by Jonathon Van Maren
Postmedia News reported several days ago that an Ontario woman, identified only as “L.B.,” was given a “reduced” sentence of infanticide for smothering her two infant children. This followed on the heels of the recent decision of an Alberta judge to sentence a woman who had strangled her newborn to a suspended sentence. Joanna Birenbaum of the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund defended the sentence as “in line with the community’s sense of justice” in light of Canada’s sixty-three-year-old infanticide laws.
George Orwell once wrote that, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” Elaborating further, he stated that, “Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
In Canada today, these statements describe with chilling accuracy the concept of the “unwanted child” and “the woman’s right to choose,” polemics which are increasingly moving past the government funded in-utero infanticide of abortion to include newborn children, who, according to Canadian law, are simply not as valuable as older human beings.
What “every child a wanted child” actually means, of course, is that every unwanted child should be a dead child. Canada’s Pro-Choice Action Network, which often features prominent fetal-death advocate Joyce Arthur, stated some time ago on their website that a common “anti-choice” lie was that,
The ‘abortion mentality’ leads to infanticide, euthanasia, and killing of mentally disabled and elderly persons. This ‘slippery slope’ argument has no merit. In countries where abortion has been legal for years, there is no evidence that respect for life has diminished or that legal abortion leads to killing of any persons. Infanticide, however, is prevalent in countries where the overburdened poor cannot control their childbearing and abortion is illegal.
First, it is erroneous to claim that infanticide happens due to abortion being restricted, as was evidenced by a TIME magazine article last year which inquired “Why are French Women Killing Their Babies?” Secondly, further evidence of the “abortion mentality” can be found in the increasing rates of the abortion of disabled children, as well as the spread of euthanasia abroad. Finally, however, when murder is “downgraded” to the “lesser charge” of infanticide, feminists are first in line to confusingly defend what seems to be a direct attack on the emotional capabilities of women—something that was once one of the fiercest battles of the suffragist and feminist movements.
Canada’s infanticide law states the following,
A female person commits infanticide when by a wilful act or omission she causes the death of her newly-born child, if at the time of the act of omission she is not fully recovered from the effects of giving birth to the child and by reason thereof or of the effect of lactation consequent on the birth of the child her mind is then disturbed.
To boil it down, this law (incidentally drafted in 1948 to avoid having juries hand down the death penalty to desperate unwed mothers) states that the natural process of pregnancy—and specifically “lactation”—can cause a woman’s mind to be “disturbed” to the point of causing her to murder her own offspring. The claims of feminists throughout the last century—that women were the intellectual and psychological equals of men—are thus completely discarded by the pro-abortion feminists in a hasty attempt to justify yet another category of killings. Thus the rhetoric of “choice” slowly encroaches on the precious lives of yet more innocent Canadians.
It is clear that the defenders of abortion, infanticide, and gendercide are experiencing a curious lack of reading comprehension or perhaps an inner ideological conflict. They simultaneously claim that abortion is not a “slippery slope” leading to infanticide and a more all-encompassing Culture of Death, but are willing to strenuously defend these atrocities once they reside safely at the bottom of said slope.
Canada is beginning to see the full results of a society that lacks a worldview with intellectual consistency and has no dedication to universal human rights. First, we decided that a woman’s “right to choose“ was a right that included the right to dismember her sons or daughters in utero, as if this “therapeutic” procedure was somehow equivalent to her right to choose a specific diet. Then, Canadian judges began to notice the fact that Canadian law did not place the value of human life on an equal plane and that as such, they could begin to “downgrade” certain groups of Canadians based on age—starting, of course, with those who could not speak out for themselves.
It is up to us, Canadians with a voice, to shift our society away from this moral quicksand. It is up to Canadians who believe human life is intrinsically valuable to begin draining the poisonous swamp of the Culture of Death, and to extend our hand to our pre-born neighbours and give them the justice that they so desperately need. Can the wholesale slaughter of the most vulnerable Canadians be stopped? The choice, as it were, is yours.
This article first appeared at unmaskingchoice.ca and is published here with the author’s permission.