Reflections on Debating Peter Singer, Part 5, by Stephanie Gray Connors

On Our Human Capacity to Love

After the debate, an audience member e-mailed me saying, “I've been wrestling with the sentiments Peter shared around suffering and humans with compromised capacities. Some of what he said greatly troubled me. What occurred to me this evening is that I think killing humans who present profound suffering or need profound care is not only an assault on that person, but one on our very selves. What I think many, including Peter, miss is that without these people calling forth love and care from us, we ourselves are diminished and hurt. I suppose like all great evils, it's masquerading as a good, a kind of cruelty clothed in false mercy, which makes it all the more difficult to unmask.”

  This viewer’s sentiment expresses my observation too.  Regarding his last point about cruelty clothed in false mercy, as I prepared for my debate against Peter, one of the things I found most challenging was that Peter doesn’t come across as monstrous the way some of his views are, which then makes his views that are monstrous appear as not so bad.

  Peter and I had a private Skype call in advance of the debate, just to get to know each other as people without discussing contentious topics, a practice I’ve developed for my various debates in the last several years.  We discovered a number of things in common, including our love of travel and hiking.  He is an avid surfer and I have no doubt that my husband and he would have a smashing good time riding waves together.  When my parents watched the debate, my mom observed that Peter seemed like a friendly and calm type of person (his soothing Australian accent is certainly to his advantage), and someone she could have an enjoyable conversation with, if she were to overlook his views on abortion and euthanasia.  Moreover, Peter promotes “effective altruism” where he encourages people to share their wealth with the world’s poor; in fact, Peter himself is known for doing that with significant percentages of his income.

  I don’t deny he has good qualities, and this is where there is an important lesson for we who disagree with him: Peter is no different than any of us; every single one of us is a flawed human being.  We all have good sides, and corresponding bad sides.  We all have qualities, beliefs, and behaviors worthy of emulating, and those that are not.  The challenge is to have the discernment to not overlook the bad when someone demonstrates a good.

  For example, Peter is known for propagating the drowning child thought experiment.  If you see a child drowning in a pond, but in order to save the child you’d have to wade into the water and ruin your expensive shoes, should you do so?  The obvious answer is yes, and Peter’s perspective here that we should rescue the child at personal inconvenience is a good one.  On that, Peter and I agree.  But just because he’s right about that doesn’t mean he’s right about abortion.  In fact, his support of abortion would be analogous to having a child and then seeing a pond and subsequently intentionally placing the child into the pond to drown.  If it’s wrong to leave a child to drown because you don’t want to ruin your shoes in rescuing the child, all the more it should be wrong to intentionally create a situation where you drown a child!

  Of course, Peter would point out that if the child is aware and would suffer, then that should stop us from drowning the child.  He would then point out that since pre-born children do not suffer from abortion (at least early abortion), then it is permissible.  As mentioned previously in this series, something can be wrong even when it doesn’t inflict suffering.  But I would also add this:

  Holocaust-survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl once said, “The salvation of man is through love and in love.”  He also said, “The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is…”

  How can one be “more” human?  Aren’t you either of the species homo sapiens or not?  I think what Frankl is getting at here is, in a sense, what Peter Singer is getting at—that there are qualities or features that go beyond the physical reality of us.  Peter focuses a lot on whether a being is rational, aware, has desires, or suffers.  But even a psychopath can demonstrate all of those qualities.  I would say there is something more to us humans than just those qualities.  What that “more” is, is our capacity to love.  And the more we love, the more we live up to our nature, the more we reach the fullness of what it means to be human (hence we would associate the word “inhumane” with cruel, unloving acts). 

  So what of those who are not developed enough to love?  What of the child in the womb, or the newborn infant?  Their inability to currently manifest love (or interests and consciousness to the level we know it) shouldn’t make them candidates for destruction.  On the contrary, their immaturity in this regard should make we who are already mature be candidates for helping form them, for showing them what love is.  And once someone comes to know love through receiving it, they can return love.  Of course, even if someone doesn’t live long enough to develop the awareness needed to love back, it doesn’t absolve us of our responsibility to love them, to treat them with kindness, not cruelty.

Peter would perhaps consider this view utopian, but I fully recognize we live in an imperfect world and our call to love will not always be lived out properly. I am merely suggesting that while acknowledging that, it doesn’t justify intentionally inflicting (or promoting, or justifying) homicide on the youngest of our kind.

To read Part 6, click here.

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Reflections on Debating Peter Singer, Part 4, by Stephanie Gray Connors

Should Doctors be Killers?

  At one point in the debate, Peter Singer branched from abortion to euthanasia.  He mentioned that there are some health conditions after birth where he thinks parents, in consultation with physicians, should be able to euthanize their disabled infant.  Euthanasia is a topic that needs its own debate to be adequately addressed.  Because I have already blogged extensively about it here and am releasing a book on the topic at the end of 2020, I will keep my remarks here brief so as to stay focused on abortion.  I will say this, though:

  I suppose to give Peter credit, he was being consistent—but consistently wrong.  Beyond the aforementioned point that parents shouldn’t kill their children, I would suggest that physicians also shouldn’t kill their patients.  I am reminded of a quote by a physician of Quebec’s Jewish General Hospital, Dr. Michael Bouhadana, who said, “A doctor’s job is to cure sometimes, relieve often, comfort always, kill never.”   Or consider the drug company Pfizer: They didn’t want their pharmaceuticals being used in the death penalty.  These reasonable perspectives make their way back to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates who declared, “I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, no[r] will I make a suggestion to this effect.”

When writing about this Hippocratic Oath, which became commonplace for physicians to publicly declare, anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “For the first time in our tradition there was a complete separation between killing and curing… With the Greeks, the distinction was made clear. One profession… dedicated completely to life under all circumstances… the life of a slave, the life of the Emperor… the life of a defective child. … This is a priceless possession which we cannot afford to tarnish…”

  So what happens, then, when there isn’t a complete separation between killing and curing?  Well, what’s happened historically when those charged with curing become those involved with killing?  In short, the Holocaust, which, as a matter of tragic fact, ended the lives of three of Peter Singer’s grandparents. 

  Holocaust-survivor Elie Wiesel wrote an essay titled, “Without Conscience,” which was published in 2005 in the New England Journal of Medicine and read by medical students at UBC in Canada.  Wiesel wrote about the role of doctors in killing, saying,

  “[I]nstead of doing their job, instead of bringing assistance and comfort to the sick people who needed them most, instead of helping the mutilated and the handicapped to live, eat, and hope one more day, one more hour, doctors became their executioners…Why did some know how to bring honor to humankind, while others renounced humankind with hatred?  It is a question of choice.  A choice that even now belongs to us—to uniformed soldiers, but even more so to doctors.  The killers could have decided not to kill.”

  It’s truly bewildering when you have someone, like Peter, who is so close to the brutality and loss that was inflicted by the Nazis who nonetheless holds a view that is similar; namely, that there are human lives unworthy of life.  Lawyer Wesley J. Smith pointed this out in a lecture he gave.  He noted (around 8:22) how the Nazis would kill disabled children.  He mentions how a father of a disabled child wrote Hitler and asked Hitler if his child, who had defective limbs and other difficulties, could be euthanized.  Smith describes how Hitler responded by sending his personal physician Karl Brandt to the father:

  “Dr. Brandt explained to me [said the father] that the Fuhrer had personally sent him and that my son's case interested The Fuhrer very, very much. The Fuhrer wanted to explore the problem of people who had no future, those whose life was worthless.  From then on we wouldn't have to suffer from this terrible misfortune, because The Fuhrer had granted the mercy killing of our son.  Later we could have other children, handsome and healthy, of whom The Reich could be proud.”

  Smith then paralleled the above with an almost identical sentiment written by Peter Singer himself in his book Practical Ethics: “When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed.  The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second.  Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him.”

  Peter Singer is right to want to reduce suffering and produce a better life for people than they are already experiencing.  Those are goals.  But he is wrong about the means to achieve those goals.  In the debate I made an analogy to someone who wants to go to university to become a scientist to do a great thing like find a cure for cancer.  We can all agree that that is a good goal.  But what if the means the person used to achieve the goal was to bribe a university with money in order to be accepted?  We can all agree that means is not ethical.  So I am not questioning Peter’s desire to reduce suffering.  I am questioning his means to achieve that; namely, allowing homicide.

To read Part 5, click here.

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Reflections on Debating Peter Singer, Part 3, by Stephanie Gray Connors

On the Subject of Animal Rights

One of the things Peter Singer expressed dismay about me, was that I eat meat.  The subject of the debate, however, was not “Eating animals is immoral.”  Instead, it was, “Abortion is immoral.”  One could be a vegan, or one could be a meat eater, but both types of people could still come to the conclusion that abortion is immoral because we ought not kill innocent humans, particularly our own offspring. 

  Further, on a technical level, when someone says, “Human lives matter,” it doesn’t follow that “Animal lives don’t matter.”  By way of analogy, if someone says, “Black lives matter,” it doesn’t follow that that person is declaring, “Latino lives don’t matter.”

  If someone wants to protect animals as well as humans, they can.  I think, for example, of Bindi Irwin, the daughter of the late “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin.  Bindi is known as a “wildlife warrior” who works at the Australian Zoo.  Her love for animals is strong, but so is her love for her pre-born child.  Bindi announced her pregnancy in the first trimester and has made various posts on social media about how much she loves her yet-to-be-born daughter.

  So if Peter Singer wants to protect animals as well as humans, fine.  What is troubling, however, is that he protects animals but not all humans.

  Moreover, Peter argues that to protect humans because they’re human, and to not protect animals, is to be guilty of speciesism, which is, to him, as morally troubling as, for example, racism.

  First, consider that the non-human species that Peter protects can be guilty of speciesism.  Many species prioritize their own over another (think, for example, of the cougar mentioned previously in this series who prioritized her own babies over a human, or consider that a whale eats fish and that chimpanzees eat meat).  Is Peter going to lecture these beings for their consumption of other animals?

  Second, Peter protects beings (whether humans or not) that are conscious, rational, self-aware, and have desires.  Notice that his criteria is not limitless; it is still exclusive.  Plus, while his criteria of who gets protection may extend beyond some humans, it nonetheless is criteria that humans have.  He’s therefore picking qualities for “moral standing” or “personhood” that are present in our species (and some others, but not all others) so he’s guilty of a degree of speciesism, too.  By selecting criteria that involves intellectual capabilities but not, for example, something like having alligator skin, is to be guilty of speciesism (he just favors a number of species over others, instead of one over others).

  Third, the criteria Peter has selected for personhood are actually qualities pre-born humans do have—they just cannot act on those qualities yet due to their age.  By way of analogy, consider one way a dog is different from a cat: The canine nature involves barking and the feline nature involves meowing.  And yet, it’s possible to have a dog that cannot bark or a cat that cannot meow.  If the dog cannot bark, is it not a dog?  It is obviously still a dog, and it has the inherent capacity, by virtue of its canine nature, to bark; however, due to developmental problems or some intentional intervention, the dog simply cannot manifest a bark.  Likewise, pre-born humans, by virtue of their human nature, have the inherent capacity to be conscious, rational, self-aware, and have desires; however, because they haven’t lived long enough they haven’t yet manifested those capacities to their fullness. 

  The same could be said, by the way, about newborn children—they have the inherent capacities an adult manifests, but due to their age they cannot yet act on them.  If you ask an adult, “May I kill you?” the person will shout “No!”  If you ask an infant that same question, the child will have no comprehension of what you’ve asked; that, however, is not license to kill the child.  And yet, by Peter’s own admission, newborn infants aren’t persons of moral standing.  He estimated that it isn’t until a child is six or nine months old, post birth, that they adequately meet his criteria of personhood.  The implications, by his worldview, that such an infant could be killed as a result, should be very troubling to people.  On the contrary, the position I hold is that we ought to treat our children kindly, no matter how developed their inherent capacities are or are not.  

  Fourth, when non-human animals are found to have higher-functioning and this prompts humans to want to protect them, it is the entirety of the other species that is protected—not just the adults. I think, for example, of the sperm whale.  Several years ago, Readers Digest Canada published an article entitled “Why Whales Are People Too.”  In it, it cites a group of scientists and ethicists who met in Vancouver, Canada, which led to the creation of the “Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans: Whales and Dolphins.”  That declaration isn’t protecting only adult whales; instead, it’s protecting all the animals which fall into the category of cetaceans, which includes the itty-bitty pre-born embryonic and fetal cetacean babies.  Proof of that is with Article 1 which doesn’t discriminate based on age or developmental level and instead says, “Every individual cetacean has the right to life.”  This shows that where certain characteristics or qualities are valued, it is the inherent capacity for such qualities, not a current capacity, that result in a species being protected.  By that logic, then, since pre-born humans have the inherent capacities Peter has chosen to prioritize, pre-born humans ought to be protected.

To read Part 4, click here.

Reflections on Debating Peter Singer, Part 2, by Stephanie Gray Connors

Something Can be Wrong Even if it Doesn’t Cause Suffering

  One of the things Peter Singer was particularly focused on was the wrongness of inflicting suffering/harm on others.  As a result, if something, such as an abortion, doesn’t inflict suffering because the pre-born child is not conscious and cannot feel pain, then, according to him, it is not wrong to do.

  My mentor Scott Klusendorf had given me a good response, which I ended up using in the debate: Imagine you die and someone comes to your funeral and gives a speech saying all kinds of falsehoods about you.  Imagine they brutally tear down your character with one lie after another.  Because you are dead, you technically are not harmed by such calumny and detraction; you aren’t even aware of it.  You therefore could not claim you’ve “suffered” by the person’s words.  And yet, wouldn’t we still believe the person did something wrong?  Moreover, wouldn’t we say that they wronged you in so far as tearing down your good character and misleading others as to what kind of person you had been?

  Likewise, rather than get into a debate about the precise moment pre-born children feel pain (because at some point they don’t and abortion is still wrong), I wanted to impart that abortion is wrong not because the victim feels pain but because the victim is a human child.

  Further, think about the implications of his view on the born: When someone is sleeping they aren’t aware.  When someone is under anesthetic they aren’t aware.  Surely it would be wrong to kill an individual who is sleeping or under anesthetic.  If so, then that is proof one does not have to be aware, or even suffer, at the time of death for the infliction of homicide to still be wrong.  Moreover, if someone were to say that sleeping individuals or those in surgery will come out of their unconscious state and subsequently be able to pursue a happy life—then the same could be said about pre-born children.

What We Expect of Moms and Dads

In January of 2020, I wrote this blog about a father, son, and friend who almost drowned in the ocean off the coast of Australia.  The father’s love for his son is not something specific to that man, but is built into the nature of what it means to be father—or mother.  In other words, all parents are meant to love, protect, and care for their offspring, not harm or kill them.  That is why there is universal outrage when parents fail in this responsibility and inflict abuse on, and even end the lives of, their own children.

  Abortion, in whatever form, ends the life of not just anyone, but of one’s own child, therefore violating the nature of the parent-child relationship.  Whether abortion starves (early chemical abortion), dismembers (first-trimester suction abortion), decapitates and disembowels (second-trimester D & E abortion), or sucks out the child’s brain (D & X abortion), the method does not determine the morality.   In all situations, one’s offspring is destroyed.

  Peter Singer is known for being an animal rights activist, and given that he often puts humans and animals on the same level, it is worth pointing out that typically animals that are more like humans (e.g., other mammals) have mothers who go to great lengths to protect their offspring.  In fact, in the debate I referenced a recent viral video of a runner in Utah who was stalked by a cougar for 6 minutes. Why did the cougar follow and threaten the runner for so long?  Because the runner had been approaching the cougar’s two babies and the momma cougar thought he was a threat to her children.  It seems to me that we humans should take a page out of this momma’s playbook—protect your offspring.

To read Part 3, click here.

Header Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

Reflections on Debating Peter Singer, Part 1, by Stephanie Gray Connors

We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident

Some principles are so obvious they should not have to be defended.  Instead, they can be universally known through intuition and should merely be accepted.  That’s why, when the United States’ The Declaration of Independence declares, “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” it precedes the statement with, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

In preparation for my debate against Peter Singer, I discovered that he, like the Declaration of Independence, believes that some truths are self-evident. In his 1972 essay, Famine, Affluence, and Morality he wrote,

  “I begin with the assumption that suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad. I think most people will agree about this...I shall not argue for this view. People can hold all sorts of eccentric positions, and perhaps from some of them it would not follow that death by starvation is in itself bad. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to refute such positions, and so for brevity I will henceforth take this assumption as accepted. Those who disagree need read no further.”

  Notice what Peter does here: He makes a claim and then expressly refuses to defend it. Why? Because it is self-evident; although there are a minority who might disagree, he does not engage them and instead labels such thinking as being an “eccentric” position.

  As the saying goes, “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”  I therefore chose to follow in Peter’s footsteps in my opening remarks and I, too, decided to make claims that I would not defend but instead take as assumed (knowing that if a minority disagreed, such a view could fairly be labelled as “eccentric”).  My positions were as follows:

1)     All humans are equal and it is wrong to intentionally end the life of an innocent human.

2)     Parents have a responsibility to care for their children, not kill them.

  These are not controversial claims.  They are nearly universally accepted.  My task was not to defend these, but to defend their applicability to the pre-born and make the case that one can conclude abortion is wrong based on evidence I provide that abortion violates these two well-established principles.

  Of course, Peter had a thing or two to say about my position (disagreeing with the assumptions); hence, I’ve created this multi-part series reflecting on my debate with the man who cites journalists as calling him the “world’s most influential living philosopher.”

To read Part 2, click here.

Book Recommendations Part II, by Stephanie Gray

Several years ago I provided a list of 10 of my book recommendations here. Given the corona virus lock down, where people have more time to read than usual, I thought I’d add to my list of recommended books with the following:

An Introduction to the Devout Life, by Francis De Sales

Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin

Ghost Boy: The Miraculous Escape of a Misdiagnosed Boy Trapped Inside His Own Body, by Martin Pistorius

The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It, by Paul Brand & Philip Yancey

Guardian of the Golden Gate: Protecting the Line Between Hope & Despair, by Kevin Briggs

Life Lessons: Two Experts on Death and Dying Teach Us About the Mysteries of Life and Living, by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler

The Little Big Things: An Unforgettable Story of Acceptance and Making Every Day a Good Day, by Henry Fraser

On Fire: The 7 Choices to Ignite a Radically Inspired Life, by John O’Leary

Theology of Home: Finding the Eternal in the Everyday, by Carrie Gress et al.

The Way of Trust and Love, by Jacques Philippe

Are you interested in my recommended list of movies? Check it out here.

Header image source: @radu_marcusu from www.unsplash.com

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10 Movie Recommendations, by Stephanie Gray

During this time of the corona virus, where so many people are contained in their homes, I wanted to provide a list of movies I recommend. While these films aren’t directly about the pro-life cause, there are underlying themes and messages within them that relate to it, themes like courage, faith, hope, resilience, self-sacrifice, truth, goodness, beauty, the need for communion of persons, and what leads to human flourishing—or its opposite.

Each film below is hyperlinked to the trailer. Hopefully you can find the full film on Netflix or by renting on itunes.

1. Beyond the Gates: About an idealistic young teacher and a tired old priest running a school in Kigali during the Rwandan genocide.

2. Score: A documentary about the development of musical soundtracks to accompany films.

3. Alive Inside: A documentary about the power of music to reach people with dementia.

4. Happy: A documentary about what key elements lead to peoples’ happiness.

5. The Giver: A dystopian story about a community that is built around “sameness.” In this futuristic world people no longer know loss, death, hatred, or violence. But the trade-off? They also no longer know love, empathy, compassion, and joy.

6. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: The film adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ first book in the Narnia series where the lion Aslan serves as a Christ figure.

7. The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society: An author joins a secret book club during World War II.

8. A Man Called Ove: An isolated elderly man wants to give up on life until he realizes the power of relationship.

9. Three Identical Strangers: A documentary that unravels the true story of identical triplets separated at birth and what happens when the human person is treated as an object rather than a subject.

10. End of the Spear: A dramatization of the true story of Christian missionaries who were killed by a tribe in Ecuador that they tried to evangelize, and how the wife and sister of two of the slain men reached out to those who had killed.

Header image source: @alexlitvin via www.unsplash.com

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What a Father Can Teach a Mother, by Stephanie Gray

On a recent call-in radio program I did with Catholic Answers Radio, the lines were open only to people who support abortion in order to have on-air debate with me; one caller, who was defending abortion, referenced the pregnant woman as a mother. Which led me to ask what a mother is.

The reality is, not all females are mothers.  The term mother doesn't simply imply having two X chromosomes.  Instead, it also implies having offspring.  Which leads to the next important question: What do civil societies expect of mothers in relation to their children?

The obvious answer is that we expect mothers to care for their children, not harm them.  That is why abortion ought to be rejected—it is a brutal betrayal of the nature of a parent-child relationship.

The protective role of parents was brought to light in a powerful story I recently learned about: In June 2019, a father, his 7-year-old son, and the father's friend endured a harrowing, near-death experience.  Maike, Julian, and Stephen went fishing off the Caloundra coast in Australia.  They planned for something they had done before—an overnight trip, sleeping in their little boat, anchored but surrounded by the vast ocean.  In the darkness of the night, their resting bodies awoke to water around them as their boat rapidly sank.  For more than 6 hours, the three souls bobbed amidst the freezing waves, hanging onto two air-filled buckets that just barely kept them afloat.  The documentary of their ordeal, and interviews with each person, reveal just how close to death they were.  What struck me most was the love of the father for his son.

Maike Hohnen did what he could to preserve his son's life, treading water while holding onto his body, which was unconscious for most of the time.  When a helicopter finally arrived, Maike's predominant thought was that his son be taken first.  Rescue crews considered Julian was dead but did CPR.  When he was miraculously brought back to life, they thought he could have brain damage.  But he was perfectly fine. 

Like Maike Hohnen, a woman in a crisis pregnancy may feel like she’s drowning.  She may feel overwhelmed by the waves of life crashing around her, seeming to threaten her very existence.  Abortion tempts her to let go.  But Maike Hohnen demonstrates that love teaches us to hang on.

When Maike, Julian, and Stephen’s boat first capsized, Maike said of his son, “[He] calmed me down. He said, ‘It will be alright, dad.’ He actually pointed towards Caloundra and said, ‘We just have to swim that way, dad.’”

They weren’t able to swim “that way.”  But, as the child predicted, everything was alright.  Because the father knew to hang on.  And therein lies the lesson for the mother in a crisis pregnancy: To hang on.  To realize that she is not alone; that there is the presence of another; that the other is her child; and that her child needs her.  With that insight lies the power to calm her down until rescuers arrive who, by their actions, affirm that her life, and her child’s, is worth fighting for.

Post Script: In an interview, Maike said that if Julian had died in his arms in the ocean, he would have let go and drowned himself because he wouldn’t have wanted to go on living without his son.  His emotional reaction is understandable because his love was so great.  Having said that, it doesn’t mean that such a course of action would have been correct.  And so, there lies another lesson here, which is that our ultimate love must be in Creator and not creature.  Even when our most beloved of relatives depart from this earth, God still has a purpose for we who are left behind.  There are others to love and be loved by, and even when we face excruciating suffering like the loss of a beloved, as Holocaust-survivor and psychiatrist Dr. Viktor Frankl observed, we should seek to find meaning in suffering so as not to despair.

Image source from unsplash.com, Julián Gentilezza

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The Power of a Cry, by Stephanie Gray

When someone cries, how do compassionate people respond?  The cries of another typically elicit a reaction from the hearer to comfort and console those whose tears express what words cannot.

I once met a labor and delivery nurse who told me about a particularly traumatic abortion-related story.*  A patient presented at the hospital the nurse worked at.  The patient was in labor at 25 weeks pregnancy (pregnancy typically goes to 40 weeks).  Earlier that day, she had gone to a late-term abortion clinic where she had Step 1 of a multi-step procedure to induce the death of her pre-born child.  Potassium chloride (KCL) had been inserted into the heart of the baby to bring about a heart attack in the child.  Then, in the following days, the doctors were going to go in and pull that baby’s body parts out piece by piece. 

Since labor had begun unexpectedly, the woman went to a hospital, but it was a hospital that does not do abortions.  When the woman told the medical personnel what she had gone through earlier in the day, she said to them, “I came in for an abortion. I want an abortion. I don’t want this baby.  I want the abortion now.”

The doctors and nurses gathered.  They listened for a heartbeat and, unexpectedly, the KCL had not stopped the baby’s heart.  They discussed the situation and determined that they had a responsibility to resuscitate the baby if the child came out alive.

The woman said, “I don’t want that.  I want an abortion.  Kill my baby!”

The medical team said no; if the baby came out with a heartbeat, they would attempt resuscitation.  The woman continued with her labor.  And when the baby was born, the infant cried.  Upon hearing the cries of her child, the mother screamed, “Save my baby!”

Feeling the child kick had not softened her hard heart.  Hearing the heartbeat had not softened her hard heart.  But hearing the cries of her own flesh and blood had drawn out from within her the instinctive and maternal response to alleviate the suffering of the vulnerable in her midst.

Unfortunately the choice the woman had made earlier in the day had a permanent consequence: Resuscitation did not work, and the baby passed away.

There’s an important lesson here, and that is the power of a cry.  For pre-born children, however, their screams are silent.  We cannot hear, at an audible level, their plea for our aid.  But we who know they exist, we who know their very lives are in jeopardy by legalized abortion, have a responsibility to raise our voices in their place, to make an appeal to the consciences of others to help—not harm—them.

*This story was told by Stephanie at the March for Life in Victoria, BC, in May 2019.

Image source from unsplash.com, Sergiu Vălenaș

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Response to the Canadian Government's "MAiD" Consultation, by Stephanie Gray

The Canadian Department of Justice is looking at expanding access to assisted suicide. According to their website, “During the development and implementation of MAID (Bill C-14) in 2016, many Canadians voiced their support for broader access to MAID. As a result, the Government of Canada committed to study a wider variety of medical circumstances where a person may want to access MAID.”

As the government moves forward on this, it has put together a questionnaire for Canadians to fill out on this topic, with a submission deadline of January 27, 2020. I found that the phraseology of some questions implied support for assisted suicide (the term I more accurately use rather than the euphemism “MAiD” for Medical Assistance in Dying). I therefore chose to only answer the questions where I could write a paragraph response in comment boxes. As an aid to help others filling this survey out, or who want more information on an apologetic on this topic, I’ve shared my submissions below:

Comment Box 1: 

I find it troubling that a country which has not legalized the medical killing of prisoners has legalized, and considering expanding access to, the medical killing of patients.  We reject the death penalty but we embrace assisted suicide?  Rather than expanding access to suicide assistance, we should only have suicide prevention.  If suicide is wrong and if homicide is wrong, blending the two together in a type of suicide/homicide (which is what assisted suicide is) doesn't make them right.

Comment Box 2: 

We cannot know today how we will feel about experiences in the future when the future eventually arrives.  The thought of becoming paralyzed today could fill someone with despair; however, if that were to actually occur down the road, it's entirely possible the person would adapt.  Consider Matt Hampson or Henry Fraser, men from the UK who became quadriplegic and have fulfilling lives where they are happy and help others. People should not be aided in suicide.

Comment Box 3: 

Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Dr. Viktor Frankl said "Despair is suffering without meaning."  The job of compassionate people is not to leave someone in despair, it's not to aid someone in despair; rather, it's to help the person find meaning so as to eliminate the despair without eliminating the person.  Embracing suicide assistance, and expanding access to it, goes against the search for meaning Frankl wisely wrote about.  Civil societies should help vulnerable citizens, not kill them.

*Image source from Unsplash: patrick lanza, @abyss_

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