National Affairs
A 'decades-old ideological straitjacket'
Claire Hoy
Things change. Sometimes for the better. Who among you hasn't been shown one of those dark, mysterious ultrasound images of a baby growing in the stomach of a daughter, granddaughter, spouse, friend, or whomever?

Who among you hasn't smiled at the image along with the expectant mother and/or father and marveled how much the whole baby business has changed from a couple of decades ago when the science to study the unborn didn't exist and when hospitals wouldn't even let the father or anybody else into the delivery room with mom? And now the tougher question: who among you hasn't seen an ultrasound image of a fetus, its arms, legs and head clearly visible, its tiny body thrashing around, and still believes that a fetus is, as the radical, pro-abortion feminists like to say, "a clump of flesh?"

Or, as Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada (ARCC) so lovingly put it in April 2006, "fetuses are not that important..."

And there, of course, is the rub.

Edmonton Tory MP Ken Epp begs to differ. He is the author of Bill C-484, a private member's bill which passed second reading in the Commons last week and which, when it becomes law, will make it a separate crime to kill a fetus while committing an offence against the mother.

Epp was outraged after Jared Baker shot 19-year-old Olivia Talbot and her unborn son in November, 2005 - she was six months pregnant at the time - and after Baker was subsequently convicted of just one count of murder.

That's one, as in Olivia Talbot. Which means that, as far as the law saw it, her unborn son was a big fat zero.

Consider the sense of that. At six months, her unborn son would have been between 11 and 14 inches long and weighed a pound and one-half or so; his strong heartbeat could have been heard through a stethoscope, his finger and toe nails were fully formed, he was sucking his thumb, responding to noise, moving all around, and had hair and eyebrows. In addition, his eyes would have been opened and the placenta and umbilical cord would have been fully developed.

Yet, as the law sees it, he didn't exist. He was, as Arthur also said, "none of our business."

Abortion activists consistently claim to speak for women, but the facts are they are completely out of touch with women, stuck as they are in their decades-old ideological straitjacket where any recognition of fetal rights are seen as an abject surrender to those horrible people who believe that killing the unborn - either through crime or through abortion itself - isn't something society should encourage.

Indeed, a recent Environics survey on the question of legislation such as Epp's bill found that 75 per cent of the Canadian women who were asked felt it was a good idea.

And public opinion polls have for decades consistently shown that a healthy majority of Canadians - men and women alike - believe that our current lawless approach to abortion (we're the only industrialized country in the world with absolutely no restrictions on abortion) should be changed. There is no universal agreement on exactly what changes should be made, but apart from the radical few, most people have serious qualms about the status quo.

In a column this week in the National Post on Epp's bill, Suzanne Fortin, herself pregnant, an official with the Family Coalition Party of Ontario, wrote that our current legal system which treats the woman and the fetus as one and the same is "a legal fiction...

"If I were the subject of an attack in which my unborn child was hurt or killed, I would be devastated and would want the perpetrator brought to justice for both the injury to me and to my unborn child," she wrote.

"When women grieve for a miscarried child, they are not grieving for a mere body part. Whether they treat the fetus as a potential life or as a full-fledged member of the family, they are not grieving the loss of themselves, but of something other than themselves..."

That's as eloquent a summation of the reality of the fetus as a separate entity as this writer has ever seen.

And if that doesn't convince you that Epp's bill is worth supporting - and a good starting point for bringing some humanity to our fetal laws overall - then there is no hope for you.