Sentence in case an outrage

As a committed advocate for the right to life of children before birth, one of the many pro-abortion canards repeatedly thrown my way goes something like this: “why don’t you put all your efforts and resources into helping children that already born!” To which I always reply, “aside from the fact that pro-lifers do many, many things for born children and women, it isn’t legal to kill born children yet. When it is, however, you can be sure pro-lifers will be the first ones to oppose that injustice too.”

I’m sure to say “yet” and “when” because I believe that when society devalues one group of human beings (at this time in history, pre-born babies), all human life is devalued.  “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” MLK Jr. famously said.

Further, I’ve always argued that there is no moral difference between a born baby and an unborn baby, so the killing of the pre-born is equally immoral as killing infants.  The infamous, pro-infanticide Princeton Professor Peter Singer agrees with me (albeit in reaching the exact opposite conclusion), writing in his book Practical Ethics, “if, for the reasons I have given, the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either.”

Do I really believe that the day will come killing unwanted born infants will be legal in Canada? Yes I do, at the very least the terminally ill and disabled, and it appears we have taken a huge “progressive” step toward that right here in B.C.

This week, Judge Len Marchand of Kamloops gave Courtney Saul a mere 2 years’s probation for drowning her newborn son in her kitchen sink. She had just given birth to the baby, George Carlos, and had an exam to get to that day. She didn’t know what else to do with her baby, apparently, so she drowned him, stuffed his corpse into a computer box, and threw him in her trunk to rot.

The less than lenient sentence has rightfully sparked outrage on social media. A visit to the National Post facebook page shows that aside from the odd radical feminist sympathizer, the vast majority of comments are expressing anger and disbelief.

So who is Judge Len Marchand? Well, interestingly enough it turns out his father held a cabinet position in the Pierre Trudeau government. Remember him? He’s the P.M. who said "the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation" in order to justify legalizing the killing pre-born babies. Maybe sons Justin and Len Jr. can carry on the legacy and tell us the state has no business in the kitchens of the nation?

Marlon Bartram
Kelowna Right to Life Society