CBC/Facebook - Great Canadian Wish Contest

CBC and Facebook have launched "The Great Canadian Wish" contest and have asked Canadian Physicians for Life to contribute an editorial about the current #1 wish: "I wish there was an end to abortion in Canada". This editorial is posted on CBC's website (www.cbc.ca/wish) as: Editorial #1 and is reprinted below.

The Paradox of Abortion

In Canada, an unborn child’s only real protection is found in the heart of her mother. A wish to abolish abortion is, in the end, directed at the heart of every woman who is surprised by motherhood. She is suddenly confronted by another life, someone else’s life, as surely as if a baby was left on her doorstep with a note: “Please look after me.”  At this point, she has only two paths before her – to continue to be the mother of a live baby or to become the mother of a dead baby. Women know this, and need not be patronized by glib phrases like “it’s only tissue,” or “it’s just a part of your body, like your appendix.”

Everyone of good will on both sides of the abortion debate knows that abortion is a difficult decision. But it is not difficult like a decision about whether to undergo  experimental chemotherapy is difficult. It is difficult because it violates our intrinsic taboos about killing. We are all harmed when we violate this prohibition. Women are harmed.  The unborn child dies. Doctors, nurses, and abortion counselors are damaged. Society is brutalized.

We are told “abortion is a matter between a woman and her doctor” – but what does the doctor have to do with it? The doctor won’t have to live with the higher risk of future premature deliveries, or infertility, or chronic pelvic infections, or future dangerous tubal pregnancies, or breast cancer. Will the doctor be there to dry her tears when the anniversary of the day she lost her baby draws near? The commonest cited “medical” reason for abortion is to relieve stress and depression, yet recent record linkage studies on three continents reveal that abortion is linked to greatly increased risks of depression, self-harm, and suicide. 

Women who have submitted to an abortion suffer in silence. They take their antidepressants and their alcohol. They turn on the TV and hear abortion activists deride the idea of post-abortion grief. They are told that nothing significant has happened to them, just a “necessary medical service.” And if they feel bad for some reason, well it was their “choice,” was it not?

Mass abortion is the price Canadian women are led to believe they must pay in order to have equality with men. Women are told they must forget who they are and submit their social problems to a typical male solution: mechanistic, controlling, destructive. A society that has lost respect for a woman’s biological giftedness and surrendered its abhorrence of killing leaves a distressed pregnant woman with little protection to offer her unborn child. She is vulnerable to making a destructive choice; and the downward spiral continues.

There’s got to be a better way.

Canadian Physicians for Life
June 8, 2007