Barrel Strength

I know how I feel about Dr. Henry Morgentaler getting the Order of Canada. I do not know whether I am justified in my feeling.

Morgentaler is a hideous man. His doctrines are appalling. His view that the the primacy of the woman over her fetus is so absolute, it cannot be right. There is no balance in his view. Freedom to choose is the freedom under all circumstances to be able to abort a future child, no matter at what stage of pregnancy. And if you object to that view, you will be accused of believing that women are not and should not be absolutely sovereign over all decisions of reproduction. I am guilty as charged.

Society, in some form, in some way, has an interest in its own survival, and consequently in the reproductivity of its women. This has always been the foundation of our laws controlling access to abortion. Consequently I do not consider that women are absolutely sovereign in their reproductivity. They have the preponderant interest, to be sure, but not absolute freeedom of choice. Call me a compromizing weasel on this issue, and I will agree with you. Most of us are all compromizing weasels on the subject of killing the unborn. I do not think even the freedom-to-choose crowd contemplate killing the unborn with equanimity, they just want to shut off their consciences. We would be very convinced of our own rectitude if we were not compromizers, or persuaded of absolute doctrines on the matter, as many are.

I can understanding killing the guilty for capital crimes, but not for parking tickets. Likewise killing the unborn for our convenience, that is a harsh doctrine. Yet we live by it. We put into practice our beliefs in this matter all the time. And the same people who uphold the euphemistic “freedom to choose” are most often the people who are repelled by capital punishment. Go figure.

But back to Morgentaler. There is something deeply wrong about the man which defies my powers of description, and possibly my understanding. I see him as the Nazis’ last poisoned gift to mankind. Somehow the Nazi vision of evil was so pure and absolute (kill all the Jews, because they are the source of evil) that its doctrines have perversely, weirdly infected the doctor, who did time in Auschwitz. I cannot imagine the stress of being in a hell created by a political ideology that declares that you are the emanation of Satan, but Auschwitz would come close. I hope never to undergo a similar process of degradation, enslavement, starvation and hideous, unremembered death at the hands of demons who hate you and wish to see you and your kind exterminated, as one would a wasps’ nest under the cottage deck which has just stung your baby. His absorption of some of the absolutism of their doctrines, and its weird refraction as an evangelist of aborting human fetuses, is an imaginative stretch on my part, but I prefer to situate the cause of evil outside of Morgentaler himself. In this I may be too generous towards him. He may be authentically and originally evil, without assistance from the Nazis.

Whatever he thought he was doing for the cause of women, he has so far exceeded that goal that he has become a menace to our survival. He is not the right sort of person to be honoured in this way by the Order of Canada. The selection committee has lost its moral bearings if they could not see that they have honoured the exponent of quite evil and disgusting doctrines, which are far in excess of the immediate cause, questionable as it is, of access to abortions.