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Notes
for an address to the
Annual Pro-Life Dinner of Oxford Right-to-Life
Mr.
Chairman, members of the clergy, ladies and gentlemen.
I am honoured to have been invited to speak to you this
evening on the ultimate right -- the right to life.
As pro-lifers, we understand the primordial importance
of affirming the sanctity of human life. It's obvious
to us that if the right to life is not consistently safeguarded
and upheld, no one can rest secure in the right to liberty,
the right to personal security or the right to any other
basic human good. For this very elementary reason, there
is no more vital issue confronting our society than the
urgent need to reaffirm the most fundamental and essential
human right of all -- the inalienable right to life.
Up
to about 40 years ago, the right to life was secure in
Canada. Virtually all Canadians understood that the deliberate
killing of an innocent human either inside or outside
the womb is a grave crime that can never be justified.
Under terms of the criminal code of Canada, any physician
who deliberately aborted the life of a human being in
the womb at any time during a pregnancy was guilty of
a criminal offence carrying a maximum penalty of life
imprisonment. Then disaster struck. The restrictions on
abortion in the criminal code were first weakened by Parliament
in 1969 and then abolished by the Supreme Court of Canada
in 1988 with its illegal, unconstitutional and outrageous
decision in R. v. Morgentaler. Thanks to the folly of
Parliament and the arrogance of the Supreme Court, Canada
is the only ostensibly democratic country in the world
where a baby in the womb has no legally recognized right
to life. Every year in this country, unscrupulous physicians
deliberately kill more than 100,000 human beings in the
womb. How can anyone try to justify such a mass slaughter
of precious, innocent human life?
For
an answer, I turned to the website of the leading pro-abortion
advocacy group in Canada -- the Canadian Abortion Rights
Action League (CARAL). The very name of this organization
is odious and false. It flies in the face of one of the
most ancient and basic of all moral injunctions: Thou
shalt not kill an innocent human being. That precept includes
babies in the womb. Truly, there are no abortion rights;
only abortion wrongs.
In
an attempt to defend the indefensible, CARAL has listed
a number of alleged "Abortion Facts" on its
website. Consider this pathetic organization's alleged
abortion fact number 1:
There
is no scientific consensus as to when human life begins,
a point made by such institutions as the National Academy
of Sciences and the American Medical Association.
That
statement is utter nonsense. In its support, the poor,
benighted fanatics in CARAL can do no better than cite
an article in the September 1981 edition of Vogue Magazine
entitled, "The Scientific View: When Does Human Life
Begin?"
Let
us not mince words: CARAL's alleged abortion fact number
one is not just false: It's a bald-faced and deliberate
lie. It's impossible to believe that leading CARAL activists
like Dr. Mary McKim and other physicians can be unaware
that there is a scientific consensus as to when human
life begins. Consider, for example, the following unequivocal
statement by two leading embryologists, Dr. Keith Moore
and Dr. T. V. N. Persaud, in the sixth edition of their
authoritative medical textbook entitled The Developing
Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology:
Human
development begins at fertilization, the process during
which a male gamete or sperm … unites with a female
gamete or oocyte … to form a single cell called
a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marks
the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.
That's
it. There is no scientific dispute about it. The beginning
of each of us as a unique individual human being occurs
at fertilization or conception. That's an indisputable
scientific fact. Everyone of us in this room began life
as a single-celled zygote or embryo that contained all
the genetic information necessary for us to start evolving
from an unique tiny baby boy or girl in the womb into
a full-grown adult.
CARAL
points out that St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas did
not know or affirm that human life begins at conception.
But let us use our common sense: Can there be any doubt
that if these two eminent saints were alive today, they
would agree that life begins at conception? And is it
any less obvious that Augustine and Aquinas would fully
endorse the ringing affirmation of Pope John Paul the
Great and the magisterium of the Catholic Church that
the deliberately killing of a human being in the womb
is a grave crime that can never be justified?
Even
CARAL seems to doubt its own cockeyed position on the
beginning of human life. In its so-called Fact 11, CARAL
states:
Even
if it could be shown that human life begins at conception,
that finding would not entail the further moral judgment
that life at that stage ethically merits full protection.
Why
not? With this statement, CARAL virtually concedes that
human life begins at conception, yet still supports the
deliberate killing of babies in the womb. How can that
be? How can CARAL justify such a patent contradiction?
In
another of its alleged facts, CARAL states:
Even
if the fetus has the right to life, it does not follow
that it has the right to use the pregnant woman's body.
The
mind boggles. As CARAL sees it, a mother might reasonably
say to her child in the womb: "I am sorry, but I
do not want you. I know you have a right to life, but
you have no right to use my body. Therefore, I am going
to have you killed." How appalling. How dreadful.
How sad and perverse it is that there are physicians and
nurses who will accommodate such a desperately misguided
mother, by using their medical skills not to nurture life,
but to kill her baby in the womb.Embryonic Stem Cell Research:
Let
me now turn to a related subject: embryonic stem cell
research. During the Second World War, Albert Mengele,
the notorious Nazi physician, had no qualms about performing
death-dealing research on human beings at the Auschwitz
Death Camp. Who would have thought that scarcely 50 years
later, the government and Parliament of Canada would endorse
essentially this same kind of research? Yet that's the
case. In recent weeks, a solid majority of the House of
Commons has repeatedly voted in favour of a government
bill that authorizes the deliberate killing of human beings
for medical research.
The
legislation in question is Bill C-13, An Act Respecting
Assisted Human Reproduction. This legislation authorizes
medical researchers to extract stem cells from a human
embryo -- a procedure that inevitably kills the embryo.
Chretien and other like-minded Liberals support this provision
of the bill, yet they would bridle at any comparison with
Mengele. As they see it, their lack of compunction about
allowing medical researchers to kill tiny human embryos
a few days after fertilization bears no resemblance to
Mengele's willingness to kill adult human beings during
his gruesome medical experiments in Auschwitz.
What,
though, does size or age have to do with the sanctity
of human life? During debate on Bill C-13, Canadian Alliance
MP Jason Kenney recalled how Dr. Seuss, that "great
moral authority," affirmed in Horton Hears a Who
that:
A
person is a person, no matter how small.
Kenney
added:
The
size of embryos does not matter. They are all human. I
submit that is scientifically undeniable. They are the
offspring of human parents. They could be of no other
species but homo sapiens. Understood either scientifically
or philosophically, they are living human beings. Every
single one of the 301 members of the House was once an
embryo, no bigger than the head of a pin.
Regardless,
some eminent research scientists in Canada and the United
States not only insist there is nothing wrong with embryonic
stem cell research, they are even clamouring for legal
permission to clone human beings for this same purpose.
Cloning can be achieved through a process of somatic cell
nuclear transfer that is akin to fertilization. In essence,
the nucleus is extracted from the cell of a donor who
is to be cloned and transferred into a human oocyte or
egg, whose own nucleus has been removed or deactivated.
The resulting cloned embryo has virtually the same genetic
composition as the donor. If some mad scientist were to
succeed in cloning to produce children, he or she could
create a genetic replica of you, your child or anyone
else living or dead from whom a donor cell can be extracted.
Supporters
of cloning for biomedical research hope that through the
creation and extraction of stem cells from a cloned embryo
of someone like Christopher Reeve, medical scientists
might eventually learn how to grow nerve tissues that
could be transplanted into Reeve with little chance of
rejection, because the genetic composition of the tissues
would be virtually identical to the genetic composition
of every other cell in his body. In this way, medical
science might eventually come up with a complete cure
for Reeve's terrible paralysis. But at what moral cost?
Much as we sympathize with the suffering of people like
Reeve, can the prospect of curing their illnesses justify
the deliberate creation and killing of a cloned human
embryo?
The
President's Council on Bioethics, a body appointed by
President George W. Bush, addressed this issue in a report
released last July entitled Human Cloning and Human Dignity:
An Ethical Inquiry. The Chairman of the Council is Prof.
Leon Kass of the University of Chicago, a prominent ethicist
and Jewish intellectual, who holds a medical degree from
the University of Chicago and a PhD in biochemistry from
Harvard University. The Council also includes two leading
Catholic intellectuals -- Prof. Mary Ann Glendon of the
Harvard Law School and Prof. Robert P. George, a philosopher
at Princeton University -- and a prominent Lutheran academic,
Gilbert Meilaender, a professor of ethics at Valparaiso
University. Among other members of the Council are seven
of the world's foremost scientific practitioners of embyronic
stem cell research.
The
Council gave separate consideration to the ethics of cloning-to-produce-children
and cloning for biomedical research. On the first issue,
all 17 members of the Council agreed:
Cloning-to-produce-children
is unethical, ought not to be attempted, and should
be indefinitely banned by federal law.
On
the second issue -- cloning for biomedical research --
the Council could not agree. Seven members, including
the Jew Kass, and the Christians Glendon, George and Meilaender,
insisted upon a permanent ban on all cloning for biomedical
research; three members of the Council favoured a four-year
ban on the procedure, pending further study; while the
remaining seven Council members recommended that the United
States Congress should allow cloning for biomedical research,
subject to strict guidelines to preclude cloning-to-produce
children.
Note
the precise wording of the terms used by the Council --
cloning-to-produce children and cloning for biomedical
research. The Council unanimously agreed to reject the
more common and misleading terms -- reproductive cloning
and therapeutic cloning -- because all cloning is reproductive
and no cloning has yet produced any therapeutic benefits.
The
seven Council members who favour cloning for biomedical
research contend that just as no one has any qualms about
having organs retrieved for transplantation from a brain-dead
person, so no one should object to the extraction of stem
cells from a brainless and unconscious five- or six-day
old cloned human embryo. Having said that, these seven
panellists allowed:
Some
argue that the transplantation analogy is misleading,
because (an embryo) has the potential to become a fetus
and ultimately a child, whereas the brain-dead individual
does not. But the potential to become something (or
someone) is hardly the same as being something (or someone),
any more than a pile of building materials is the same
as a house.
That's
the best argument these scientific experts could produce
to justify cloning for biomedical research. In response,
the majority of the President's Council pointed out that:
The
cell synthesized by somatic cell nuclear transfer, no
less than the fertilized egg, is a human organism in
its germinal stage. It is not just a "clump of
cells" but an integrated, self-developing whole,
capable (if all goes well) of the continued organic
development characteristic of human beings. To be sure,
the embryo does not yet have, except in potential, the
full range of characteristics that distinguish the human
species from others, but one need not have those characteristics
in evidence in order to belong to the species. And of
course human beings at some other stages of development
-– early in life, late in life, at any stage of
life if severely disabled –- do not forfeit their
humanity simply for want of these distinguishing characteristics.
We may observe different points in the life story of
any human being –- a beginning filled mostly with
potential, a zenith at which the organism is in full
flower, a decline in which only a residue remains of
what is most distinctively human. But none of these
points is itself the human being. That being is, rather,
an organism with a continuous history. From zygote to
irreversible coma, each human life is a single personal
history.
I
submit that any reasonable and fair-minded reader of this
report by the President's Council on Bioethics would have
to conclude that Kass, Glendon, George, Meilaender and
other members of the panel majority have won this debate
hands down. They have demolished the best arguments that
the scientific proponents of cloning for biomedical research
have to offer.
The
case against human cloning is so compelling and obvious
that even Chretien and his Liberal colleagues seem to
have grasped it. Thus, Bill C-13 at least purports to
ban all human cloning, without exception. Section 5(1)
states:
No
person shall knowingly
(a) create a human clone
However,
despite these clear words, pro-life Liberal MP Paul Szabo
has repeatedly warned during debate on Bill C-13 that
the legislation might not, in fact, ban all human cloning,
because of the peculiar definition of terms in the bill.
Responding for the government, Jeannot Castonguay, Parliamentary
Secretary to the Minister of Health, has insisted there
is no reason for such concern. On March 18, he unequivocally
declared in the Commons:
No
matter what the objective or the method, this legislation
prohibits the creation of a human clone.
Will
the courts agree with Castonguay's opinion? That, of course,
remains to be seen. Given the predilection of the Supreme
Court of Canada to change legislation enacted by Parliament
under the pretence of upholding the Canadian Charter of
Rights and Freedoms, the rule of law in Canada has been
abolished. There can no longer be any certainty about
how the Court will decide any issue. At the least, in
the case of Bill C-13, the government has clearly stated
that it intends to ban all human cloning, both for producing
children and research.
Section
5(1) of Bill C-13 states that no one shall knowingly:
(b)
create an in vitro embryo for any purpose other than
creating a human being or improving or providing instruction
in assisted reproduction procedures;
With
this provision, the Bill would seem to ban the creation
of human embryos, cloned or uncloned, for the purpose
of embryonic stem cell research. That's all to the good.
Yet the bill would allow the creation of human embryos
for research and teaching in relation to assisted reproduction.
Canadian Alliance MP Rob Merrifield has underlined this
blatant contradiction:
Sometimes
we overlook the whole idea of creating an embryo for
reproductive research. Canadian laws will now legitimize
the view that human life can be created solely for the
benefit of others. This obviously goes against the view
that life should not be created in order to be destroyed,
yet this is what the legislation would allow.
Merrifield
is obviously right. If it's wrong, as the Liberals concede,
to create a human being that will be killed for stem-cell
research, it's also wrong to create a human being that
will be killed for any other research purpose, including
the improvement of assisted reproduction. Why cannot the
Liberals grasp such elementary logic?
There
are other contradictions in Bill C-13. While it ostensibly
forbids medical researchers from creating human beings
for the express purpose of killing them to extract their
stem cells, the legislation permits medical researchers
to conduct this same death-dealing procedure on human
embryos that have been created through in vitro fertilization
by a fertility clinic for the purpose of producing children.
Typically, fertility clinics create up to 25 human embryos
for a woman, in the hope that one or two can be successfully
implanted in her womb. Once implantation has been achieved,
any remaining, so-called surplus, embryos are either frozen
for future use or killed. In the confused mind of Health
Minister Anne McLellan, there is nothing evil about killing
these human embryos for medical research. As she and her
like-minded liberal and socialist colleagues see it, it's
wrong for medical researchers to create human life for
the purpose of destroying that life in stem-cell research,
but it's right for these same scientists in the course
of their research to destroy a human life that was created
to produce children, but is no longer wanted for this
purpose. There is no rhyme or reason to such twisted logic.
In
an attempt to introduce a consistent regard for the sanctity
of human life into Bill C-13, Kenney moved an amendment
to forbid the extraction of stems cells from all human
embryos, including those that were originally created
to produce children. This was an eminently reasonable
and logically coherent proposal. Alas, it has been voted
down in the Commons.
Note
also the misleading language employed in Bill C-13: Section
5 stipulates that no one shall knowingly, "create
an in vitro human embryo for any purpose other than creating
a human being." Scientifically, that is nonsensical.
A human embryo is not a moose, a cow or an oak tree. A
human embryo is full-fledged, nascent human being in the
first stages of life. Understood in plain, ordinary, common
sense language, s. 5(1) declares that no one shall knowingly
create an in vitro human being for any purpose other than
creating a human being.
What
accounts for such an absurd declaration in Bill C-13?
McLellan has explained that the term human being in the
government's bill should not be understood in the ordinary
or scientific sense, but in the legal sense as a human
child completely emerged from the womb. That's the linguistically
and scientifically ridiculous redefinition of a human
being promulgated by the Supreme Court of Canada. By resorting
to such Orwellian linguistic subterfuge, our judicial
masters seek to mask their supreme contempt for the sanctity
of human life in the womb at any time, even up to the
last second before birth.
Section
5(1)d of Bill C-13 stipulates that no one shall:
maintain
an embryo outside the body of a female person after
the fourteenth day of its development following fertilization
or creation …
Why
should such a rule apply only after the fourteenth day
following fertilization? There is no good, logical and
reasonable answer to that question. The scientific facts
are indisputable: Human life begins at fertilization.
If the Liberals uphold the sanctity of human life, they
would agree to have Bill C-13 amended to place a total
ban on the creation of any human embryo outside the body
of a female person.
As
it is, with Bill C-13, the Chretien Liberals at least
purport to plainly state that in their opinion, creating
a cloned or uncloned human life with the intent of killing
that life within the first week of its existence for the
purposes of embryonic stem cell research is an intolerable
affront to human dignity. But having made this affirmation,
how can most of these same Liberals condone a legal regime
that gives medical doctors free rein to kill a human being
in the womb at four weeks or four months after fertilization,
simply because the mother no longer wants her baby? Where
is the reason, where is the logic, where is the common
sense in these contradictory positions? Where is the vaunted
Liberal compassion for the weakest and most vulnerable
of our fellow human beings? Pro-life Christians:
We,
pro-lifers, are often derided as unreasonable, religious
fanatics. That's not true. However much we pro-lifers
might disagree on many questions, we are united in our
firm conviction that our pro-life convictions are eminently
reasonable. They are firmly grounded in truth. It's pro-choice
fanatics, like members of CARAL, who are unreasonable.
While we pro-lifers rationally and consistently uphold
the sanctity of all human life, our opponents are caught
up in a tangle of contradictions and lies by which they
try to justify the unjustifiable and to tolerate the intolerable
-- namely, the deliberate killing of some innocent human
lives for the convenience or benefit of others.
If
logic, reason and truth are on the pro-life side, it might
be wondered, why are pro-lifers not winning the debate
over the sanctity of human life? I submit that the question
is misconceived. We are winning this debate. As the language
of Bill C-13 demonstrates, even more and more liberals
among our fellow citizens are beginning to realize the
evils of creating, cloning and killing human beings for
medical research.
On
March 18, the pro-life movement in North America scored
a significant victory, when the United States Senate passed
a bill banning partial-birth abortions by a vote of 64
to 33. The House of Representatives is poised to adopt
this same bill and thereafter, George W. Bush, the greatest
pro-life president of modern times, can be counted upon
to sign the legislation into law. Let us resolve to do
everything we can as Canadian pro-lifers to hasten the
day when this most gruesome, cruel and barbaric of abortion
procedures is outlawed in our country.
Sometimes,
I am driven almost to distraction by the obtuseness of
so many people of my own generation on the abortion question.
Given all the pain, anguish, suffering and illness endured
by women who have been duped into having an abortion;
given the dreadful demographic impact of abortion on our
entire society; why cannot everyone over age 30 grasp
the obvious -- that abortion hurts women, that abortion
is depopulating our country, that abortion coarsens our
moral sensitivities; that abortion, like murder, is a
terrible evil that should be outlawed and can never be
justified?
Frustrated
as we are by such ignorance, we pro-lifers are reassured
by the knowledge that the truth cannot be forever suppressed.
It's bound to win out. Already, there are encouraging
signs of a pro-life upsurge among young people. Consider
a remarkable article published on March 30 in The New
York Times -- than which there is a no more adamant pro-abortion
publication. The piece was entitled: Surprise Mom: I'm
Anti-Abortion. It began with a profile of Afton Dahl,
a 16-year-old Minnesota girl. To the manifest dismay of
the Times' reporter, young Dahl explained:
The
baby's heartbeat starts at around 12 to 18 days, so
it's murder to kill someone with a heartbeat. I don't
believe in abortion under any circumstances, including
rape. I think it would be better to overturn Roe v.
Wade.
In
response, Dahl's 47-year-old mother told The Times that
she clings to the wrongheaded views typical of her generation.
While allowing that she would never have an abortion herself,
this mother said she thinks other women should retain
the option to have their baby in the womb killed through
abortion.
Kelly
Kroll, a junior at Boston College and president of Collegians
for Life, is another young pro-lifer profiled by the Times.
Kroll considers herself a "survivor of the abortion
holocaust" because her birth mother put her up for
adoption rather than have her killed in the womb. Kroll
told the Times:
Myself
and my classmates have never known a world in which
abortion wasn't legalized. We've realized that any one
of us could have been aborted. When I talk about being
a survivor of abortion, I am talking about it from a
personal place.
The
Time's reporter alluded to the number of opinion polls
in the United States over the past few years showing that
a sharp generation gap has developed on the abortion issue.
The Times article ruefully concluded:
If
today's teenagers and young adults maintain their views
on abortion into older adulthood, and if succeeding
waves of students are also conservative, the balance
could tip somewhat in the America's long-running abortion
war, some experts speculate.
Let
us pray that The Times, for once, is right -- that North
American youngsters will come over to the pro-life side
in such numbers as to tip the balance in favour of enacting
laws that will clearly, consistently and steadfastly uphold
the sanctity of human life at all stages from fertilization
to natural death.
Meanwhile,
let us be grateful for the pro-life witness of clear thinking
politicians like Szabo, Merrifield and Kenney. And let
us not take for granted the outstanding pro-life leadership
of many leading politicians in the United States, including
President Bush. Bush stands firmly behind the assertion
in the United States Declaration of Independence:
We
hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life …
In
an address to a vast throng gathered in Washington last
year for the annual March for Life, Bush said:
Abortion
is an issue that deeply divides our country. And we
need to treat those with whom we disagree with respect
and civility. We must overcome bitterness and rancour
where we find it and seek common ground where we can.
But we will continue to speak out on behalf of the most
vulnerable members of our society.
We
do so because we believe the promises of the Declaration
of Independence are the common code of American life.
They should apply to everyone, not just the healthy
or the strong or the powerful. A generous society values
all human life. A merciful society seeks to expand legal
protection to every life, including early life. And
a compassionate society will defend a simple, moral
proposition, life should never be used as a tool, or
a means to an end.
These
are bedrock principles. And that is why my administration
opposes partial-birth abortion and public funding for
abortion; why we support teen abstinence and crisis
pregnancy programs; adoption and parental notification
laws; and why we are against all forms of human cloning
…
We
are a society with enough compassion and wealth and
love to care for both mothers and their children, and
to seek the promise and potential of every single life.
You're working and marching on behalf of a noble cause,
and affirming a culture of life. Thank you for your
persistence, for defending human dignity, and for caring
for every member of the human family.
May
God continue to bless America.
And
to that, let us add, "May God continue to bless President
Bush." And let us also beg our merciful God for such
enlightened leadership in Canada. With the exception of
former Saskatchewan premier Grant Divine, we have not
had a single prime minister or provincial premier in Canada
over the past 30 years who has been willing to speak up
forthrightly in defence of the sanctity of human life.
Canada is truly in a sorry state. Our country has sunk
deep into the darkness of a culture of death. What, then,
will we, pro-lifers, do? Will we give up the struggle
in frustration? Will we abandon our commitment to uphold
the truth about the sanctity of all human life from fertilization
onto natural death?
Of
course not. Together as pro-lifers, we will decry Bill
C-13. We will insist that our MPs voted down this dreadful,
anti-life bill. We will steadfastly oppose the killing
of embryonic human beings for any kind of medical research.
Furthermore,
we will make sure that our movement goes on offering help
to women who are pregnant and distressed. We will strive
to console the women, and men, who have been hurt by abortion.
We will assure them as we remind ourselves when we lament
our own grievous sins of commission and omission that
there is nothing -- absolutely nothing that we have ever
said or done or not done -- that can separate us from
the love and forgiveness of God that is freely open to
all of us through repentance and faith in Christ Jesus.
We will pray for the conversion of abortionists. We will
visit the lonely. We will resolutely oppose assisted suicide
and euthanasia. We will never stop loving and caring for
the sick and the comatose and the handicapped -- not even
in the hours of their death.
And
we will earnestly pray that God will empower us by His
grace never to despair, but always to uphold as best we
can in this culture of death that most wonderful and sacred
and precious of divine gifts -- the gift of human life.
Rory Leishman
836 Wellington St.,
London, Ontario,
Canada N6A 3S7
Home/Office Phone: 519-439-2676
Home Page: www.roryleishman.com
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