4 - Friday, February 26, 1988 - North Shore News

IT’S STRANGE. The media have an unwritten rule
about not dealing with the topic of suicides, because there
is a common belief that writing about it only encourages
it. Generally, if somebody kills himself, we don’t report

it.

Suicide is considered, if not
precisely a mental discase, a
shameful thing.

I think it is this same reaction
— shame — that keeps such a
cloak of relative media silence
on the abortion issue. It has
been noisy recently, sure, but
only because the status quo has
been shaken.

Otherwise, it is accepted that,
yawn, some $2,000 pre-delivery
human babies are flushed or
dumped or, for all 1 know,
garburated, every year in B.C.

When [think about it, | get a
twisty fecling inside.

It’s quite a story, really. Mass
murder in Lotus Land?

But I don’t write about it
much. Typical media. Maybe
‘there's a kind of biological
apathy involved.

Or maybe humans have just
always been pretty casual about
destroying what gets in our
way, unless it can stand up for
itself, or has a lawyer, and
that’s all there is to it.

: You can say a fetus isn’t a
human being until...fillin the
blank.

Maybe a fetus isn’t a human
being until 90 years after its
delivery, for all I know. !
haven't got there yet. Maybe
when | am there, that’s what
Pll think.

In the meantime, | can’t see a
line where you can say human
life begins, except — I'll say it
again! — at that one point in
time and space where sperm
meets egg.

After that, life is a biologi-
cally continuous event until
death — whether at three mon-
ths after conception or 50 years
or 1,000 years.

Why is that so difficult to
follow? If you don’t believe in a
soul, you have to go with
science, and science presents us
with a continuum from concep-
tion to the last second.

The argument that brain
development doesn’t occur until
20 weeks, and therefore no
human being exists until then, is
witch doctor talk. The brain
unfolds from the genetic
blueprint. If it does not
develop, that’s one fundamen-
tal situation.

But if you destroy it before it
has a chance to grow, as it is
until-proven-otherwise pro-
grammed to do, that’s an utter-

ly different fundamental situa-
tion.

Besides, why this emphasis
on brains?

Brains don’t grow by
themselves. If they did, would
you call that ‘‘human’'? I
wouldn't.

Conversely, I would be will-
ing to shut off the life-support
system of any brain-dead per-
son,

Euthanasia but not abortion.
Is there a contradiction here?

T would say that euthanasia is
an act of mercy, and fetal
euthanasia — sparing a
deformed fetus the indignity
and suffering of life unfairly
handicapped from the start —
is the ethically correct thing to
do.

Thave a simple way of
measuring whether this is right
or wrong. Task myself: Would
I want this done ta me? An old
trick,

[have seen old, paralysed

people kept alive on machines,
and |] know I don’t want that.

I have likewise gone into a
sanitorium and visited the vic-
tims of genetic discases like
Trisomy 18 -- and J wouldn't
want that, cither

Te

ce

... maybe humans
have just always
been pretty casual
about destroying
what gets in our
way, unless it can
stand. up for itself,
or has a lawyer, and
that’s all there is to
i,’’

If you haven't paid a visit to
such a ward, because you were
lucky enough never to have had
to, do so.

Do so, especially, before ar-
tiving at any facile decisions
about alfabortions being evil.
There is a greater evil soime-

times, if one is going to use that
kind of language, in letting a
hopeless, horrible torment go
on,

In cither extreme case, the
self trapped inside the body,
whether ‘‘aware'' of itself or
not, has to depend on its fellow
humans to spare it awful
anguish, and our responsibility
to cach other — to tribe
members, at least — has been
to help cach other avoid being
tortured.

Being adopted per se doesn't
constitute terrible anguish.

In this country there are so
many chil'less couples standing
by willing to adopt unwanted
children that, for years, it has
been our habit to virtually kid-
nap them from Indian reserves,
so short were we of a supply of
our own — and now, prospec-
tive adoptive parents have to
reach into the Third World.

A gut feeling. You start pick-
ing the facts to fit the feeling,
rather than vice versa. So
there's no debate. All you can
do is say where you stand,
Anybody who can figure out
how they got there, good luck
to them! ©

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