Abortion: The Elephant in the Room

It is intriguing to wonder why we tiptoe around abortion like a sleeping tiger. It continues as major issue facing Canada, typified by the persistent refrain: “I’m fearful Harper/the Conservatives/others will raise the abortion issue.” It betrays the subconscious fear that it remains an explosive issue

It remains so for a reason. Abortion is the number one issue facing Canadians on two fronts. First it deals with human life and death, and second, as long as a large part of Canadians oppose it, it remains an major ethical issue that cannot remain dormant indefinitely.

I recognize the difficult and often dire straits of many who seek abortions and the help they need. Unfortunately, abortion is a short term, counterproductive solution, rather like cutting down a needed fruit tree because it obscures the view. There has to be a more humane solution than simply aborting human life.

Apart from the destroyed life of the unborn child, growing numbers of women—and men—hide their pain following abortion, for guilt often infuses grief at this significant loss. They wonder what their aborted child would look like at today’s age; his eye or her hair colour, and mourn the loss of joy from a lost expanding family.

I can’t help feeling that the venom we direct at pedophiles, beyond their deserved judgment, is a subconscious cultural reaction to suppressed guilt at the widespread termination of children we have been given and rejected.

But the problem has greater reach than the individual. It is not possible to terminate 100,000 human lives a year, consider it acceptable and settled, without consequences. This amounts to about 3.2 million abortions—approximately the population of Alberta—since Canada repealed all laws protecting the unborn in 1988.

This huge loss has impoverished our nation of a complete province of people who would now be serving our nation, expanding our industries and culture, and providing the natural balance between the young and earning and the old and feeble. Now, we need to augment our birth rate, well below replacement value, to ensure a stable or growing population.

I welcome those attracted to our shores because of the opportunities Canada offers. The vast majority seek what we all need: a secure and stable environment to raise their families, most of whom will aid our deficient population because they do not practise abortion.

Abortion and infanticide in China and India have left those most populous nations with a huge imbalance of the sexes. Our supposed mastery of nature may yet turn and slap us in face. Abortion is a negative and destructive mastery. We can have the children nature gives and limit the children we desire, but not make the children we need.

I doubt we know all the ramifications from widespread abortion. Unless we discuss abortion freely and openly to seek all its outcomes, national and personal, we may leave a deteriorating legacy for the children we permit to live.