Editor:
We have been seeing a lot of letters and articles about abortion lately. I'm like most Canadians. I don't like abortion (who does?), but I'm happy with the status quo and devoutly wish that the blessed peace and quiet would have lasted.
That said, since the pro-life faction has lately been talking about having an information campaign, I thought I would make a point that I don't recall seeing made here lately.
The ‘life' in ‘pro-life' is a code word. If we're talking about when life begins, it does not begin at conception. It begins before conception. Sperm and egg cells are alive. If we're going to fetishize some kind of life-cult, we're starting to get into Monty Python "Every Sperm Is Sacred" territory.
‘Life' is really code for ‘ensoulment'. This is truly a religious moral debate for the pro-life faction, not a secular one. From a secular standpoint, a literal ball of cells with no nervous system does not at all clearly deserve the same legal standing as an infant or an adult.
The hard truth is that there is no good dividing line, so we have to set one arbitrarily. The arbitrary line the pro-lifers want to draw is not reasonable. Maybe a late-term fetus should have some rights, although the life of the mother must still come first. But a conceptus should not have any rights.
Every sperm is not sacred. Nature aborts many fetuses, and a woman can only bear a tiny fraction of the potential babies within her. A woman must have the right to use her finite reproductive capacity at the time of her choosing, and both reason and morality dictate that up to a certain point, abortion has to be OK.
Agreed it would be better to have been careful and lucky with contraception and not have an unwanted pregnancy at all, but that is not always the way it works in the real world.
For what it's worth, the present law works, and P.E.I. should improve access to abortions. If we really had to draw lines, they should be based on a scientific understanding of the development of the nervous system, and reflect a gradient of increasing rights.
Stephen DeGrace,
Charlottetown
