4 ~--Wednesday., February. 18, 1987 ~

North Shore News

Bob Hunter

® strictly personal ®

BILL VANDER ZALM, as we all know by now, is a sort
of cheerful ayatollah when it come to willingness to apply
one’s spiritual convictions in the real world.

This is, of course, not
peculiar. Lots of people try to
push others around in the name
of God, Allah, Buddha, the At-
man, Dialectical Materialism—
name the theology, it’s the same
game.

The great abortion war, which
the premier has waded into, is
hardly what you could call a
scientific debate. Everyone agrees
on the science end of things: the
dates when pregnancy can be
safely terminated, the precision
of the process, what to do, how
to do it.

It is not a medical issue, either.
It is a profound clash of spiritual
values, probably the most serious
debate in the modern industrial
world.

_ This makes it, in part, a politi-
cal fight. What shall the statute
books say? In a democracy, the
outcome of the contest ought to
be based purely on what the ma-
jority wants.

But there isn’t such a thing. as
an unfiawed democracy
anywhere, and Canada’s
parliamentary system, even at its
best, is little more than an
awkward oligarchy—an elite of
MPs, senators, bureaucrats,
flunkies and fixers, who generally
ignore the whims of the masses
anyway.

Politically defined, the ques-
tion is individual woman’s self-
determinism versus an ancient
religious teaching. Is it therefore
also a battle between atheism and
Christianity? At one fevel, for

” gure. .

‘ Enter Vander Zalm,

Catholic.

Naturally, he’s going to try to
shape our little cordilleran society
as closely to his system of beliefs
as he can.

The response of the provincial

devout

government therefore becomes
pro-life, which is based on a
religious doctrine, namely the
sacredness of human life once
conceived.

It is a lovely notion. Philo-
sophically, I go along with it.
Abortion is definitely murder.
The talk about women wanting
control over their bodies com-
pletely ignores the rights of the
body within their body.

Besides, no one knows the ex-
act course their fate is going to
take. Who is to say that a person
isn’t better off in the long run for
having a child and living with the
consequences rather than snuff-
ing him or her out while still a
foetus?

People mess with destiny at
their peril.

It is weird, any way you look
at it, that there is a huge line-up
of 5,000 families wanting to
adopt babies, yet B.C. continues
to have the highest abortion rate
in the country.

Adoption is not a bad thing.
Much love can come of it. And at
least the entity in question gets to
survive and learn ( or fail to
learn) what it can in life.

f remember when I was involv-
ed in the anti-sealing campaigns
of the mid-’70s somebody sent
me a letter demanding to know
how I could oppose the seal
slaughter on moral grounds, and
yet remain indifferent to the
slaughter of 60,000 unborn
humans every year in Canada.

There were a few glib answers I
could have spouted, but the
question rattled in my youthful
assumption that abortion was
okay because it was ‘‘progressi-
ve,”’

It dawned on me that when, as
a young man, I rejected Catho-
licism, I automatically started

trying to believe the opposite of
what the church thought about
everything, including abortion.

It took quite a while to re-
think some of that re-thinking.
But today, | have virtually swit-
ched sides again.

ft is reasonable to grumble:
Once a Catholic, always a Catho-
lic, I guess. But, honestly, in this
case | don’t think it’s a matter of
early programming.

For one thing, I can claim the
distinction of having received a
huge volume of hate mail from
Catholics when I wrote a maga-
zine article about the history of
the papacy just before the Pope's
visit here three years ago.

My ‘‘sin’’ was to repeat what
the history books all agreed on,
namely that any genuine cosmic
linkage between John Paul JI and
Saint. Peter was repeatedly
broken by the ascendency of
scores of crooked and often
perverted popes.

Me. programmed?
imagine.

That abortion might be wrong
is a conclusion I have reached
gradually, independently and, I
might add, against the grain of
many of my friends’ views. It is
not a ‘‘modern”’ thought at all.

That doesn’t mean it’s invalid.
Merely venerable.

Hard to

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