Flipping the Coyne on Abortion: Why Canada's MPs Should Vote Against Motion No. 312

There are things that a government does not debate. Whether to be a government or an organized criminal gang is one of them. For that reason Andrew Coyne is simply wrong to submit, as he has in the National Post, that the idea that our Parliamentarians cannot debate abortion “is unworthy of a democratic country”.

Coyne’s assertion comes in response to an April 26, 2012 motion introduced by Conservative back-bencher Stephen Woodworth, the Member of federal Parliament for Kitchener Centre, that reads as follows:

Motion No. 312

That a special committee of the House be appointed and directed to review the declaration in Subsection 223(1) of the Criminal Code which states that a child becomes a human being only at the moment of complete birth and to answer the questions hereinafter set forth…and that the special committee present its final report to the House of Commons within 10 months after the adoption of this motion with answers to the following questions,

(i) what medical evidence exists to demonstrate that a child is or is not a human being before the moment of complete birth,
(ii) is the preponderance of medical evidence consistent with the declaration in Subsection 223(1) that a child is only a human being at the moment of complete birth,
(iii) what are the legal impact and consequences of Subsection 223(1) on the fundamental human rights of a child before the moment of complete birth,
(iv) what are the options available to Parliament in the exercise of its legislative authority in accordance with the Constitution and decisions of the Supreme Court to affirm, amend, or replace Subsection 223(1).

In introducing motion No. 312, Woodworth made it clear that his proposal for a committee is not based upon a desire scientifically to substantiate any conclusions at all. As he told the rest of Parliament:

Motion No. 312 simply calls for a study of the evidence about when a child becomes a human being. It does not propose any answer to that question. In fact, it directs the committee to make no decision and no recommendation but merely to report options.

Woodworth wants evidence to be studied, but no conclusions to be drawn based on the evidence. Why? Because Woodworth – without the aid of the evidence he claims to want studied – has already made up his mind about “when a child becomes a human being”:

Why is any law defining a human being so important? Why devote time and attention to this question? Why does it matter that such laws are crafted with great care and with utmost honesty?

It is sad to even ask this question. It is sad that it is not obvious why our law defining a human being must absolutely be an honest law based on cogent evidence and sound principle.

The reason it is so important is that powerful people can strip vulnerable people of all rights by decreeing that they are not human beings. The only way to protect the inalienable rights of all is to protect the inalienable rights of each.
[…]
Members should not concern themselves with fearful imaginings but look solely at the dishonesty of subsection 223(1).

Woodworth claims the committee is needed to study whether the Criminal Code’s definition of a human being is honest yet, without any such committee, Woodworth’s already come to the conclusion that Criminal Code’s definition is “dishonest”. His call for a committee is unwarranted on its face, and does not serve the end he claims it is intended to serve.

Of course, the end Woodworth claims the committee will serve is false from the get go. Consider the first two questions he wants the committee to answer:

“(i) what medical evidence exists to demonstrate that a child is or is not a human being before the moment of complete birth”; and
“(ii) is the preponderance of medical evidence consistent with the declaration in Subsection 223(1) that a child is only a human being at the moment of complete birth”

His question presupposes his desired answer: he presupposes that that which grows in a woman’s womb is rightly referred to as a “child”, which implies it is rightly referred to as a “human”. His questions are akin to asking what scientific evidence there is that a car is an automobile before it rolls off of the assembly line. Scientific evidence has nothing to do with the matter, because the issue is philosophical, not scientific. Botany can tell us when and how an acorn becomes a tree, but the issue of whether acorns are trees is a philosophical issue, not a scientific one. And the answer is: they are not. A is A, as Leibniz expressed Aristotle’s Law of Identity, and that philosophical law is why the Parliamentarian who eats a walnut does not thereby eat a tree.

Consider next his third question for the proposed committee:

“(iii) what are the legal impact and consequences of Subsection 223(1) on the fundamental human rights of a child before the moment of complete birth,”

One doesn’t need a committee to answer that question. The impact of subsection 223(1) is to define “human being”, and there is no child who is not a human being: to speak of a child is not to speak of a horse or a watermelon. Accordingly, for subs. 223(1) to define “human being” as something that exists only after “the moment of complete birth” is to define “child” as something that exists only after “the moment of complete birth”. Thus ‘before the moment of complete birth” there is no child to have human rights that could be impacted upon by subsection 223(1). The question is a non-starter.

Given that the committee could serve no purpose in answering Woodworth’s first three questions, we can see that Woodworth’s proposal is essentially nothing more than a request for a committee to provide an answer to Woodworth’s last alleged question:

“iv) what are the options available to Parliament in the exercise of its legislative authority in accordance with the Constitution and decisions of the Supreme Court to affirm, amend, or replace Subsection 223(1).”

Even that question is largely misleading. There is no need to “affirm” a law that has already passed, and it is clear from his speech in the House on April 26th that Woodworth doesn’t want subs. 223(1) affirmed in the first place. What Woodworth really wants is a committee to come up with some amendments to or replacements of subsection 223(1) that it thinks would survive an appeal at the Supreme Court of Canada.

There is nothing for a Parliamentary committee to learn from “medical evidence” about the production of a human being. The material facts are simple and widely acknowledged by virtually everyone on all sides of the abortion debate. Human sperm impregnates human egg, either within a woman or outside of a woman’s body. Human cells multiply within the body of the host human woman, whether or not it is her egg. Over time, so long as the woman continues to supply the growing cellular mass with moving blood, oxygen, nutrients, warmth, and a means of passing waste, the mass of cells will grow and differentiate and increasingly take the form of a human body. If the process does not fail, and is not aborted, the process of creating a human being will be completed with an exiting from the woman’s body and a detachment from the woman’s blood stream. At that point, the woman who created the human being ceases to play a biologically necessary role in the survival of the new human being. The baby human being now must eat with its own mouth, breath with its own lungs, defecate and urinate, and otherwise live as all other human beings do: independently from the body of another human being. Nobody – not even Mr. Woodworth – is ignorant of any of these facts, all of which are supported with science, and are regularly taught easily to grade school children, including those who later get elected to Parliament.

So, why call for a 10 month study of “medical evidence”? In truth, Woodworth wants to pretend that to study scientific evidence of the stages of reproduction is to study the ethics of abortion. He wants to be able to say that the committee studied “the science” for 10 months and came up with options to change the law, as though those options were somehow dictated by the “medical evidence”. But key to the whole charade is Woodworth’s requirement that the committee not draw conclusions from the medical evidence. You see, scientific evidence of how reproduction proceeds is not scientific evidence that Sarah Jones should be murdered, imprisoned, or expropriated if she has an abortion. If Woodworth’s committee were to draw proper conclusions from the medical evidence of reproduction, none of their conclusions would have anything to do with the ethics of abortion or the propriety of legal definitions. So Woodworth wants the committee to skip the conclusions that actually do follow from the medical evidence, and to get right down to proposing “options” for changing the law. His strategy is akin to trying to clothe faith-based creationism in the garb of “scientific evidence” for “intelligent design”. His goal, quite simply, is to have a committee come up with a number of different “options” for categorizing some or all abortions as murders pursuant to the Criminal Code of Canada.

However, the most disingenuous part of Woodworth’s advocacy of Motion No. 312 is that his call for an end to the dehumanizing of the “child” in a woman’s womb implicitly is a call for the dehumanization of women. Every fact of reality supported scientifically by physical evidence implies what a human being ought and ought not to do in a given situation: every IS implies an OUGHT. However, that a human being IS created in a certain way, and that its creation is completed at a given time, is not the IS from which we determine whether a woman OUGHT to be fined, imprisoned, or killed for deciding not to create a human being. The only IS that bears on that OUGHT is this: What is the essential nature of a human being?

The answer to that question is determined not by the alleged words of Woodworth’s alleged god, but by the physical, scientifically determined evidence that Woodworth claims to value so highly. That evidence makes it clear that the thing that distinguishes human beings from all other things, living or non-living, is a human being’s capacity and necessity to reason. Humans, in short, are the rational animals.

Human beings do not live by instinct. Being a rational animal, a woman aiming to survive and achieve her own happiness must make the right decisions concerning whether or not to allow someone else to take her life, liberty, and property. If she applies her rational faculty to determine the facts of reality and to thereby make and act upon the decisions she must make if she wishes to survive and achieve happiness, she will survive and be happy.

Among other things, because she is a human being – and because thinking and choosing is the essence of human nature – a woman can and does decide whether or not to use her body to create a child. To threaten to murder, imprison, or expropriate her for terminating an unwanted pregnancy is to discourage her from thinking and choosing. It is to punish her for being a human being; for being an animal that, by its very nature, applies reason to the task of surviving and achieving happiness. Laws that threaten to murder, imprison, or expropriate a woman for having decided to have an abortion are laws that seek not to defend human nature, but to defeat it. They are laws that, at their root, consider human nature – independent, rationally self-serving thought – to be inherently evil. They are laws that seek to dehumanize human beings.

As noted above, nature dictates that a woman should make reproductive decisions that are consistent with the pursuit of her own survival and happiness. To ensure that she is not deprived of that power to decide, her nature as a rational animal implies that it is right for her to use physical force against others, if necessary, to prevent them from forcing her to act as a non-human; to prevent them from dehumanizing her by denying her the freedom to decide whether or not to use her body to create a human being. Because it is morally right for a woman so to defend herself, it is right for others to use force to ensure that no individual takes her life, liberty or property from her without her consent. That is why it is right for the government so to defend her life, liberty, and property from those who would otherwise punish her for deciding to terminate her pregnancy. It is also why any organization that would murder, imprison, or expropriate a woman for making the decision to terminate her pregnancy is not a government at all: whether having the support of a plurality of others or not, such an organization is nothing short of a criminal gang.

All of which brings me back to Andrew Coyne’s ridiculous statement about democracy. Democracy is not Greek for “majority rule”. What parliament can and cannot do in a democracy is not determined by a flip of the coin or by a show of hands.

“Democracy” is Anglicized Greek for “people power”. It refers not to the governmental decision-making process, but to the scope of governmental authority: government can do only what human beings have the power to do because government is comprised of nothing but human beings. “Power”, in this context” refers to what nature dictates a human being should do; to what nature requires a human being to do if she is to survive and be happy.

Democracy, being an expression of humanity living in accordance with human nature, does not include a power to dehumanize. It includes only the power to defend human nature. If what we have in Ottawa is a government – and not an organized criminal gang – democracy dictates that our legislature never pass any law that authorizes government to murder, imprison, or expropriate a woman for using the rational faculty – the power – that is inherent in her humanity.

Democracy being opposed to a law against abortion, it is not a proper function of Parliament to debate laws against abortion. Accordingly, Parliament should vote against motion No. 312. Contrary to what Mr. Coyne asserts, the idea that Parliament should debate abortion “is unworthy of a democratic country”.