Baby Leif and Baby Kintyre Witness to Canada’s Schizophrenia Regarding the Unborn

In a story entitled “At last, a chance to rest” the National Post reported yesterday on a “unique” funeral held Friday for an infant found mummified and wrapped in an 82-year-old newspaper.

Although no family came to see him off, an infant found mummified under the floorboards of a downtown Toronto home in July got the dignified burial that children's advocates were hoping for yesterday morning. Baby Kintyre -- so named by the home renovator who found him curled in fetal position and wrapped in an 82-year-old newspaper on Kintyre Avenue in the city's east end -- was buried as part of an unusual ceremony held to draw attention to the plight of abandoned babies.

This case raises a host of questions about the dead child. Although the story indicates they “found him curled in fetal position” the urgent question of whether the child was actually a “fetus” or an “infant” was immediately answered in the second paragraph.

Investigators never did find Baby Kintyre's next of kin, or a cause of death, although Ontario deputy chief coroner Jim Cairns determined the infant was born alive by looking at the air sacs in his lungs.

So obviously by outward appearances it was not possible to say whether the mummy was a fetus or an infant. [I guess there can't be THAT much difference between these two entities, can there?] In fact the original July story identified the mummy as either a fetus or a “young baby.” A medical examination was necessary. This crucial determination paved the way for a huge memorial service with all the bells and whistles, along with headline media coverage.

What do you think might have happened to this little child’s remains had the coroner not been so sure that Baby Kintyre had made it through to birth? In that case, the child would have actually been a “fetus” and I’m guessing the discovery would hardly have qualified for much more than a line or two buried somewhere on page B14.

Fetuses, after all, have no legal standing in Canada. Legally they are not considered persons. Small wonder then that after nearly forty years of such confusion some Canadians even question whether they are truly human beings. We really don't seem to know what they are.

No one would have risked entry into the “A-word” debate by highlighting the strange death of a mummified fetus by means of a funeral , even though it might have only been days away from drawing air into its lungs. Imagine suffering the wrath of the advocates of “choice” who do everything in their power to de-humanize the unborn child at every stage of its life, right up to that “magic” moment of birth whereupon a “blob of tissue” miraculously becomes a fully formed “wanted” baby, complete with personhood.

In Canada no abuse of unborn children is actually possible under the law since mothers hold supreme power over the growing mystery entity within their bellies, consigning them even to the butchery of an abortionist’s knife or suction machine if it suits their circumstances. Note in the following quote what is considered as “the very first stage of abuse” for children.

Yesterday's elaborate funeral was arranged by The Canadian Centre for Abuse Awareness as part of its ongoing campaign to honour children who have been abandoned, what the centre considers the very first stage of abuse. It is also using Baby Kintyre's funeral as an opportunity to advocate for legislative reform.

What would happen I wonder, if Baby Kintyre had turned out to be a fetus and some pro-life group had decided to hold a grand funeral pageant like this one in order “to advocate for legislative reform?” I can hear the howls now from “poor-choicers” but then again, perhaps they wouldn’t have heard about it because the media would have suddenly had better and more important matters on which to report.

Apparently in Canada today the “children’s advocates” referred to in the first paragraph of the story have a very selective understanding of the term “children” and “babies.”

In a unique agreement with the cemetery and the coroner's office, the centre will now receive babies from across Canada, give them a name and arrange their funerals. This way, the discarded infants will not end up in minimally expensed municipal graves, or "paupers' graves," as Dr. Cairns calls them.

Discard in dumpsters or incinerators more than 100,000 dead and bloodied “fetuses” violently killed in the womb and we are not expected to be the least bit concerned about a decent and respectful burial. But abandon a baby and we rush to create a national funeral centre to avoid “pauper’s graves.”

Kill the child in the womb, right up to 9 months—no problem. Kill the child the first day of his/her infancy—it’s a clear-cut case of abuse, even murder.

But both our semantics and our heartlessness are catching up with us. Unsurprisingly, the line now appears to be blurring with respect to what is and is not infanticide.

Still, the call for similar measures resonates in Canada every time there is a fatal case of newborn abandonment, or another crime where a troubled mother kills a newborn. After a 15-year-old girl gave birth to a healthy girl in the bathroom of her parents' home in Brampton in 2002, then stabbed it in the neck, police opted for a second-degree murder charge instead of infanticide.

What might we next consider to be tolerable—Peter Singer’s take on infanticide?

In considering our tragic duplicity in Canada, try to grasp this statement by Ellen Campbell, the centre’s founder:

These little babies, I just think they're screaming from their graves about abuse of children.

No doubt Ms. Campbell is a well meaning and compassionate individual. She may even be a “pro-lifer.” And the fact is that abandoned children, like Baby Kintyre, do suffer terrible abuse at the hands of their parents, as Ms. Campbell rightly laments.

Yet—we are permitted no sympathy or pity for the more than 100,000 “little babies” killed in the womb “legally” in Canada every year but for these who are abandoned, she (along with the rest of Canada) says,

It's a huge statement about how we value children and the dignity of life.

Kinghorn, the home renovator who found Baby Kintyre, described for us near perfectly in one sentence Canada’s schizophrenia:

I can't fathom murder ... I want to think it was natural.