Toronto March for LifeOn April 13, 2005, 19 year old Katrina Effert secretly gave birth to a baby boy in her parent’s home. She then strangled the child with her underwear, and tossed the corpse over the fence into the yard of one of the neighbours.
On September 9, 2011, CBC reported that Ms. Effert’s conviction for this murder had been ‘downgraded’ by an Edmonton Court of Queen’s Bench judge to infanticide, and in lieu of jail time she will merely serve a suspended sentence.
In her argument, the judge stated that “while many Canadians undoubtedly view abortion as a less than ideal solution to unprotected sex and unwanted pregnancy, they generally understand, accept, and sympathize with the onerous demands pregnancy and childbirth exact from mothers, especially mothers without support.”
Translation? Katrina Effert simply engaged in a really, really late-term abortion. Given that we don’t, under Canadian law, value human life a few minutes before birth, why a few minutes after?
Indeed, the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, run by the virulently pro-abortion Joyce Arthur, posted the CBC article on their Facebook page with the heading: “A tragic situation, but yes, there are compelling reasons for infanticide being a lesser crime than murder.” In response to my query simply stating “Such as?” ARCC removed the comment and blocked my asking further questions underneath the article.
The abortion movement, apparently, is not even bothering to protest the stipulation of the pro-life movement that if we value human life based on age or any other arbitrary criteria, it is intellectually consistent to point out that the value of any human life (such as Katrina Effert’s baby boy)is, shall we say, ‘downgraded’. In fact, while Ms. Effert will not spend any time in jail for strangling her son, she may have to spend sixteen days behind bars for disposing of his corpse by tossing it over a fence.
Killing a child? Meh. Improper disposal of the victim’s body? Outrageous!
While this “sentence” is an outrageous miscarriage of justice, it should not be surprising. In a country where the age of a human being is directly correlated to their value, this decision is consistent with the belief that younger equals less valuable. What is rather surprising, however, is that this judge (and many commenting on the CBC article) apparently seem to believe that women are far too mentally weak after childbirth to make any rational decisions.
Post-partum depression, this decision would seem to indicate, serves as an excuse to strangling your newborn. If you can prove you were depressed, killing your child is something that is understandable and if you listen to this judge, acceptable. If abortion advocates actually believe that women are so fragile after childbirth that strangling their child is understandable, I wonder what they would say if the same judge proposed that new mothers have to prove their sanity before taking custody of their newborn children? It is absurd to simultaneously claim that women are strong enough to do anything they choose in the world, but that childbirth, something they are biologically designed to do, will result in a spasm of murder. The only natural instinct abortion advocates believe women lack is the maternal instinct.
This tragic event should be seen as a warning to Canadians. When a judge literally uses abortion as an excuse for infanticide in a court statement, and compares the two as pretty much the same thing, we should recognize that this worldview is not inconsistent with the one of “choice”. This is not even the first time infanticide has been excused–Harvard ‘ethicist’ Peter Singer even endorses it. However, if children are not valuable simply because they are children, their value will be based on other criteria. When the value of one class of human beings is downgraded, we should all take note. It is up to each of us to decide. Should humans have the “choice” to kill others?
