I… Don’t know how I feel about that.

god has completely failed to rain destruction down upon us.

How else do you explain Celine Dion and Justin Bieber?

Oh, shit. God’s using Canada to rain destruction on the rest of the world.

Is cruelty relative? If so, is a brief, small amount of cruelty more acceptable than a life of cruelty? If a woman, with the advice of her doctor, believes that carrying a foetus to term would be cruel, for the lifetime either of herself or the child, for example by endangering her life, the life of the child, or both, would abortion using a not-”non-cruel” method then be acceptable to you?

Leaving the difficulties of the distinction aside, and given that you accept that there would be a role in society for “non-cruel” abortion, what role do you say a woman should have in the decision? What role should anyone else have? Is it, in the end, any of your business or mine what happens in the decision making process, if we are not directly involved? The decision is obviously non-trivial; people make mistakes; but people also make good decisions. We can trust the people concerned to do their best. As people, no-one needs the kind of heavy-handed, moralizing, micromanaging interference, hostility, obstruction and outright violation that is the objective of the “right-to-life” movement. A moment’s reflection on the current state of the law in Virginia and Texas will show I am not exaggerating.

It appears that Mr. Friend is OK with an external authority imposing its  judgement and standards on women who are in circumstances he can never find himself in, but not OK when an authority imposes on him.

Also, until full consciousness is achieved, it’s not a person.  There is no soul.

God I love this country. Imagine the pushback to this in the US.

You illustrate very well one of the reasons why panels of men should not be making life-altering decisions for others. It’s far better to leave this decision to the woman and her physician. Don’t you think?

The interesting fallout from the supreme court decision is that it just struck down the laws in place at the time, and since then there has been no legislation to replace it, which means abortion in Canada is not limited by any legislation at all – the only considerations that matter are those between a woman and her doctor, although there are some guidelines and regulations put in place by Provinces. In short, the Criminal Code of Canada says that a baby is only a baby at the moment of birth.  The Chief Justice at the time wrote:

“Forcing a woman, by threat of criminal sanction, to carry a fetus to term unless she meets certain criteria unrelated to her own priorities and aspirations, is a profound interference with a woman’s body and thus a violation of her security of the person.”

Interestingly, a member of the governing Conservative party (which officially has no policy stance on abortion) introduced a private-members bill which would study the issue of putting some sort of law in place to govern the practice a couple of years ago. Even that much movement towards legislation was debated hotly enough that when it went for a vote, it was defeated with even many Conservatives voting against it, with the socially conservative Prime Minister saying he would not re-open the debate on abortion and voting against the bill himself. My feeling is that it’s probably pretty safe to say the status quo isn’t going to move anywhere for a while.

Somehow, this has not led to the complete destruction of our society, women are not treating it as a form of birth control, and god has completely failed to rain destruction down upon us. In fact, since 1998 the rates of abortion have been falling.

In unrelated news, I (likely amongst others) submitted this. It was fun finding it: scroll scroll scroll … hm. Interesting … hey, look at that hair… oh she’s named Doctorow…  Oh hey, it’s Corey!