MIDDLE GROUND

National Post - May 13, 2002
The middle ground is in the middle
By Andrew Coyne

Anne McLellan must have been pleased at the way her new legislation on reproductive technologies was received in the press. Readers of The Globe and Mail were informed that a provision in the bill allowing researchers to harvest human embryos for stem cells - killing them, in the process, a fact that might be expected to be the subject of some controversy - was "a Canadian compromise." The Toronto Star agreed, saying it "struck a careful balance between the life-saving possibilities of stem-cell research and the need to protect the sanctity of human life." The National Post's coverage sounded a similar note.

Hundreds of thousands of perfectly legal abortions later, we are perhaps accustomed as a society to the idea of killing children before they are born, however sad, regrettable, etc. it may be. But the notion of stripping the unborn child for parts strikes me as sufficiently novel that it seems odd it should already be sanctified as a "compromise," or as the Minister herself called it, a "middle-of-the-road" approach. The basis for this appears to be that the Minister limited researchers to experimenting on human life that had already been created, whether in the form of "surplus" embryos obtained from vitro fertilization clinics or the detritus of aborted fetuses. What would be prohibited, at least in theory, is the creation of new embryos solely for the purposes of research.

So between the one "extreme" of insisting that human beings are not mere surplus tissue for the use of others, and the other of allowing them to be raised and killed on farms, the bill may indeed be said to be a sort of compromise. But that is a statement only of how flexible those words "extreme" and "compromise" can be. The plain fact is that the unborn child has no protection in law in Canada. It had none before this bill, and it will have even less after it has been passed into law.

The Minister's only concession to the "need to protect the sanctity of human life" was to point out that "surplus" embryos are already destroyed. "Do you know what happens to them?" she asked reporters, sweetly. "They go in the garbage. So the donor can choose to have them thrown out ... or they can also choose to let those surplus embryos be used for the purposes of medical research." How absurd, how extreme it would be just to throw all those embryos out with today's trash. The compromise position is to throw them out later.

Mind you, the legislation does have its critics. The Globe, for one, was greatly put out that the creation of embryos for use as lab rats would still be banned. Indeed, the Globe would prefer that these should be made available not only by means of ordinary in vitro technology, but by cloning. The Minister's inclusion of such "therapeutic cloning" among a list of "unacceptable practises" was, in the Globe's view, a concession to extremists. As an editorial explained, "therapeutic cloning is 'unacceptable' only to those who don't recognize that a days-old human embryo is only potentially human. It hasn't even the hint of a nervous system. It has no consciousness. It is a group of undifferentiated cells."

Well there you are. Who could fail to grasp such an obvious point? But if what distinguishes such a sub-human - sorry, "potentially" human - creature, what entitles us to create, experiment upon and discard it at our will, is the absence of certain features - specifically, a nervous system or consciousness - then we must presume that the presence of such features, as in the later stages of fetal development, would prohibit such treatment. But that can't be right. For to concede that would be to concede that the fetus has, at some point before birth, some sort of legal rights, at the least a right not to be killed. And that, as we know, is an extreme position.

How do we know this? Because we are told so, endlessly, from the Prime Minister on down. The status quo, in which there are no legal restrictions on abortion of any kind, though it would seem objectively to define one end of the spectrum of possible regimes (a total ban being the other), has somehow been defined as the moderate middle ground. The result is that only one side of the debate tends to show up: While the Liberal party is avowedly a pro-choice party - the vote on Ms. McLellan's bill will very likely be whipped - the Alliance has taken no stance. As a spokesman put it, this is in keeping with the leader's desire for "a moderate position for the party."

The only ones who seem not to have been briefed on this are the people. The latest Gallup poll, in line with previous surveys, is unequivocal. Of 1,003 adults interviewed in November, 2001, just 32% agreed that abortion should be legal "under any circumstance" - the status quo. Which is to say that roughly two-thirds of Canadians believe there should be at least some legal restrictions on abortion. While 14% said it should be illegal in all circumstances, 52% said it should be legal "only under certain circumstances" - for example, during the first trimester. On abortion, it turns out, the middle ground is actually in the middle. Perhaps the same is true for other issues.