far does one extend the principle?
For instance, may a police officer who views any form of nuclear armament or drinking of alcoholic beverages as morally repugnant, refuse to protect nuclear arsenals or breweries, respectively? The implied, although usually unstated, conclusion is that those in uniform must follow orders blindly.
Blindly following orders to protect the Morgentaler abortuary is exactly what 399 of the 400 officers at 14 Division in Toronto’s West end are doing at the behest of the Attorney General. Likewise, blindly following orders is what the elite, 20,000 strong, Paris police force did at the behest of the legitimate, Vichy government, under Marshall Petain.
Like the officers standing guard at the Morgentaler abortuary, the Paris police were never ordered to kill anyone. Many of them were merely ensuring that “demonstrators” did not disturb “peace and order” while hundreds of Jewish children destined for death in concentration camps were hauled away in buses.
But the “fetuses” killed at the Morgentaler abortuary are not legally persons! Neither were the “unmenschen” (non-humans) “which” were being hauled away in the buses. A society always relegates the victims of a holocaust to the status of non-persons in order to hide the injustice it is perpetrating.
Oh! But the officers at 85 Harbord Street usually are not inside the abortuary; they are maintaining peace and order in Toronto’s public areas (adjoining the abortuary). On their part, the Paris police were never even near the death camps; many were merely maintaining peace and order on the public streets (the bus routes). I fact, the Paris police were hundreds if not thousands of kilometers away from the concentration camps where the killings took place. Chalk up one in favor of the Paris police.
Those who criticize David Packer’s action may claim that he was not ordered to protect an illegal establishment because, they maintain, the Morgentaler abortuary is in legal limbo until the Supreme Court rules on the pending charges. But in ensuring “peace” for the transfer of Jewish children destined for the death camps, the Paris police were protecting a totally “legal” activity. Chalk up another one for the Paris Police.
What about the fear of some that allowing those in uniform to follow conscience would jeopardize peace and order because officers may refuse to protect, for instance, nuclear arsenals or breweries? The answer to this is that most people, whether in uniform or not, understand the moral difference between defense and murder or between operating a brewery and a death camp. Moreover, the world has never suffered any cataclysms because people, whether inn uniform or not, placed conscience above orders. But even in recent times the world has suffered terrible holocausts because some of the uniformed (and non-uniformed) placed orders above conscience – as Auschwitz, the Gulag, Archipelago, the Mao regime and the Morgentaler syndicate amply testify.
So, David Packer, by maintaining “peace” outside the “clinic” to render possible the killing of babies inside it, you would indeed be getting blood on your hands by association. In fact, you would be no better than the Paris police during the Second World War whose actions every right-thinking person condemns.
