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TechnoratiRespect for conscience must be a social value
In mature Western democracies we have competing societal values, with abortion at the eye of the storm.
Michael Cook reports that new legislation in Victoria, Australia, “decriminalises abortion and forces doctors with a conscientious objection to refer a woman to a doctor who will do an abortion. In the event of an ‘emergency’ abortion … regardless of their moral qualms, doctors must do [an abortion] themselves. Victorian nurses will be in an even worse predicament. They must participate in an abortion if ordered by their boss.” The same scenario, in a somewhat softer version, is being played out in the United States and Canada. Here, codes of professional conduct or regulations, rather than legislation, are being proposed to limit freedom of conscience rights with respect to abortion.
An effort is also underway by pro-abortion advocates, led by International Planned Parenthood, to have the United Nations declare access to abortion a universal human right.
Healthcare professionals who, despite such coercion, follow their conscience risk a variety of legal threats. Their conduct can be found to constitute discrimination under human rights codes, or professional misconduct when it would result in disciplinary proceedings and penalties ranging from reprimands to fines and loss of a license to practice medicine or to practice as a nurse.
Needless to say, this state of affairs has caused deep concern for many healthcare professionals. What has led to this situation and what might be its wider consequences? To respond to that question and deal with this situation, I believe we need to understand two new realities, a political reality and a medical reality.
The political reality
| I suggest there is a political problem caused by the disproportionate influence on politicians of what are being called 'hard minorities' such as the pro-choice lobby, as compared with 'soft majorities'. |
I suggest there is a political problem caused by the disproportionate influence on politicians of what are being called “hard minorities” such as the pro-choice lobby, as compared with “soft majorities”. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s stance on abortion in the context of this week’s Federal election reflects this reality. I thought about what I’d say to him about his stance, were I to write him an open letter. Here’s what I drafted (but did not publish):
Dear Prime Minister,
I write regarding some media reports about your views on abortion and the law, which I believe raise serious concerns for many Canadians.
For instance, it’s reported you don’t believe abortion is an important issue, but you do believe “arts and fitness funding for children” is an “important challenge”. And you “would ‘whip’ [your] front bench so that none of [your] cabinet ministers would support any private member's bills that could re-open the [abortion] debate”. (Globe and Mail, 29 Sep).
Here are some questions I would respectfully ask you: Your statements can reasonably be interpreted -- and no doubt will be -- as affirming that the societal values norm you accept (and will impose on your Cabinet) is that abortion raises no moral or ethical concerns, including for society. That’s the pro-choice position -- a simple and straightforward stance based entirely on the rights of individual women. Yet, in the past, you’ve rightly described abortion as a “complex” issue. I thought that meant you accepted that abortion does raise moral and ethical concerns, at least for society. Addressing those concerns, including those relating to shared societal values, requires some law on abortion, as around 70 percent of Canadians agree. Are you now saying there should never be such law?
What about respect for “freedom of conscience” of your cabinet ministers? Your position reflects that taken recently by the Ontario Human Rights Commission in advising the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario. It warned that physicians who refused to facilitate procedures contrary to their moral or religious beliefs, which patients requested, could be in breach of the patients’ human rights. It recommended physicians “leave their personal beliefs outside the surgery” -- park their ethics and values with their cars. Such a stance is “power speaking to truth”, even if it’s only the truth of some cabinet ministers’ consciences.
Students for Choice have been lobbying Canadian medical schools to make abortion a “required procedure”. That would mean students must competently perform an abortion to graduate as MDs. Might your refusal to respect cabinet ministers’ freedom of conscience be a similarly restrictive condition that will expressly exclude some MPs from “graduating” to cabinet?
I believe abortion in the late 20th and early 21st centuries will come to be seen as a great human tragedy, just as we now see slavery or racism. We now regard politicians who supported those practices as being involved in appalling human rights abuses and failure to respect other human beings. Might the same be true of contemporary politicians whose absolute silence on abortion meant there were no protections for unborn children, even those who would live if delivered instead of being killed?
I’m an ethicist, not an activist, and I'm far from being a classical anti-abortion activist. While I believe that abortion is always a serious ethical issue, I do not support legally prohibiting early abortion, although I fervently hope it would be a rare occurrence. My position has put me at odds with both some pro-life and all pro-choice groups. That said, I'm more and more convinced that abortion is the single most important issue we are dealing with in terms of the future shared values on which we will base our society and that history's verdict will affirm that.
Among the reasons are, first, that abortion is not just an issue for individual women, much as pro-choice advocates adamantly push that view. Unavoidably, our collective stance on abortion is an important element in establishing society’s value of respect for life. The current Canadian situation -- a unique one among comparable countries of having no law to protect even viable fetuses -- necessarily damages that value, especially when abortion is commonplace and regarded with equanimity. It also seriously damages our “values environment” as a whole. We need to be as sensitive to caring for that as we now recognize we must be in caring for our physical environment.
Second, abortion is just the tip of an iceberg of several competing worldviews that encompass many different and often conflicting values. Consequently, what we decide about abortion will have many flow-on effects to other values well beyond those relevant to abortion. In particular, a central issue in deciding about many important values on which we currently disagree, not the least of which is euthanasia, is where to strike the proper balance between intense individualism at one pole and intense communitarianism at the other. As described, your current position on abortion affirms intense individualism.
So, let’s apply this value choice to some other questions. Even limiting ourselves to just the area of adults’ “rights” with respect to their children, will we likewise accept that there should be no restrictions on designing one’s child? And what about transhumanism: are there limits that need to be respected to keep the essence of our humanness intact for future generations?
I have spoken with some election candidates about your stance on abortion. One, from your party, told me he is a practicing Catholic but would go along with you because “abortion is a political question, not an ethical or moral one”. He argued that the moral and ethical issues are only between a woman and her doctor -- a classic pro-choice argument -- and he added that “one has to make compromises in politics”.
(An aside: I ended up voting for a candidate from a party I would not usually support, who told me there were five percent of issues on which he would never vote against his conscience. I respected him for that -- it was the response nearest to my own values that I was able to obtain, so it was either vote for him or abstain from voting. I subsequently wrote to him: ‘I am hoping that one of your conscience issues would mean that if legislation providing some protection from abortion for viable fetuses were to be presented in Parliament, you would not vote against it. As I explained when we met, I believe this matter goes beyond the individual woman and unborn child involved in any given case and is a central matter in maintaining our collective societal value of respect for life.’ He was elected. There is now a great deal of hand-wringing in Canada about the record low voter turnout -- 10 million eligible voters, or 49 percent, did not vote. At least some of them were “values voters” on a wide range of values issues, and probably had the same problem as I did in finding a candidate to vote for. )
Finally, that raises the issue of why politicians, whose personal values are not consistent with those of pro-choice advocates are so frightened of them? One probable reason is that the strategy of these advocates is to deliberately paint an either/or picture -- either no restrictions on abortion at all, or total prohibition of abortion -- that terrifies the vast majority of Canadians. Given only that choice, they choose no restrictions, although, as polls show, the majority would like to see our society have a more nuanced and balanced response to law on abortion. Politicians who take a lead in providing such an option so that, as a society, we can re-affirm our respect for life, could be surprised by the support they receive.
Another reason might be that these politicians think that people like me, who would hope to see some protection of unborn children, will continue to vote for them because we have nowhere else to go. It’s true we often have nowhere else to go, which is a threat to democracy. But it’s not necessarily true we will continue to vote for them.
With respect.
Yours sincerely,
Margaret Somerville
The medical reality
| Would any of us really want to be treated by a physician who had complied with a directive to 'park your ethics and values with your car outside the surgery'? |
The push to abolish respect for physicians’ and other healthcare professionals’ freedom of conscience reflects an emerging view that physicians are mere technicians able to provide services that patients want and have a right to access. Thus, physicians have a duty to provide these services and no right to bring their moral or ethical reservations into play; to do so is discrimination.
Think of having your car repaired: for a mechanic to refuse to service your car just because you were a woman would be discrimination and a human rights offence. Some say physicians’ refusal of medical services for moral or ethical reasons is the same thing.
Unlike the mechanic, however, a physician who refuses to be involved in abortion is not providing the service to one patient but not another, or basing his refusal on any characteristic of the patient. Rather, he is refusing the service to all patients and doing so because of the nature of the procedure, which he believes is morally and ethically wrong.
And, unlike medicine, usually car repairs don’t raise moral and ethical issues. But what if you were a bank robber preparing a getaway car and told the mechanic that? Suddenly automotive repair would become an ethical and moral issue. Would a refusal still be wrong or might it even be required? And referring the bank robber to another mechanic would make you complicit in the wrongdoing.
The practice of medicine always and unavoidably involves ethical and moral issues, although when we all agree on how they should be dealt with, we might not be consciously aware of them in day-to-day practice. It’s only when something goes wrong or there is a conflict of values that the ethical issues flash up on the big screen. Treating physicians as mere technicians fails completely to take that omnipresent ethical aspect into account.
Treating physicians as mere technicians is also the antithesis of the traditional concept of a physician as a professional with ethical and legal obligations to exercise good professional judgment. Most notable among those obligations is “first, do no harm”, which means that a physician may not simply fulfill a patient’s request, but must make an independent judgment as to its acceptability.
At its extreme, treating physicians as mere technicians can result in an argument that bizarre requests should be fulfilled. For instance, some people argue that if a person wants their healthy right leg amputated, they have a right to that surgery. On a more everyday level, patients’ lifestyle choices -- and the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC )warns that failure to honour them could be discrimination -- can be a problem. Some women who rejected physicians’ advice to change their diet if they wanted to lose weight and instead demanded Phenphen, a weight-loss drug, died as a result.
Treating physicians as mere technicians denies that respect is required for physicians’ freedom of conscience and their ethical and moral values. Quite apart from the serious wrong to physicians that denial inherently constitutes, such an understanding of the physician- patient relationship would do a great disservice -- not only to the medical profession and society in general, but also to patients, because maintaining respect in any human encounter, including the physician-patient encounter, requires that respect be mutual.
In stark contrast to fostering such mutual respect, here’s the OHRC’s startling view of a physician’s obligation in the physician-patient encounter: “It is the Commission’s position that doctors, as providers of services that are not religious in nature, must essentially ‘check their personal views at the door’ in providing medical care.” The commission makes clear that physicians’ “personal views” include their deepest and most important ethical and moral beliefs and values. Obviously, that raises serious problems for physicians, but again it also raises problems for patients: Would any of us really want to be treated by a physician who had complied with a directive to “park your ethics and values with your car outside the surgery”?
It’s true sometimes that acting on personal views can be discrimination: Refusing to treat a patient simply because they were homosexual is discrimination and wrong. But that’s not the issue here. Rather, the problem lies in classifying as discrimination a refusal to provide or refer for a service, such as abortion, euthanasia, or artificial reproduction, that the physician believes -- and many other people believe -- is morally and ethically wrong. Such refusals should be treated differently from refusals of morally and ethically neutral services, such as refusals to rent an apartment to a person or serve them in a restaurant on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination. We can all agree that is wrong.
Social reality
Although many Canadians believe that a big difference between the United States and Canada is that Canadians have a consensus on basic values and Americans don’t, this issue of physicians’ freedom of conscience might show us that that the former is not true. Likewise, our recent election might show that Canadians are wrong in believing that, unlike Americans, they don’t vote along social-ethical values lines. In short, countries like Canada and Australia might also be involved in the culture wars, but in a much less high profile way than the United States.
The reality is that in many mature Western democracies we have competing societal values, with abortion at the eye of the storm as the situation in Victoria, Australia, of forcing physicians who have conscientious objections to do or refer for an abortion shows.
Abortion is so central to our values disputes because respect for human life is the foundational value of our kind of society and abortion involves defining what that respect requires.
In Canada, having achieved a black hole on abortion law -- there is no law -- pro-choice advocates are not content with having the freedom to act according to their values; they want to make others, for whom it would be a breach of their values, act likewise. And they want to have their beliefs and values publicly affirmed. Obtaining official rulings from human rights tribunals that physicians have no freedom of conscience protection regarding abortion establishes that their values should predominate as the societal norms. That is even truer when coercive legislation enshrining those beliefs is enacted, as in Victoria.
In short, these people claim freedom of values belief for themselves, but refuse to respect others’ freedom. That’s why they will not tolerate a respect-for-freedom-of-conscience exception. No matter what our values or views, we should all be concerned by such totalitarianism and fundamentalism.
Margaret Somerville is director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, and author of The Ethical Imagination: Journeys of the Human Spirit.
Absolutely no need to apologise, João, and my apologies if I seemed abrupt. I certainly did not mean to be rude or disrepectful.
Margo
If you think or felt that way, I think I have to blame none other than my own penchant for the discussion of the detail while you were trying to present the essential. Its my fault and I apologize.
I’ll accept your word that Canada has not yet a proper and fair law to deal with these type of crimes. I hope you get it.
João
João Pedro Afonso
Law - especially crinminal law - has multiple functions. One of the most important is to express society’s abhorrence of certain acts. As I’ve explained many times, in Canada there is no potential of criminal liability for abortion - killing an unborn child - at any stage of pregnancy. That can be seen as a statement by Canadian society that any killing of an unborn child is not a heinous act, at least not one that deserves the condemnation of the law and punishment. This law would have corrected that message by expressly stating that it is a very serious wrongful act, at least in certain circumstances, namely, those the law spelt out for its application.
I’m going to leave this discussion here, as I believe we don’t have any more clarity to add by contiuing it. I think we are now speaking past each other, rather than constructively engaging on issues and furthering any new insight.
Thanks for your contribution to the discussion.
Margo
But Margo, if hypothetically in your first case there was an autopsy to the dead mother and found her not pregnant (because she was lying to contract marriage, for example, or because she really believes she’s pregnant, or because she miscarriage it prior to the aggression), then the boyfriend wouldn’t be accused under this law despite his evil intention to be precisely what the law intent to prevent and punish.
Any live inserted in the society is unique and irreplaceable. I fail to see why the death of a woman isn’t unacceptable enough by itself, or for that matter, isn’t the loss of a dream in the miscarriage of an expected child, or simply the simple aggression. Any mature law should have deterred these already… it is not like that as if we couldn’t afford the time to discuss the law proposals.
I confess to you, I’m particularly irrational when I ear these kind of cases, what I want is to skin alive these guys. But we should not produce new laws just as answering to a social catharsis need. These kind of aggressors don’t reason in terms of punishing countability, what they do is to gamble they’ll never be caught. To discuss more traditional penances will not stop their attacks, to attack their believes in their impunity, their faith in not be caught and get way, yes.
João Pedro Afonso ...
We’ve had some horrific murders of pregnant women in Canada in the recent past, JUST BECAUSE they were pregnant. In one an 18 year old woman refused to have an abortion, so her boyfriend conspired with a friend to kill her because he didn’t want to be a father. In another, an 8 month pregnant woman was mudered with the express intention of killing the baby, which was alive when the woman was brought to the hospital, but died before the doctors could save it. It’s such cases, and ONLY such cases, that Bill C-484 was meant to address. It’s goal was, through the medium of our criminal law, to directly express Canadians’ horror at and condemnation of such evil, especially such an evil intention. With respect, the objections you raise are irrelvant by comparison.
Thanks Margot for your suggestion. I follow it and read the law proposal at “http://www2.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?Docid=3127600&file=4”, both languages. I’m not comfortable with what I read. Not only it didn’t answered my prior objections but more were raised. For example, if a common thief strikes viciously a pregnant woman and causes her to lost his baby, we will not be liable under this law because it might successfully argue he didn’t know she were pregnant, while someone who happens to know the victim and his state, is liable even if in the heat of some discussion forgot entirely about the pregnancy and acted recklessly. The degree of the assault might be less than the first but even so, the compound sentence be much higher, reaching the life imprisoning. This strikes me odd, as if the baby had no existence by itself, unless it exists in the mind of the aggressor too. It also raises some serious possibilities of blackmailing over people, since so much is at stake.
I could gone on, there are more objections, some technical others not, but since this is lateral to your article in comment, I’ll refrain myself unless you are interested.
Cheers,
JPA
João Pedro Afonso
Look up Unborn Victims of Crime Act, Bill C-484 Canadian Parliament on Google and you will get the answeres you seek.
Margo Somerville
...
The other problem is that, if some friend of the pregnant cause by accident her miscarriage, the woman could judge what happened and consider not presenting charges. This wouldn’t be possible with the proposed law, since existing two or more plaintiffs, the law had to take in consideration the interests of the others parts as well and judge if there is criminal matter by itself. It is even conceivable that a not reported miscarriage could lead to charges of cover up against the mother, stroked by grief she might be. In practice, this would lead to the obligation of reporting every miscarriage (but paradoxically, not intentional aborts, not by this law), to be subject of an independent investigation.
Third problem, bad life habits will turn definitely a liability and a possible reason of persecution between mother and sons… not that a pregnant should not take a healthy life if possible, but until know, that pertained to the conscience of the mother only. With a law like that, the door to a further open policing of the pregnant women by the state, will be open, because there will be an implicit admission of the fetus as an individual entity and possible plaintiff, against aggressions to him.
Note that what constitutes a problem for some, may be opportunities for others. I probably need a more open mind about this.
Cheers
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“The proposed legislation would have made a criminal assault that was undertaken with the intention of killing or injuring a fetus in utero or with recklessness (conscious unjustified risk-taking) as to whether that outcome resulted, a separate crime. In short it would have recognized both the pregnant woman and the unborn child as victims of a criminal assault.”
So, we are talking about common or accidental crimes over pregnant women, is that it? About aggravating the crime by multiplying the victims? Pregnant women are people we, the society, treat automatically in a special way (one of the two kind of people to whom I have the Pavlov reaction of giving automatically my seat in subways, anyway), so, I trust them to be an aggravation factor already in justice courts, for being it. If not, they should. So, the only additional practical purpose would be, not to protect the pregnancy, but to force justice to separate the plaintiff in two or more, acknowledging citizen statue to the fetus, and dismissing pregnancy as an aggravation factor (except as a disability factor, like a disease).
The first time I read your reply, I thought the law to be a good idea to protect pregnant women, but now, after some thoughts, I’m not so sure. One problem is that the perception of the crime would be based on unseen factors, like the number of fetuses in the womb. The aggressor to a woman with an hysterical pregnancy would be treated as an aggressor to a normal woman, while one attacking a pregnant of twins would be charged much more than to a normal pregnant… despite the intention in the mind of both to be the same, to attack a pregnant woman.
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The pro-choice lobby lobbied ceaselessly and successfully to prevent this legislation, because they adamantly objected to any legal recognition that a fetus existed and deserved some legal protection, even though the Bill expressly excluded any application of it to abortion or to the pregnant woman or a physician performing an abortion.
Joyce Arthur (Canadian Abortion Rights Action League) a leader of the Canadian pro-choice movement summed up the reason they were so opposed to this legislation this way:
“If the fetuses are recognized in this bill, it could bleed into people’s consciousness and make people change their minds about abortion.” (In “Fetal rights stir debate on abortion,” by Charles Lewis, National Post, March 1, 2008.)
In short, the only way to maintain the current black hole on abortion law in Canada is to pretend the fetus doesn’t exist.
JPA writes:
“If it’s delivered alive it then has the same constitutional rights, in particular the right to life and to “security of the person”, as everyone else, and to kill it then would be murder.”
But if that’s the case, why the need for a viable fetuses law? Shouldn’t the above protection be enough? I must be missing something…
MS: Under the Canadian Criminal Code a “child does not become a human being” for the purposes of the homicide and assault provisions “until it has been delivered in a living state from the body of its mother”.
Consequently, if you kill a viable fetus in utero (either through abortion or as a result of an attack on the pregnant woman) there is no crime involved with respect to the fetus.
If the baby is delivered alive and dies as a result of either the wrongful (criminal) attack (provided the attack was not abortion, because that is not criminal) or is then intentionally or recklessly killed, murder or manslaughter charges could be laid.
The proposed legislation would have made a criminal assault that was undertaken with the intention of killing or injuring a fetus in utero or with recklessness (conscious unjustified risk-taking) as to whether that outcome resulted, a separate crime. In short it would have recognized both the pregnant woman and the unborn child as victims of a criminal assault.
1 of 2: continued…
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A way to deal with this would be to filter admissions, to impose an age or viability limit to the access and fine tuning it to keep under the budget. I call this approach, the “Rights” approach, because these filters will be sold as rights, the right to survive/treated if certain conditions are attained. Most than likely, a “viable fetuses” law must start from this approach for politic reasons, which means it will have to choose a pragmatic viability criteria. Whatever we choose, I don’t think we will ever be satisfied, either with the budget amount or with the age limits, there will be always pressure to extend the system… just like there are pressures for the medical system to treat more and more diseases, and to extend more and more years of life. But here we have at least the advantage of having most of the patients mature enough to say, enough is enough. We don’t have that luck in the case of viable fetus. Eventually we’ll reach the point where the health system will faces rupture or do thought choices, and that’s what my question was about.
(There’s a third approach bound to happen in these cases, and I suspect that’s what the pro-choice groups are fearing most: that’s once established the precedent of viable fetus protection, and once the state reaches that financial rupture point where it’ll not able to do it alone, it asks abort candidates to either, share the costs of premature birth or to maintain the pregnancy to the end… in practice, forbidding the abort, and taking away the autonomy those women were after; An interesting variation would be, since viable fetus salvaging would be much more costly than to have the babies born naturally, the state would propose to pay them to take pregnancies until the end, when it would accept them for adoption. I’ll refrain from exploring the consequences of this idea, for now).
Cheers,
JPA
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...
Regardless the issue of viable fetuses and resources, I know that medical resources costs for everyone… that’s why I asked for what would be the “ethical” equipartition of our finite resources, in light of this. Without knowing the real costs, nevertheless I can assume that these will be more important with how much premature the babies are going to be, perhaps important in a explosive away. To have an image, if to save an eight month baby it would cost thousands, to save a six/seven month, it would cost millions. In the extreme, I think it is not inconceivable that a project class Manhattan, Apollo or Human Genome, could offer us today the capability of saving the five/four months, perhaps all the gestation period… but at which costs? Billions? We might be confronted with the dilemma that to save one fetus, we must sacrifice the entire budget for healthy meals in public schools. Or a national tracing program for breast cancer. Or… Ok!, I’m exaggerating to make a point, the numbers will surely not that bad as the ones I painted above. But this kind of dilemmas is sure to rise eventually. It is already costly to save premature babies who ARE wanted, luckily rare because the mothers will do anything to that not happen, imagine what would be to save all fetus deemed viable coming from late abortions?!?
So, to implement a suitable viable fetuses law, likely we will have to make choices. The question is what would be the best ones. I see two possible approaches for start. One is the “Lottery”, to establish a budget to equip some number of units to treat these cases and fill these in a “first come first in” basis. This is fine, but eventually it will face serious critiques in the moment it would reject the admission of wanted premature babies, for being filled by unwanted ones from abortions. That’s why I called it a lottery approach, there will be luck involved.
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“If it’s delivered alive it then has the same constitutional rights, in particular the right to life and to “security of the person”, as everyone else, and to kill it then would be murder.”
But if that’s the case, why the need for a viable fetuses law? Shouldn’t the above protection be enough? I must be missing something…
“Children’s right to “be reared by their biological” parents is not absolute. Adoption in the “best interests” of a particular child is a necessary and justifiable exception to that basic right. With respect to abortion, in my view, a child is better off alive and adopted than dead from abortion,"…
This is where we diverged. No fundamental right should accept exceptions. Nor should it be negotiable in exchange of other fundamental rights, because that would mean the later is not a right of “his”, but a purchasable right. We cannot argue that we quit from the natural parenthood to assure the fundamental right to live, because that would mean, one of them was never “his” right. Instead, we should look to what we are really trying to accomplish. Clearly, we are after to fulfill the child’s “best interests”, and maybe, that’s the fundamental right we are looking for children. But this is vague.
I feel badly about your last article. By commented it too much, I fear I killed the discussion. The MercatorNet editor even felt compelled to write to me. Ultimately, I was going to propose there, that the most fundamental child’s rights is to have an happy childhood, and to be raised to became a functional adult. A state can accept that, because it favors what states want most, functional citizens. The traditional family is also favored by this, because is the best way we know to assure these rights. In the problem above, your adoption option would come naturally as a solution, and not as an exception. Although… it wouldn’t help your implicit purpose of avoiding new “Adams” and “Eves”, sorry. :-)
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... part 2 of 2
JPA: Continuing to the obvious conclusion, if adoption is an option, I don’t see why viable fetuses shouldn’t be protected… except that fragile life viability is also a question of resources: technology and science can push the boundaries of life sustainability, but at a cost. How much resources in a finite world is ethical to employ this way, is a question I don’t know how to answer.
MS: Yes, but cost is a question that applies to everyone who needs to use medical resources, not just to fetuses who would be aborted because they cost too much. Sometimes, we have to be prepared to spend money (that is, it will cost us in economic terms) to uphold some of our most fundamental and important shared values. Respect for life is one such value - in fact, I believe the foundational one of a civilized, compassionate, human rights respecting, ethical society.
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