What gives life value?

Below is the text of an email to a utilitarian bioethicist.

____________________

From: MarkPickup@shaw.ca
To: Arthur Caplan, Ph.D., Chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and the Director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Dear Dr. Caplan: We have communicated before, primarily about the Schiavo case. [Caplan advocated Terri Schiavo's death. I advocated for her to live.] I want to share a photograph of my youngest grandson and me to illustrate a point: What ultimately gives life quality is not physical function. In my case I am incurably ill and disabled (triplegic) from multiple sclerosis. My life has quality because of love. Moments like this are amongst my happiest.

This was a critical point I want to help you not to overlook because you missed it with the Terri Schiavo case. Terri's estranged husband was clearly in a conflict of interest with Terri. Michael Schiavo was living with another woman and started a family with her. He had every reason to want his disabled wife out of the picture. She was clearly a burden to his new life.

We had no way of knowing what Terri wanted, she left no written directive, we only had hearsay testimony of her husband that she wanted to die.

Yet Terri Schiavo had every reason to live. She was dearly loved by her parents, her brother and sister (I know, they are personal friends of mine). They wanted to take Terri into their embrace and care for her. It was people like you, and other academics, her estranged husband as well as Florida's courts (George Greer in particular) who advocated her death, under the most flimsy assertions she would not want to live in her disabled condition. So what! I do not want to live in my disabled state of advanced MS either, ... but it doesn't mean I'm better off dead. As you can plainly see from the photograph, I am loved.

Perhaps if I was not loved or felt I was a burden on loved-ones, I would want to die. But the response of a civilized society should not be to assist my suicide, rather help me seek life with dignity instead of so-called "death with dignity." Dying with dignity is not achieved by offering poison to a person who has sunk beneath the waves of depression or circumstances. Dying with dignity is the end result of having lived with dignity. Even a stupid man like me knows that.

Love is the final arbiter of life's dignity and value, not physical or mental capacity. I want to help you not to overlook or miss this critically important point.

Mark Pickup
Beaumont, AB.,
Canada

Bill Clinton's little outburst

While campaigning for his wife’s Democratic nomination, Bill Clinton, was confronted by pro-Life demonstrators. One protester held up a sign that said "Abortion is murder." Bill Clinton lost his cool: "I gave you the answer. We disagree with you." He continued,

"You wanna criminalize women and their doctors and we disagree. I reduced abortion. Tell the truth, tell the truth, if you were really pro-life, if you were really pro-life, you would want to put every doctor and every mother as an accessory to murder in prison. And you won't say you wanna do that because you know, that you wouldn't have a lick of political support. Now, the issue is who, the issue is, you can't name me anybody presently in politics that did more to introduce policies that reduce the number of real abortions instead of the hot air putting out to tear people up and make votes by dividing America. This is not your rally. I heard you. That's another thing you need is a president, somebody who will stick up for individual rights and not be pushed around, and she won't."

No, Mr. Clinton, you are wrong.

I have been involved with the pro-Life movement for a quarter of a century and have spoken from coast to coast in both Canada and the United States. I’ve met literally hundreds if not thousands of pro-Lifers.

I have never known any pro-Life advocate who thinks women should be jailed for having an abortion. Not one. The former President’s outburst of temper is patently absurd.

Abortionists in jail

I am “really pro-Life”. I don’t want to put “every” doctor in jail, just abortionists. As for women who have abortions, they are victims as much as their babies. Why would I want to see them in jail?

Mr. Clinton, please let me “tell the truth, tell the truth.” I have no interest in criminalizing women. As co-founder of a crisis pregnancy centre for women in crisis pregnancies, (of which there are hundreds across North America) my intent was to provide women complete, accurate, and current information about abortion and prenatal life. It was never my desire to see any woman put in the bloody hands of some low-life abortionist. It is abortionists who should be in jail, Mr. Clinton. Most doctors (and certainly those of a Hippocratic tradition) have very low opinions of abortionists.

In response to the sign "Abortion is murder" Clinton said "We disagree with you." Why would he disagree when decades ago biology established that human life begins at conception? Ideology and bigotry. He does not accept the humanity and personhood of the unborn child. To people of his liberal ilk, access to abortion is more important that the universal human right to life declared by the UN's Declaration of Universal Human Rights. (In 1998, his own administration celebrated the 50th anniversary of that lofty document.)

Selective human rights

Yet he agrees and champions the freedom to choose the death of one's own offspring before birth, or in the birth canal by partial birth abortion. He considers it a woman's right. By his behavior we know he does not really believe in universal human rights at all. Bill Clinton believes in selective human rights.

Bill Clinton spoke about “real abortions.” All abortion is real. It is not pro-Life advocates who “tear people up.” It is the abortionist who literally tears people up; the abortionist knowingly tears up the littlest and youngest members of humanity. With grisly precision of suction aspiration or dilation and Curettage (D&C), the abortionist tears up preborn children.

One day, perhaps years from her abortion, the mother will learn about the marvel prenatal life; the reality of her earlier abortion will tear her up and break her heart. It may even break the heart of the father of the aborted child. I know, I am one.

Lies and abandonment

The woman who chooses abortion is often as much a victim as her child. She may have made a terrible decision out of desperation, or abandonment, ignorance or listening to the lie that her baby is just a blob of tissue.

Where will the Clintons and their sophistry be when the reality of abortion hits home for the post-abortive woman? They will be far away probably denying that post abortion trauma even exists. It will be pro-Life people who will comfort the post-abortive woman in her sorrow, helping her pick up the pieces and rebuild and reconcile with God and herself.

Mark Pickup

Read Mark Pickup's latest blog "I used to be an artist" at http://markpickup.blogspot.com/

The case of Robert Latimer: Justice denied

Seven years into his second-degree murder conviction, child-killer and Canadian folk-hero, Robert Latimer won day parole today. In Canada, second degree murder carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole for at least ten years. (The jury at his trial recommended he only serve one year.) Happily the sentence was mandatory, but he still gets out three years earlier than minimum requirements. Hey, who’s counting?

Actually Canada’s disability community, their advocates and allies were counting. You see, Canadian courts tend to be easy on killers of the disabled. Seven out of ten Canadians support Robert Latimer. Seventy percent of Canadians agree with assisted suicide for the chronically ill and disabled.

Canadian citizens with disabilities and incurable illnesses needed re-assurance that we are seen as deserving of equal legal protections as able-bodied Canadians. We didn’t get it.


Disability community responds

Jim Derksen of the Council for Canadians with Disabilities told CBC News, "I worry that the public will understand this parole as some kind of sanction of what he [Robert Latimer] did."


Craig Langston, the president of the Cerebral Palsy Association of B.C., worried other parents would follow Latimer's lead: "I think it sends a scary message that parents can decide that taking a life of their child is the right thing to do," he said. "The preservation of life should be the first concern."


Justice denied

Although it was clearly established early on that the murder of Tracey Latimer was premeditated, it was doubtful any trial would convict him of first degree murder. Latimer was eventually convicted by a reluctant, sympathetic jury to second degree murder which carries a mandatory life sentence with no chance of parole for at least ten years. Now he does not even serve the minimum requirements of the lesser sentence!

Canada is increasingly hostile to its incurably ill and disabled people, like me.

Canada’s National Parole Board reversed an earlier decision to deny Latimer’s day parole application, and granted it. They consider him a low risk to society. I suppose that’s true – he has no more disabled children to put out of his misery.

Still, one wonders why we even have minimum sentences for crimes when offenders are not required to serve them. (?) Then again, why should I be surprised? That's the appalling and unjust nature of Canadian justice.

Mark Pickup

Read Mark Pickup's blog for February 24th 2008 "I know that my Redeemer lives."

See http://markpickup.blogspot.com

We have entered a New Dark Age

In Canada, abortion was legalized in 1969. Canada’s Justice Minister of the day was the so-called "Honourable” John Turner. He stood in the House of Commons at the bill’s third reading and assured a reluctant Parliament that:

“The bill has rejected the eugenic, sociological or criminal offence reasons. The bill limits the possibility of therapeutic abortion to these circumstances: It is to be performed by a medical practitioner who is supported by a therapeutic abortion committee of medical practitioners in a certified or approved hospital, and the abortion is to be performed only where the health or life of the mother is in danger.”[1]

It was an evil ruse: Once the bill became law it did not limit abortion to certain circumstances, it allowed abortions in any circumstance. There were people who warned this would happen. One written brief submitted to Canada’s Parliament two years earlier, by an adhoc group of citizens calling themselves the Emergency Organization for the Defence of Unborn children, warned that abortion acceptance would make Canada step backward in time:

"We would enter a second Dark Age where human life counted for little…When we find ourselves killing off our unwanted babies, why not our old people, our crippled, our blind and our sick? Why not all inmates of prisons and mental institutions? …"

The brief continued,

"All abortion, in fact, is human sacrifice. If not to appease our anger, it is the sacrifice of an innocent life to our own comfort and convenience, our social and economic position or perhaps a woman’s peace of mind or physical well-being… To legalize abortion is to give official sanction to it and therefore encourage it -- not only in some circumstances, but whenever someone thinks it convenient."[2]

The paper's authors were decried, their voices shouted down. Abortion advocates discounted them as alarmists and religious kooks, … but the kooks and alarmists were right. The bill did not limit abortion. It encouraged abortion. It played into the logic of human darkness.

Abortion increase wildly after legalized

In the year that Canada’s abortion bill passed into law (1969) there were 268 abortions in the entire country. The ink was barely dry on the legislation that legalized abortion and the law was being flouted. Within twelve months, the number of Canadian abortions spiked over 4,000 percent to 11,152! In 1972, the official number of abortions in Canada jumped further to 37,299.[3] The tight narrow guidelines were rarely, if ever met. The number of abortions in Canada increased dramatically and unrelentingly. (By 1982, things became so bad in Canada that abortions outnumbered live births in Canada’s largest city of Toronto![4])

I had a discussion with a retired Canadian physician whose medical practice was its peak during the 1960s and1970s. He could not remember any request for abortion ever being refused by a hospital abortion committee. He recalled that in his experience, all requests for abortions were simply rubber-stamped.

No abortion law tolerated

Canadian abortion advocates were not happy with any law or theoretical restrictions. They wanted no law, no appearance of restrictions to abortion, regardless of how ineffective or phony Canada’s legislation might have been. They wanted abortion on demand! In 1988, the abortion lobby got its wish when Canadian Supreme Court struck down Canada’s abortion law. Abortion advocates literally danced in the streets. Since then, there has been no law restricting abortion in Canada. It is legal to have an abortion for any reason, or no reason whatsoever, during all nine months of pregnancy.

Foreshadow to Roe v. Wade

By the time of America’s infamous 1973 Roe verses Wade abortion decision by the United States Supreme Court, Canada had had its abortion legislation for nearly three and a half years. The Canadian rate of abortion increased over 13,000 percent! All America had to do was look north to Canada, with a fraction its population, for an indication of what lay in store for the US. The human carnage that was occurring north of the 49th parallel was exactly what American “progressive” secularists had been conniving to get for years: unrestricted abortion. They knew that permissiveness toward abortion would result in wild increases in abortion rates.

Former abortionist and abortion rights activist, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, wrote about this in his 1983 book The Abortion Papers: Inside the Abortion Mentality.[5] He wrote that during the 1960s groups like the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) claimed, without documentation, that there were more than a million illegal abortions in America annually. Actual demographical studies on that time showed an average of 98,000 illegal abortions annually between 1940-1967. By any standard, misstating the number of abortions by 902,000 annually is an exaggeration of monumental proportions!

More than 50 million abortions have occurred in America since Roe v Wade in 1973. It is only a fraction of global abortions.

According to Paul Belien of The Brussels Journal there are now 40 million abortions performed in the world each year.[6] The Canadian kooks who spoke against abortion, forty years ago, were right.

“We would enter a second Dark Age where human life counted for little…When we find ourselves killing off our unwanted babies, why not our old people, our crippled, …”

We have entered that new New Dark Age. The next assault on the sanctity of human life is euthanasia. It has begun.

With advanced multiple sclerosis, will I be euthanasia fodder?

Mark Pickup

________________________________________________________
[1] Hansard, May 6th 1969, pp.8397-8.
[2] Taken from, Alponse de Valk, Morality and Law in Canadian Politics: The Abortion Controversy (Montreal. P.Q., Canada: Palm Publishing, 1974), p. 51. Out of print. See House of Commons Committee Proceeding minutes -- Abortion, November 8, 1967, Appendix “F,” pp.168ff..
[3] Government of Canada. Statistics Canada, Therapeutic Abortions, 1981, Minister of Supply and Services 1983, Catalogue 82-211, P.120.
[4]“Abortions outnumber live births in Toronto,” Toronto Globe and Mail, June 17th, 1983.
[5] In the mid-1979s, Dr. Nathanson renounced his abortion activities and advocacy. He became vehemently opposed to abortion and pro-Life advocate, and later became a Christian.
[6] Paul Belien, “EU to Catholic Doctors: Thou Shalt Abort,” The Brussels Journal, 27 December 2005. (http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/596). Article accessed from internet 3 January 2006.

Read the latest blog by Mark Pickup "Marriage, leadership and servanthood" at http://markpickup.blogspot.com