Jonathan Kay Again Addresses National Disgrace Of Killing Unborns

Once again, Jonathan Kay, columnist for the National Post, takes Canada to task for its failure to even engage in a discussion of debate and points to the success of militant pro-abortion forces in muzzling debate through intimidation.

The McMaster episode, tiny as it may be in the grand scheme of Canadian political life, is telling: The militant left isn't content with our country's current laissez-faire abortion policy. They also want to muzzle any debate about the issue.

This is the price we pay for political timidity: If moderate politicians don't have the courage to engage the abortion issue in Parliament, is it any wonder that pro-abortion extremists think they can shut down their opponents on university campuses, too?

Last year, Kay wrote a notable opinion, claiming that Canada needed an abortion law.

Since 1991, when the last effort died in the Senate, Canada has had no abortion law -- a shameful status that distinguishes us from every other nation in the free world. Fetal viability can begin after 23 weeks of gestation. At 37 weeks, doctors consider a pregnancy full-term. Yet by the lights of Canadian federal law, it is equally legal to kill a fetus at 10, 23, 37 or 40 weeks. Doctors are even permitted to remove part of a viable fetus from a woman before extinguishing it -- a process opaquely referred to as "intact dilation and extraction."

Kay's piece last year followed on the heels of an equally surprising column by Dr. Paul Ranalli which appeared in the Calgary Herald. Entitled "An ethical society can't avoid debate over curbing choice," Dr. Ranalli made excellent points concerning the "hidden agenda" advanced, according to many of the elites of our nation, by conservatives. Surprisingly, Ranalli noted,

As it turns out, there is a hidden agenda in this country on abortion, but it is not Harper's, or even that of card-carrying members of the Conservative party. It belongs to the Canadian people, and it is this: a majority of Canadians do not support the current open, unrestrained status of abortion in this country.

If offered the choice (to use a term abortion proponents have appropriated as their own), Canadians would support broad restrictions on the procedure.

Don't believe it? You'd be wrong, but you are not alone.

The prevailing elites in media, education, law, medicine and public policy are all more supportive of unrestricted abortion than the general public, and have worked hard, and successfully, to keep that fact hidden.

At the time, these were two very high impact stories appearing in widely circulated Canadian newspapers in quick succession. To me it was quite significant and signaled a change of sorts, perhaps a stirring deep within the soul of Canada, an emerging openness to take another look at the ethics [and horror] of killing unborns.

Around the same time, both Naomi Lakritz, columnist for the Calgary Herald, wrote a scorching piece about the killing going on at the Calgary Kensington clinic [article can be viewed here] and Claire Hoy as well, of the Orangeville Citizen spoke Canada's need for an abortion law.

Jonathan Kay's most recent comments reflect his renewed call for Canadians to address the question of legal abortion

It is a disgrace that Canada is the only civilized nation in the world without an abortion law. As far as our criminal code is concerned, there is no difference between aborting a weeks-old embryo and a viable, full-term fetus. This must change.

But this time around, using the illustration of the "small but telling teapot tempest that erupted at McMaster University" recently, Kay zeroes in on a key factor maintaining the sacrosanct status of abortion in Canada:

How does this legal black hole persist? In part, it's because pro-choice fundamentalists -- the minority of Canadians who believe that nothing should impede a woman from having an abortion at any time, for any reason--have successfully shut down the debate: If a Conservative politician so much as muses about abortion-law reform at election time, the Liberals and their media supporters will seize on it as evidence of a "secret agenda" to send society back to the era of backroom abortionists. The resulting near-total conservative self-censorship has reinforced the unspoken left-wing conceit that opposition to abortion is somehow inherently illegitimate, even hateful.

These are signs, in some small measure, of something brewing in Canada's soul and conscience.

But there is much more that needs to be done.

Please consider doing your part for the least of God's little ones.