How did we ever come to this muddled way of thinking? Did you notice how a good number of the people interviewed said “it depends”. In other words, the abortion decision is not right or wrong in and of itself. It would be OK if the woman was raped, but not if she was “rich” or used it for “birth control”.
What this shows is that
1) people think about the issue almost entirely through what will happen to the mother’s “freedom.” That is why there is this appeal to situational ethics. Rarely do the respondents mention the humanity of the unborn child….
2) people have not been properly educated about just what precisely is being aborted, what the consequences are to the woman, child, and to the greater culture.
We do not define a child in and out of existence merely because of the financial circumstances of its mother or the situation surrounding its birth.
Undergirding all of this is an underlying foundation of fear and a false view of freedom.
Freedom to kill an unborn child is not authentic freedom. The act remains intrinsically evil and the consequences of abortion (and there are many) remain with the woman for the rest of her life. She may be “rid of” the responsibility of rearing a child, but she can never escape what evil had to be committed to purchase this so-called freedom. In point of fact, she has not purchased freedom at all, but rather only enslavement to the serious health and emotional consequences which will continue to exact payment from her all her life. Some freedom that is.
Killing another human being does not bring relief or freedom. It brings the opposite.
That is why we need a national, transparent debate in this nation about this issue. We need to hear from women who have had abortions. We need to read and hear about the advances in fetal development.
Since we won’t get it from the Catholic BashingCorporation or the PseudoConservativeParty, we must find other means of pushing the envelope and forcing the discussion out of the dark ages of the sixties.
This is way too funny. The CBC, that paragon of useless Canadian inclusivity and tolerance, has accidentally gone and made abortion a prominent topic of discussion on their little FaceBook entry called “The Great Canadian Wish List”. After willfully ignoring and misrepresenting the abortion issue year-after-year, this lame excuse for a public broadcaster has inadvertently stoked the fires of this controversy by reviving an issue that simply will never go away.
It turns out that the number one vote getter right now is…drum roll please….the end to abortion! Yes, folks, you too can join the swelling ranks of pro-lifers and skeptical agnostics as they rebel against the enforced silence and the so-called “settled issue forever and ever amen” brigade by participating in the CBC’s Great Canadian Wish List. Here is the text of the wish:
I wish that there was an end to abortion in Canada.
The intentional killing of an innocent human being is wrong. Abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent human being. Therefore abortion is wrong.
From the moment of conception a unique, individual human being is created with separate DNA from his/her mother. They also could have a different blood type and/or gender if the preborn child is a male.
By the law of biogenesis, to find out what a living thing is, we look to see what the parent’s are. Clearly, a woman’s offspring must be human. The term “foetus” is from Latin and means “offspring” or “young one”. It is a stage in development for the newly created human, just like toddler. Stages of development change, but we are always human.
The law governs many other things people deem wrong, ie. Child abuse and rape. People can choose to do these, but laws are in place against them because they harm other human beings.
With no protection for the preborn child, until they take their first breath, today in Canada over 100,000 lives are ended each year. There is also no informed consent law for women making this important decision. Many women become depressed, and/or infertile, among other things. Infection is the most common physical harm which can lead to hemorrhaging and can lead to death. Abortion is not safe for women.
This wish aims to redeem the humanity of the preborn child. It also recognizes that there needs to be necessary social changes in place to support women in crisis pregnancies.
To lend your support for this wish, please follow the instruction which my friend and fellow pro-life blogger, Suzanne, has detailed below. Take a few moments to register your account and jump on the pro-life bandwagon to end the scourge of abortion and exploitation of women.
There is something happening in this country regarding the issue of abortion. What has seemed for 40 years to be something so entrenched and accepted is, in reality, only hanging by a thread. A mild but firm wind will cut the thread that has choked millions of unborn children these past 40 years, while enslaving and ruining the lives of millions of women. The “mantra of choice” has not led to an emancipation at all, but rather to an enslavement in the desert of depression, despair, and death.
And while our political leaders wring their hands and lament foreign holocausts of previous generations, they are blinded to the national holocaust of our own children these past 40 years. And they won’t lift a finger, but actually do their utmost, to squash any debate on the unquestionable destructive effects of abortion - not only to the direct victims of abortion (women and their babies), but also on the collective soul of our nation and the societal and cultural consequences of 3,000,000+ dead Canadian babies, dead Canadian workers, dead Canadian democrats, dead Canadian moms, dead Canadian dads, and eventually, a dead Canada.
We are a nation of cowards who elect politicians who sell us smooth lies and feed us what we want to hear. They keep us from the truth and refuse to challenge us. They don’t lead. They follow. Because they love power more than the truth, they seek to squash debate on fundamental questions of human existence – not the least of which is the very capacity to transmit an authentic Canadian culture to future generations. But there is less and less of Canadian culture to transmit and there are fewer and fewer of us to do the transmitting.
Canada? What’s that? A patchwork nation of individuals held together by a shared committment to unfettered and sterile orgasms, some spending money, and a welfare state on the edge of collapse and ruin. That’s about it. That about sums up our common Canadian values.
We are a nation which is very sick and very fearful of its own future. We refuse to face our criminal past in dealing with the real crimes against our own humanity.
Being so self-absorbed in our own self-righteous denunciations about ethnic cleansing in so many parts of the world, we dare not look in the mirror and remove the planks from our own eyes. Those planks are large indeed.
We Canadians are a very industrious people, after all. We are the experts at evacuating and cleansing ourselves of a humanity we would prefer not to discuss, and exporting this destruction to every corner of the globe. Canada has become a curse to the world instead of the blessing it should be.
And what is worse in this whole tragedy is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Education and discussion are a way out of this entanglement, but our so-called democratic politicians refuse to allow the discussion to go forward. So we have the very odd situation where the country at large is very willing to discuss this issue and is very open to applying some kind of restrictions on abortions, but our politicians, especially the ones stylying themselves as “conservative”, simply refuse to allow the trojan horse into Parliament. Why? Because they have become little dictators on the question, having sold out Canada’s future for some fleeting and temporal power – a kind of political orgasm reminiscent of this sex drenched society which wants a quick hit and “to hell with the future” sentiment.
“The Conservative government won’t be initiating or supporting abortion legislation, and I’ll use whatever influence I have in Parliament to be sure that such a matter doesn’t come to a vote,” Harper told reporters in Quebec today, according to a CBC report. “I will use whatever influence I have to keep that off of the agenda, and I don’t see any likelihood of that in the next Parliament,” he said.
If Stephen Harper cares about Canada, regardless of his own personal convictions on the issue of abortion, he should show himself to be an authentic democrat and allow his colleagues in the Conservative Party to bring forward legislation on abortion.
The muzzle must be put down, Mr. Harper. The voices of the unborn need to be heard. Now. _____________________________ To register for an account on Facebook:
(Angus Reid Global Monitor) – Many adults in Canada appear to question the ideological dimension of their governing party, according to a poll by Angus Reid Strategies. 41 per cent of respondents think no current federal political party truly represents conservatism in Canada
…
In April, former National Citizens Coalition vice-president Gerry Nicholls expressed dissatisfaction with the current government in an op-ed, writing, “They have failed to cut back on the size of government, failed to control spending and failed to introduce broad-based tax cuts for both individuals and businesses.”
…
Do you agree or disagree with this statement? – No current federal political party truly represents conservatism in Canada.
This is NOT a good sign for the Conservative Party. They campaigned on being conservative and that is why they got elected. Now a good number of Canadians think otherwise, and that can only spell disaster for the Conservative Party. Being a hairs-breath right of the Liberals is a disaster waiting to happen, not unlike what befell Kim Campbell. Don’t blink, it can happen again.
Ask yourself this question. What would happen, do you think, to a man who admitted to leaving a newborn infant head down in a toilet?
Is there really any doubt? Such a monster — and that’s what he’d be called — would be charged immediately with attempted murder.
If he were an adult, his name would be released and he would more than likely be paraded in front of the media so we could all get a really good look at “the kind of person who could do such a thing.”
Contrast that reality with what has happened to the woman who gave birth to a baby boy in a Wal-Mart washroom in Prince Albert, Sask., on May 21 and it’s clear that when it comes to equality before the law, women tend to get off easy in comparison to men.
The baby boy was found, not breathing head down in a bloody toilet bowl by the store manager, who managed to resuscitate the boy by performing CPR until paramedics arrived.
Because of moronic privacy laws in Saskatchewan, the communications people at Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon, to where Baby John Doe was transferred, can’t even release the medical condition of the newborn, though police said yesterday the baby was released to children’s services.
It wouldn’t be surprising if the baby has suffered some brain and lung damage, thanks to his first breaths being toilet water rather than air.
And this is surprising? Oh come now. Let’s not get too uptight.
The indictment does not fall against this woman. She’s just acting out what society says is fine. The only thing she slipped up on was the location. If she simply had the foresight to do her deed in Everywoman’s Clinic instead of Walmart, everybody would have been just groovy with it.
I’m a social conservative. When the mullahs take over, I’ll grow my beard a little fuller, get a couple of extra wives, and keep my head down. It’s the feminists and gays who’ll have a tougher time. If, say, three of the five judges on the Massachusetts Supreme Court are Muslim, what are the chances of them approving “gay marriage”? (Source: America Alone, Mark Steyn, p. xxvii)
It is truly a remarkable sight to see the useful idiots of western democracies who style themselves “progressives” and the Islamists joining forces to stamp out any vestiges of traditional western morality and classic democratic principles.
What a great irony that those things the Left so clamors for now will be completely eradicated under Islam when the Mullahs take over. And you know what? I very much doubt they will care. Their hatred for Christianity and the West is even greater than their love for their distorted view of freedom.
That is why we should not hold our breath and expect them to see sense when our common way of life becomes seriously compromised.
As part of my one hour spent with the Lord in Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, I have begun reading The Imitation of Christby Thomas à Kempis once again. Every week or so, I post an entry from his rich work for edification and spiritual reflection….
Imitation of Christ (1.3.6) When people desire anything to an excessive degree, they immediately lose their peace of soul. The proud and avaricious are always perturbed; while the humble and the poor in spirit live in peace and contentment.
I’m a social conservative. When the mullahs take over, I’ll grow my beard a little fuller, get a couple of extra wives, and keep my head down. It’s the feminists and gays who’ll have a tougher time. If, say, three of the five judges on the Massachusetts Supreme Court are Muslim, what are the chances of them approving “gay marriage”? (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p. xxvii )Appeasement is a vote to live in the present tense, to hold the comforts of the moment. To fight for king and country is to fight for the future. But a barren society has no future, and so what’s to fight for?” (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p.37)
The Left, for its part, offers an appeal to moral virtue: it’s better to pay more in taxes and to share the burdens as a community. It’s kinder, gentler, more compassionate, more equitable. Unfortunately, as recent European elections results demonstrate, nothing makes a citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism: once a fellow’s enjoying the fruits of government health care and all the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general social interest; he’s got his, and if it’s going to bankrupt the state a generation hence, well, as long as they keep the checks coming till he’s dead, it’s fine by him. (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p.45)
This is why countries that fall into this model don’t care about defense and care even less about having children. National Defense means losing comforts. It means sacrificing part of the huge social programs they have come to expect, to be entitled to. And children? Too expensive. Too much of a drag. (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p45-55)
Her Majesty’s chilly Dominion is the land where straights live in comon-law partnerships and the gays get maried. And the upshot is: America’s fertility rate is 2.11; Canada’s is 1.48. And where does that lead? Canucks are aging faster than the Yanks. In 2000, oldsters formed 16.3% of America’s population and 17% of Canada’s-close enough. In 2040, they’ll form 26% of America’s population and 33.3% of Canada’s. (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p.55)
“Looking at it another way”, wrote Frank Gaffney in his book War Footing, “Saudi Arabia-which currently exports about ten mbd [million barrels of oil a day]-receives an extra half billion dollars every day.” Where does that extra half-bil go? It goes to the mosques and madrassas tha the Saudis export, ideology is-petroleum merely bankrolls it. (Mark Steyn, Americal Alone, p. 69)
Herbert Asquith is not the most famous British prime minister to American ears, but he’s the one who took his ocuntry into the Great War, which is the one that ended the Caliphate and delivered the Arab world into British hands. His great-granddaughter, Emma Clark, is now a Muslim. She’s a landscape artist and has designed an “Islamic garden” at the home of the Prince of Wales. The Honorable Jonathan Birt, sone of Lord Birt, the former director general of the BBC, is also a Muslim and is known as Yahya Birt. The Early of Yarborough is a Muslim, and oes by the name Abdul Mateen, though whether he can get served in the House of Lords tea room under that moniker is unclear. (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p.92)
Americans take for granted all the it’s about the future of our children” hooey that would ring so hollow in a European election. In the 2005 German campaign, voters were offered what would be regarded in the United States as a statistically improbable choice: a chidless man (Herr Schroder) vs. a childless woman (Frau Merkel). Statist Europe signed on to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s alleged African prover-”It takes a village to raise a child”-only to discover they got it backward: on the Continent, the lack of children will raze the village. And most of the villagers still refuse to recognize the contradictions: you can’t breed at the lethargic rate of most Europeans and then bitch and whine about letting the Turks into the European Union. Demographically, they’re the kids you couldn’t be bothered to have. (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p.109)
In eastern Germany, rural communities are dying and one consequence is that village sewer systems are having a tough time adjusting to the lack of use. Populations have fallen so dramatically that there are too few people flushing to keep the waste moving. Traditionally, government infrastructures expenditure arises from increased demand. In this case, the sewer lines are having to be narrowed at great cost in order to cope with dramatically decreased demand. (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p.114)
There’s no precedent for managed decline in societies as advanced as Europe’s, but the early indication are that it’s going to be expensive…For purposes of comparison, by 2050 public pension expenditures are expected to be 6.5% of GDP in the U.S., 16.9% in Germany, 17.3% in Spain, and 24.8% in Greece. In Europe, we’re talking not about the prospect of having to reduce benefits but about so long, farewell, auf wiedersehn, adieu, adieu, adieu to yieu and yieu and yieu.” (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p.114)
Abortion is one manifestation of what John Paul II called the reduction of sexuality into an ‘instrument for self-assertion’. Mr Reade might respond, ‘Yeah, that’s what’s so great about it!” But whatever one’s tastes in this area, as the pope understood, sex as mere self-assertion is a dead end. If the progressives either abort or decline to conceive their progeny, the progeny of the rednec knuckle draggers will be the only fellows around. (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p.179)
For many nations, it’s already too late. As Romania and other Communist countries belatedly discovered, even a repressive dictatorship has a hard job coercing the populace into breeding once they’ve lost the habit. When I’ve mentioned the birth dearth in newspaper columns on abortion, pro-”choice” readers have insisted it’s due to other factors [editor’s interruption here – of course, the mysterious “other factors” to avoid having to deal with their easy sex lives) – the generally declining fertility rates that affect all materially prosperous societies, or the high taxes that make large families prohibitively expensive in materially prosperous societies. But this is a bit like arguing over which came first, the chicken or the egg – or, in this case, which came first, the lack of eggs or the scraggy old chicken necked women desperate for one designer baby at the age of 48. Whether or not Russia, Japan, and Europe’s fertility woes derive from abortion, what should be obvious is that the way abortion issue is posited-as an issue of personal choice-is in and of itself- symptomatic of the existential crisis of the dying West.” (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p.189)
The chief characteristic of our age is “deferred adulthood”. All over North America and Europe there are millions of people going to college for no good reason. Certainly, there’s no reason why the sum of knowledge the average American has accumulated by the time he’s completed a bachelor’s degree should take twenty years to inculcate. We need to redirect the system to telescope education into a much shorter period. Instead, we’ve implicitly accepted that our bodies mature much earlier than our great-grandparents’ but that our minds don’t. We enter adolescence much sooner and leave it much later – in some cases, not until middle age. We’ve created a world where a thirty-one year old European male can stroll into a nightclub, tell the babes he lives at his mom and dad’s place in the same bedroom he’s slept in since he was in diapers-and he can still walk out with a hot-looking date. This guy would have been a laughing stock at any other point in human history. (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p.191)
The Islamic crescent flying over 10 Downing Street? You’d be surprised how quickly the question of what flag should fly over government buildings can become an issue. In 2005, Anne Owers, her Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons, banned the flying of the English national flag in English prisons on the grounds that it shows the cross of St. George, which was used by the Crusaders and so is offensive to Muslims. The Drivers and Vehicles Licensing Agency has also banned the English flg from its offices. So has Heathrow Airport. (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p.197)
If it were just terrorists bombing buildings and public transit, it would be easier: even the febblest Eurowimp jurisdiction is obliged to act when the streeet is piled with corpses. But there’s an old technique will understood by the smarter bullies. If you want to break a man, don’t attack him dead on, don’t brutalize him: pain and torture can awaken a stubborn resistance in all but the weakest. But jsut make him slightly uncomfortable, disrupt his life at the margin, and he’ll look for the easiest path to re-normalization. (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p.198)
Here is a list of 5 areas which are easy winners for any political party which promotes them.
Inset: A 24 week old unborn child. No protection for him from the barbarians of our age.
At about 24 weeks, after retinal development is complete, babies open and close their eyes intermittently. This helps a baby to perfect the blinking reflex, which will protect his eyes once he’s born. (Source)
1.Informed Consent – An informed consent law so that women have all the information about the health consequences of abortion to both themselves and the child. Yes, call me a radical, but all women (and men for that matter) should have their eyes wide open before they make the poor choice called abortion. If it’s really a choice, then everyone should have all of the information presented to them — not just the “Feminist’s Guide to Sex and then Abortion with absolutely no consequences – trust us!” mantra that has been the only official literature available to us thusfar. Abortion is a defeat for humanity and the greatest destoyer of peace and respect for human life. If we insist on flushing ourselves down the toilet, we should make sure we do it with full and complete knowledge.
2. Health Assistance – A federally funded medical and psychological assistance program made available to women who have undergone an abortion. Source of funding, you ask? The Pig, of course. SOW’s millions of dollars in funding it receives in federal “Conservative” funding and other ludicrous make work feminist projects. It’s time to direct this dead money into something useful — like actually helping women cope for the choice foisted upon them by deadbeat boyfriend number 8.
3. Statistical Disclosure – Full and complete disclosure of abortion related statistics (age of fetus, mother’s age, circumstances of the abortion, etc.) to help formulate public policy to reduce the occurrences of unwanted pregnancies. We want to know how many nine month old babies are being butchered in the womb and the conditions which led to it. A couple of dozen or 200? We don’t know. All we know is that the barbarians have kept us in the dark for far too long on their practices. Time to shed some light on what’s really going on. It’s not just the homosexuals who need to come out of the closet.
4. Private Members’ Bills – Complete freedom of MPs to bring forward private members bills on moral and social issues. We need to be free of Harper’s muzzle! Right now, the Conservative Party is the best thing that could happen to Henry Morgentaller’s vision for Canada. Even the Liberal Party isn’t as left on this issue. What a national disgrace the CPC is on this issue. They are nothing more than the lapdogs of the pro-abort left and have thrown out any kind of common sense on this issue along with their respect for democracy.
5. National Public Debate – In light of Canada’s (and the West’s) demographic crisis and imminent death watch, a national debate should be hosted by the nation’s public broadcaster on the consequences of abortion on Canada. Oh, I know, it’s a revolutionary thought. Can you imagine the CBC being a forum for REAL public debate? What a gas that would be. Imagine the ratings such a program would get!
These are all modest proposals that are easily supported by the vast majority of Canadians who have consistently shown that they want some restriction on abortion. None of the above proposals ban or even restrict abortion at all. They simply insist that full disclosure, debate, and post abortion services are made available to Canadian women.
I am proud to announce the publication of my book, The Vocation of Business: Social Justice in the Marketplace, by Continuum International.
The overriding theme of this book is that the original unity of distributive and corrective justice that prevailed in both economics and moral discourse until the 16th and seventeenth centuries was shattered by the rise of an individualistic capitalism that relied on corrective justice (justice in exchange) alone. But an economics that lacks a distributive principle will attain neither equity nor equilibrium and will be inherently unstable and increasingly reliant on both government power (Keynesianism) and consumer credit (usury) to correct the imbalances. Catholic social teaching, by contrast, emphasis a greater equity in the distribution of land and other means of production, and the just wage, and thereby leads more naturally to economic equilibrium and social justice. Finally, the book shows many examples of functioning systems, both large scale and small, that operate on the principles taught by the Church and produce a high degree of both equity and equilibrium.
I am also proud to have two very nice “blurbs.”
In this remarkable book John Médaille succeeds in showing how the more radical elements in Catholic Social teaching can be turned into really practical projects for building an alternative to capitalism. He shows that the key is to alter the culture of the business and the corporation in order to ensure that political and economic purposes, distributive and corrective justice become once again integrated, as classical philosophy and Christian theology alike demand. *The Vocation of business* supplies us at last with some keys for the turning of Christian critique of liberalism into a new from of effective practice.
John Milbank University of Nottingham
“John Médaille has produced a tour de force – a book that manages to give the reader just enough insight into the various thinkers and subjects treated without overloading the reader and without missing anything important out. The careful yet unequivocal judgement on neoconservatism and the chapter on Distributism are particuarly good.”
Helen Alford OP, Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Angelicum
Take a look inside this book at Amazon.com (http://tinyurl.com/3bdmud ). You may contact me at john@medaille.com
John C. Médaille
_______________
Got the above email in my inbox. I have always believed that while Catholicism has been at the forefront of engaging the culture of death, one thing that has been lacking is a comprehensive and workable economic theory which is compatible with Catholic social teaching.
Socialism is a sin. We all know that. But so is unbridled capitalism. We need to foster an education system that allows Catholics and other Christians to come up with a workable model.
Our country desperately needs a coalition of populists and social conservatives. Day after day this Conservative government becomes more and more indistinguishable from its Liberal counterparts.
Politics is the same thing as any other human endeavour. It starts out very noble and idealistic, but given some time and space, it forgets what it was established for and exists only to sustain itself.
That’s what has become of the Conservative Party.
The base doesn’t care if you are in a minority situation for the next 10 years, guys.
From: pacheco1@socon.ca To: NationalOffice@chp.ca Subject: New Political Avenue Headers: Show All Headers
Greetings,
My name is John Pacheco. I am social conservative activist here in Ottawa.
As you may have been reading in the press lately, there is a growing movement within the Conservative Party for reform. The two major constituents in this movement are the populist-reform wing and the social conservative wing.
Both of our groups are currently in the process of exploring what avenues are available to us in this new coalition. One route is organizing within the Party. The other approach is to form a new political party.
The purpose of this email is to inquire whether the CHP and its supporters would consider supporting this initiative if certain conditions could be met, and if so, what conditions they would be.
Yours very truly,
John Pacheco Social Conservatives United www.socon.ca
Entries (RSS)