Forbidden Questions With Stephen Woodworth

If there's one topic the left is desperate to declare off-limits, it's abortion.

For obvious reasons. Few topics reveal just how little an individual life is worth to the collectivist hordes of the far-left as abortion. The idea that a life can legally be terminated at any point before birth is a detail that they seem desperate to ensure doesn't reach the Canadian public.

So it's only natural that University of Waterloo Professor of Philosophy (sorry, that's Assistant Professor of Philosophy) wrote an allegedly-scathing column on TheComment.com attacking Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth for even bringing it up.

I say allegedly-scathing because I've seen a couple of Twitter comments insisting it's so. But when examined at length, it's actually toothless far-left fluff, evading the crux of the questions Woodworth is asking.

Of course these are the kind of questions that a co-President of Planned Parenthood could never afford to answer. They're forbidden questions, and Dea can't afford to justify them with an honest answer -- even if they don't require an answer in order to be justified.

In particular, Dea objects to Woodworth describing Canadian law as treating unborn children as "subhuman". Yet Dea herself admits that "the law does not regard a breathing child whose little toe remains in the birth canal to be a human being".

Suffice to say, if the child is not human, it's considered something else.

But the the determination that a child was not considered a human being -- as Woodworth himself notes, a determination counter to medical and scientific fact -- originates in a legal decision to strike down Canada's abortion laws. The function of that ruling was to note that an unborn child doesn't have the rights of a human being. Ergo, an unborn child is considered less than human. Which is only a slightly nicer way of saying subhuman.

Whoops. What has Dea done here? Simply put, she's made the most startling admission to slip from the tongue of a pro-abortion lobbyist ever.

Dea's admission notes that she and her fellow pro-abortion lobbyists understand full well how fragile and flimsy the law governing who is considered human and who is not considered human really is. She's admitted that a hypothetical big toe really can make the difference, and doesn't seem to understand that she's just revealed the foundational law for the entire pro-abortion lobby in Canada to be almost entirely arbitrary.

At the height of her ideological frenzy, Dea does vainly attempt to wash this distinction away entirely. She calls it a "red herring". "Anyone who has attended the birth of a child will know that, once the head and shoulders have emerged from the birth canal, the toes (big and little) follow very quickly," she writes. "The notion of someone taking advantage of the very brief period in which the toe is the only part of the baby left in the birth canal in order to do that child harm is straight out of science fiction, and reveals Woodworth’s news release to be cynical polemic rather than the product of genuine practical considerations."

Interestingly, Woodworth hasn't ever claimed that any such thing has ever happened. Nor has he ever suggested that it would happen. But the detail that it could happen is rather sobering, one that Dea quite clearly cannot answer.

But, in the end, Dea excuses herself from ever having to answer such questions by arbitrarily declaring them to be irrelevant.

"Medical science is irrelevant to the question of when a fetus becomes a human being — that matter is a legal and philosophical one, not a medical one," Dea writes.

She could not possibly be more wrong. The very definition of what a "human being" is is deeply rooted in medical science.

No definition of "human being" can escape the most fundamental philosophical reality surrounding the topic: to be "human" is to be a homo sapien. To be a "being" is to exist. Neither of these things are for the law or philosophy to determine. They are both objective states.

An unborn child, regardless of whether or not it has exited the birth canal and breathed, is homo sapien. And it exists. No law in the land can deny that, and although philosophy may try, all but the most deranged would-be Nietzches couldn't deny it either. And even they with absolutely zero credibility in the minds of rational people.

If Dea spoke any further on this particular topic, she would surely expose the self-indulgent standard of virtue epistemology -- effectively, the means test of knowledge -- that the pro-abortion lobby is founded on. She does as much, although regarding a separate topic, when she claims Canadians don't want to debate abortion. As it pertains to Canada's abortion law -- or lack thereof -- this is tantamount to a desire to not debate something on which they are woefully misinformed.

Or, perhaps, that should be "woefully disinformed." The pro-abortion lobby has been relentless in their promotion of public ignorance on the topic.

There's good reason for a healthy debate on abortion, and good reason for that debate to continue indefinitely. After all, another fact the pro-abortion lobby cannot avoid, however desperately they may try, is that abortion deals with the termination of human life.

It's a disturbed society that would allow matters related to the termination of human life to go undebated. A society wherein abortion is not the subject of debate is as disturbed as one in which capital punishment is not the subject of debate.

Shannon Dea may not like it. But tough. It's more important for Canada to have an ethically healthy society than for the pro-abortion zealots of the land to have their way, which is unfortunately the only thing they really care about.