Canadian Medical Association: babies not human until after birth

OTTAWA, 16 August, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The largest association of doctors in Canada, in an attempt to stonewall a looming abortion debate from being unleashed, voted yesterday to support the wording of the country’s Criminal Code which states that a baby becomes a “human being” only after being born.

Pro-life doctors and leaders have condemned the move as ‘shameful’, ‘unethical’, and ‘defying parody’.

Delegates to the Canadian Medical Association’s annual general council voted on the motion so as to prevent what they called a “backdoor” attempt to reopen the abortion debate. They voted to pass, says a CMA report on the meeting, “a resolution supporting the current wording of the Criminal Code which states that a child ‘becomes a human being within the meaning of this Act when it has completely proceeded, in a living state, from the body of its mother…’”

Canadian Physicians for Life condemned the CMA’s move, saying that “every Canadian doctor knows that the unborn child is a live human being.”

Dr. Will Johnston, president of Canadian Physicians for Life in a statement emailed to LifeSiteNews pointed out the hypocrisy of the Canadian Medical Association which has a long-established policy of supporting the killing of human life through abortion.

“CMA delegates worry about children not exercizing enough or not wearing bicycle helmets, while over one hundred thousand children go missing from our playgrounds every year because they were killed by abortion.”

“The mismatch between this problem and yesterday’s conversation from the CMA annual general meeting defies parody,” he said.

Dr. John Shea, MD FRCP(C), told LifeSiteNews from his home in Toronto that the delegates to the CMA meeting should be “ashamed of themselves for failing to recognize when human life begins”.

“The biological fact is what counts here, which is when the ovum and the sperm unite, a single-celled human organism is formed. Period. This organism is a human being, a person at the single-cell stage. From that point in time he or she has rights. Anybody who denies that fact is denying biological reality; they are lying.”

Conservative Member of Parliament Steve Woodworth filed a motion in the House of Commons last February to establish a special committee to consider when human life begins. He called for Parliament to re-examine section 223 of the Code, a 400-year-old provision inherited from British common law, that stipulates a child only becomes a “human being” “when it has completely proceeded, in a living state, from the body of its mother”.

“Section 223 is, purely and simply, a law that says some human beings are not human beings,” said Woodworth at that time.

Dr. Johnston called Section 223 of the code “our profession’s biggest shame and biggest headache. It is a disastrous public policy which does far more harm than good.”

Pro-life groups across the country rejoiced in Woodworth’s motion, hoping that it might provide a foundation to offer protection to unborn children in the womb.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has pledged to vote against the motion when it comes up, calling it “unfortunate” that the motion was deemed votable by an all-party committee of the House. Woodworth’s motion has been postponed till the fall.

Jim Hughes, president of Campaign Life Coalition, told LifeSiteNews that CMA’s motion “just shows the sorry state of the leaders of the CMA who have drifted so far from the oath of Hippocrates.”

The Hippocratic Oath, originating in 5th century BC, was until recently sworn by those who practiced the healing arts so that they would do so ethically and honestly. At one point in the oath, doctors swear that they will not give a woman medicaments to “cause an abortion.”

Canadian Medical Association: babies not human until after birth

Blatantly political and having nothing to do with biology. From the moment of conception, there is a genetically unique individual that will, unless otherwise interfered with by disease, trauma, or design, proceed through a series of definable stages that end in senescence and death. Regardless of whatever happens to it along the way (even becoming liberal), that being is continuously of a single nature. The CMA is trying to treat fundamental being as a stage of development or circumstance of being. This is simply insane and is designed for the purpose of allowing people a justification for killing their unborn without feeling guilty. That is, they have to find ways of making the act seem other than it actually is.

The various ways of making it seem other than or not as bad as it is are to redefine, reinterpret, redirect, and refuse.

Redefine. Call it something else. Use other words that are foreign or neutral or technical. Let’s not refer to it as an unborn baby, let’s refer to it as a “fetus” (meaning ‘baby’ in Latin) or a “product of conception” or a “mass of tissue” like a tumor or just ignore it completely and just focus on the process, the “pregnancy.” So you’re not “killing your unborn baby,” but removing “the products of conception” or “terminating the pregnancy” or just doing some body sculpting.

Reinterpret. And since some people who believe killing a newborn is murder could be persuaded that a matter of weeks on the other side of the birth canal doesn’t make much difference, it’s helpful to reinterpret things so that the “murder” label doesn’t even make sense any more. If a being isn’t a person, killing it isn’t murder. The object, then, is to think of all the ways it could be considered something other than human. Some of the following appear more lame than others. But that depends on the degree to which they seem to fail to overcome your objection to calling it other than human:

It’s not finished yet, so just as a vehicle on the assembly line isn’t really a car until it can actually be driven and used as a car, so the developing products of conception aren’t yet a human person.

During fetal development the products of conception are recapitulating the evolutionary history from single-celled organism, through fish, and so forth, and so isn’t yet a person any more than a tadpole is a person or a human.

It’s not human because it’s totally dependent on the mother in the womb and is “unviable.”

It’s not human because it doesn’t even look human in the early stages.

It’s not yet human because it doesn’t have the ability to think and reason and contribute to society (though, if it’s female, killing it is denying it its future constitutionally protected right to choose).

It’s not a human because it hasn’t breathed and it’s when it breathes that the soul enters the body and it becomes a human being, so something without a soul isn’t human.

It’s just tissue, you know, meat, and, if you kill it, it isn’t murder.

But they forget that for many people in society, “meat is murder.” And the unborn child is at least meat, so isn’t that murder? Well, no, they would argue, because we don’t eat the products of human conception and, besides, it wasn’t born yet. But don’t animal rights people claim that killing the unborn calf for food (the true veal) is tantamount to murder and animal rights activists call it murder even though they don’t want to eat it? So if it’s a moral outrage to kill an unborn calf as a food choice it’s not a moral outrage to kill an unborn human as a “reproductive choice”? This interface between “reproductive rights” and “food rights” is something that is not extensively discussed, probably because doing so would result in the exact opposite of what is desired: a way of redefining and reinterpreting the problem into something tolerable.

Redirect. Another way to soften the image of abortion is to refer to it as a “medical procedure” and a “right of privacy” and “reproductive freedom.” And they can go farther, not even referring to the pregnancy at all, but to their “body” as in “our bodies, our selves” and claim that no one has a right to tell them what they can do with their own bodies. This redirects attention from the one getting aborted right past the specifics of the particular abortion and onto external and generally revered societal themes such as science and medical technology, rights, and personal autonomy. Given the long-standing emphasis on the wonders of medical science in Western society, this practice can, at least, appropriate to itself a little of the mojo of medical science. Hey, it’s just a medical procedure that is done by doctors and doctors are like gods, so it can’t really be that bad, right? Sure, just as long as you don’t think of other doctors like Mengele in Nazi Germany carrying out all sorts of medical experiments they claimed necessary for the advancement of the master race on the bodies of those who were termed useless mouths, the dead weight of human debris. At least they were benefiting society, right, even though they don’t deserve to live in it, being by their very nature dangerous to society’s welfare and justly targeted for elimination. And given the emphasis in our society of rights and liberty and personal autonomy, the appeal to “right of privacy” and “reproductive freedom” helps to blunt others’ criticism of the act and redirects the attention away from the abortion and onto them, making them appear to be intrusive into something that is just “the decision between a woman and her doctor” or wanting her to be enslaved by her pregnancy by those who themselves are too selfish to step up to the plate to offer her any help. Never mind that a decision between a woman and her doctor to knock off an abusive husband wouldn’t be called “privacy” but “premeditated murder.”

Refuse. Refuse to acknowledge that your chosen course of action could have any possible consequence other than the one you imagine for it. Since you are in complete control, because it is your choice alone, there is no one more able to determine what is better for you than you. You are the captain of your ship. You are the master of your fate. This, of course, has long been the method of the so-called eugenicists (another euphemism) who try to retrofit society into their idea of paradise by getting rid of what they term undesirable elements, dead human waste, useless mouths, mental, physical, psychological, and even political defectives. To do this they have proposed voluntary and involuntary sterilization, mechanical or chemical birth control, elective and forced abortion, infanticide, or when other methods are too slow or when the need is too urgent, even genocide. Keeping this in mind, you’ve got to wonder what’s going on when the majority of abortions in the United States come from the two largest minority groups, black and Hispanic, and the majority of abortions are carried out by Planned Parenthood, founded by the eugenicist Margaret Sanger to help rid the country of “undesirable races.” To ensure the desired future, the ones in control, the ones who know better, have to make the hard choices for rest. It’s a noble and lonely destiny and there are always those who will criticize them for making the tough choices that in the end will benefit everyone.

So when people try to sell you something that isn’t to your benefit, they always try to describe it in terms that make it seem more desirable than it is. And when people try to do something they sense is wrong but still desire to do, they always try to describe it in terms that make it seem less morally repugnant than it is. Whether a mastermind trying to wholesale reinvent or fundamentally transform society or a woman trying to get out of what appears at the moment to be the threat of a fundamentally transformed life, the approach is the same: redefine, reinterpret, redirect, and finally refuse to accept any criticism. Why? Because the one who is in total control doesn’t have to.

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