Unborn aren't given much of a chance
National Affairs
Claire Hoy
All things being equal, Roxanne Fernando's baby would have been about seven months old now. Unfortunately, both Roxanne and her baby are dead, beaten to death last February and tossed into a snowbound ditch in northwest Winnipeg, allegedly because the Philippine native, known as "Apple" to her friends, refused to have an abortion.

Three men - two adults and a youth - have been charged with her murder. As for her baby - a sevenmonth fetus at the time - Canada is the only country in the civilized world that doesn't give a damn. In virtually every other country, the alleged murderers would be charged with two murders, not one.

But in Canada - also the only country with no laws whatsoever governing abortion - the unborn baby may just has well have been parts for a used car as far as the law - and the political, media academic elites - are concerned.

The age-old argument about when life begins - at conception, at birth, or somewhere in between - is a debate which can't even be raised in this country without provoking a maelstrom of hateful attacks from the entrenched pro-abortion forces and their army of supporters in high places.

During Stephen Harper's first run at the prime minister's office, for example, one of his western candidates, a woman, told a reporter that it wouldn't be that bad an idea to have women get counseling before they decided whether or not to have an abortion.

So what happened?

Well, led mostly by the Globe and Mail, headlines sprung up across the country announcing that if Harper won women would be forced to undergo counseling - and who knows what else. It wasn't true. It was the media - happily joined by the Liberals and the NDP - who took an innocent, and rather sensible, suggestion and ramped it beyond recognition. But that's what happens in this country whenever the dreaded "A" word rears its' ugly head.

Ever since Brian Mulroney's attempt to pass legislation offering minor controls on abortion failed more than two decades ago because of a tie vote in the Senate - imagine our unelected political hacks having the power to decide anything - no politician at any level has dared tackle the question.

And so we go on our merry way moaning about our low birth rates and doing cartwheels to increase our immigration numbers, all the while pretending that some 100,000 unborn babies each year find themselves, literally, in the trash can.

And if a woman wants to abort a child right up to the time it is born - and late-term abortions are still happening here - nobody cares. After all, it's not as if it's a person, eh?

So as long as an unborn baby has no status in law, well, if somebody stabs a pregnant woman in the stomach and kills the unborn - something that also happened recently - there are no murder charges because, after all, nobody died. Nobody, that is, except the unborn baby. We couch it in the language of "pro-choice" and "antichoice," all the better to demonize those horrible people - like me - who think the unborn is a person who is not yet born (it it's not a human being growing in there, then what is it?) As for "choice," abortionists don't give the unborn baby much of a choice do they?

The other tactic the pro-abortionists use in this country is to accuse abortion opponents of being "extremists," the kind of people who would not even raise an eyebrow if the state forced all women to carry to term, including women who have been raped or might die or suffer serious health problems if they carry to term.

This is, of course, simply not true. To be sure, a small number of people would support a ban on all abortions, but they are no more representative of Canadian society as a whole than those radical feminists who continue to demand (and so far are getting) a country with no limits - none at all - on abortion.

Public opinion polls for decades have consistently shown that the majority of Canadians are situated at various points along the way between the two extremes. Certainly a huge majority opposes late-term abortions, and a healthy majority also favor some restrictions on the process after the first trimester.

But not a single Canadian politician has the guts to address the issue.

Which is why, unique in the world, somebody can murder an unborn fetus - a fully formed human being at that stage - and the law says it didn't happen.

Shame on us.