Conservatives and Abortion: A Modest Proposal

Poor Stephen Harper. If he lets MPs vote their conscience on social issues like abortion, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage, he’s accused of harboring a secret agenda. Yet if he lets people speak out in opposition to these matters, he’s accused of harboring extremists. Just look at the language used by the media. The only “social moderates” are former members of the Progressive Conservative Party.

Andrew Coyne, who leans socially liberal, is the most sensible media commentator on this issue. He points out that at least on abortion, the current situation of having no restrictions whatsoever, which our elites regard as “moderate,” is in fact extreme and unrepresentative of Canadian public opinion.

On the current situation as unrepresentative of Canadian public opinion, he writes:

Roughly speaking, there is a three-way split: one-third favour abortion on demand, one third favour outlawing it in all circumstances, and one-third are somewhere in the middle — for example, preferring a ban on third-trimester abortions.
In any event, since we are also told we can’t debate it because the issue is so “divisive,� that suggests even the status quoters know there’s no consensus. The issue isn’t settled. It just isn’t being debated.

On it being extreme, he writes:

But it is a truism that, of the range of possible legal resolutions of the abortion question, the status quo — no abortion law of any kind — is at one extreme end, the polar opposite of a comprehensive ban.

He could add that Canada is one of the few countries in the world with no abortion restrictions. This need not be the case. The 1988 Morgentaler decision merely banned a particular administrative procedure whereby a woman gets an abortion. The majority decision said nothing about a substantive right to an abortion.

Moreover, the current situation creates problems in other areas of law where the legal status of the fetus is put in question:

The current legal vacuum — not a law but the absence of one — has forced the courts to tie themselves up in ever more complicated knots to avoid granting the foetus legal standing. Example: the “glue-snifferâ€? case — a Manitoba woman who had already given birth to two severely deformed children and was pregnant with a third. But the courts ruled she could not be compelled to stay off the solvents, even for the remainder of her pregnancy.
Example: the pregnant New Brunswick woman whose family could not sue her for reckless driving on behalf of the child she was carrying (in order to claim from her insurance). Had she injured someone else’s child, she could have been found liable. Or had some other driver injured the child in her womb, so could he. The one party for whom she could not be held responsible was her own unborn child.

Coyne leaves it at calling for debate to be opened up, which is significant in and of itself. However, he does not indicate how a truly moderate position on abortion might be had. This is an extremely difficult question.

Pro-lifers might want to try chipping away at it by promoting a ban on partial-birth abortions, and run the “risk” of being accused of copying American pro-lifers. Oh dear. One wouldn’t want to be accused of being pro-American on this, eh? The next step would be to promote a ban on third-trimester abortions. They could also promote adoption as realistic option.

However, what’s more important is that banning this or that is a secondary action. The central fact that pro-lifers must acknowledge is that their position must never ever make a pregnant woman even more vulnerable than she is. This means recognizing that a pregnant woman is not just two people, but three, including the father who must live up to his responsibilities. As I’ve stated before, our society has a serious fatherhood problem. I’m not talking shotgun marriages, but I am thinking of an effective child-support enforcement regime to assist the mother take care of the child if the father is not present (assuming she wishes to keep the child and not give it up for adoption).

If not the father, then pro-lifers might want to take a cue from Germany, which restricts abortion but provides welfare assistance. Libertarians are not going to like that, and I’m well aware of the abuses that that can produce, not to mention that it might actually produce larger amounts of children born out of wedlock (because the state provides financial incentives). However, in a society where “baby bonuses” don’t seem to have much of an effect, I somewhat doubt imitating the Germans on this measure would produce too many abuses.

Even so, if Bush could grab the center with his “compassionate conservatism,” then perhaps Harper could try to make a similar move using this issue. I may be wrong, but at least it’s an improvement on the current situation where debate has been banned.