In the midst of our latest political season, a far more important project was underway: the 40 Days for Life campaign. Best exemplified by the fervent people on 15th Avenue next to UHNBC with signs like "adoption a loving option," this movement has the goal of ending abortion. Their chosen methods are providing resources to women facing unplanned pregnancies as well as combining political advocacy with a public witness.
Abortion is an issue I take seriously because of my own adoption. Despite the laws only having been struck down in 1988, the physician attending my 26-year-old native mother profiled her for a "procedure" that would have ended in my death. Thankfully, she made a choice both of us could live with by giving me up at birth. Her decision, let alone situation, was fraught with a host of difficulties, but I am a living testament to the fact that there are alternatives to termination.
Of course no column on so difficult a topic can avoid the moral questions involved - but I am happy to offer pathways around the political quagmire if it keeps tiny humans alive. First, the adoption process should be streamlined, especially for aboriginal children, even if potential parents may be non-Indigenous; and, second, keeping one's preborn child shouldn't cause financial panic - this can be remedied by amending the child benefit program to include pregnant women.
There is no politically viable argument against either policy: everyone knows a couple desperately trying to adopt while facing a craven amount of red tape; and legislators voting against helping all the pregnant ladies with cash flow are going to find themselves unelected.
I'm certain that these changes could be fully funded, with a savings found, if all abortive procedures in Canada were defunded. That is hard to prove because of how well costs around the termination of human lives in the womb are hidden, an odd phenomenon: after all, if abortion is just another aspect of "healthcare," then opening up the books for an audit should only take a simple request, like asking for the numbers on hip replacement surgeries or innoculations, right?
The obvious answer helps segue to a deeper issue, for if we truly lived in an enlightened age, then empirical data would dictate every policy, no matter how controversial. Any biologist can tell you that life begins at conception, and not when we exit what Laura Klassen aptly called "the magical birth canal." However, due to human fickleness, political cowardice, and no small amount of profiteering, the legal status of abortion in Canada has been in a vacuum for 31 years.
There is another irony here, in our age of political correctness and material reductionism, best exemplified by the pro-abortion agitators inconsistently gathered on the same road as our pro-life citizens: to the slogan, "don't want an abortion? Don't get one," I can only respond "then please feel free to stop funding them with our taxes;" and to any variations on "I'm a woman, not a womb," I'll happily deliver a busload of intersectionalists to help debate all questions of gender.
The short answer to any accusation of conflation over the words above is this isn't some absurd dimension where logic doesn't apply. Simply put, it cannot be the case that our biology is inconsequential, yet also somehow bequeaths one sex a veto on certain controversial topics.
Indeed, considering how often mothers are pressured to terminate their children by men who wish to avoid responsibility, or how certain cultures purposely abort females because males hold more value, it's a wonder why anyone with XX chromosomes is defending abortion.
Questions of internalized oppression, brought on by the Culture of Death we inhabit, will have to wait for another time. Until then, groups like 40 Days for Life will continue to pray and offer help to any who ask, heeding the Savior's words: "whatever you do for the least of these..."
