Forest fires and roast pig

Many moons ago I was told a story that I can no longer remember. I've tried to find it on the Internet, to no avail. But the essence of it, as I recall with my enfeebled memory, is this:

A forest fire raged outside a city. When the fire finally died, one of the inhabitants found the remains of a wild boar, which roasted to death in the flames. It smelled delicious and he tried a bite. This led in time to a wide demand for roasted pig.

But people were as inclined in those ancient days as they are now to artificially constrain their imaginations and subsequent decision-making. So it was assumed that the only way to acquire roast pig was to set afire forests in which they were known to live. This led to various unintended consequences with respect to the loss of enormous tracts of woodland. It also led to a host of decisions regarding who was entitled to have roasts of pork, licenses for setting forests on fire, etc. There were even pig wars.

Finally some radical (I like to think he was a wise and thoughtful sixty-one year old) suggested that there was another way to realize the sought for objective that did not result in all of this collateral damage. I think that you can guess what it was. He faced tremendous opposition at first, but good sense finally won the day.

This glimmer of memory awoke from its sleep as I read the various articles regarding Henry Morgentaler's receipt of the Order of Canada (along with other great Canadians like Kim Campbell--Kim who?). No one will dispute that women deserve full and equal rights. No one disagrees that society must insist that governments and courts honour such rights. But like setting forest fires to get delicious food, have we sought to achieve this desirable objective in a very wrong way?

A desirable objective can be legitimately sought for, but achieved through undesirable means. It was thought that the only way to achieve a delicious feast of roast pork was to burn down the pig's habitat. This realized the main objective, but at the expense of many other laudable objectives (e.g., having lumber to build one's home, halting erosion, etc., etc., etc.). Much harm was done to acquire that perfect food, and a thicket of laws, assumptions, stereotypes, and even deaths (other animals and people in the forests) developed--all because of wrongheadedness in achieving the main objective.

To my way of thinking, Morgentaler is a classic arsonist--a forest fire starter par excellence. What do I mean?

Consider this comment regarding Morgentaler's receipt of the Order of Canada from one of his admirer's, Maria Corsillo of the Scott Abortion Clinic in Toronto (Vancouver Province, July 2, 2008, p. A9):

It's not that Dr. Morgentaler needs that honour--we need to recognize
his achievements. This is a person who has single-handedly changed our country so that we are one of the few countries that absolutely recognizes women as full and equal human beings. I think that anyone, however they feel about abortion, has to recognize that Dr. Morgentaler has given every single person in this country the right to have his or her own feelings about that.

First, there is the main objective: to recognize that women are full and equal human beings. Hands up, anyone who disagree with that? Good.

Then there are the explicit or implicit assumptions:
1. Most countries don't recognize women in this way.
2. These are countries that do not allow abortion on demand. Remember, there were legal abortions done in Canadian hospitals before Morgentaler arrived on the scene, but access to them was limited, required the consent of a medical committee, etc.
3. Unborn babies can be a hindrance to the achievement of full and equal rights.
4. Therefore, achieving abortion on demand is an important way of realizing that great objective.

Morgentaler himself made other revealing comments in a story in today's Vancouver Sun (July 3, 2008):

He said he is surprised the negative reaction to his honour from religious groups "is not more violent than it already is ... The negative opinions all come from the usual suspects: the Catholic Church, fundamentalists, women opposed to women's rights."

Here we have the same main objective: full rights for women. And we have the typical assumptions; i.e., if you are opposed to abortion on demand, then you are not just anti-abortion; you are also anti-women's rights.

So to get to the main objective, we must burn down the trees:
1. Switch the attitude toward motherhood from a inestimable privilege to a burden which one bears at one's option.
2. Decide that the abuses of women's rights that most often lead to crisis pregnancies (you know the list--fear of rejection, loss of work, falling behind, physical threats, etc.) are best solved through aborting the baby. Nothing is necessarily done about the abuses, so they are still there waiting for the woman when she leaves Morgentaler's clinic.
3. Defy medical science by denigrating the developing fetus into a blob of cells.
4. Stereotype anyone opposed to this particular means of achieving equal rights for women as anti-woman.
5. Define "unwantedness" as a sufficient reason for terminating a pregnancy (while continuing to define it as an abuse in other contexts such as employment).
6. Borrow from our sordid history of legally defining Jews, blacks, women and aboriginals as non-persons by defining the fetus as such. Astonishingly this approach is supported by Jews (Morgentaler, a holocaust survivor), blacks (Barack Obama), women (Hilary Clinton), and aboriginals (Jessica Yee, Chair, Aboriginal Realities, Aboriginal Choices, and Toronto Action Committee, Canadians for Choice) who ought to know better.
7. Pretend that abortion is a routine and safe procedure despite all of the collateral physical and emotional damage that many women and girls subsequently endure.
8. Ignore indications that there may be a significant link between abortion and breast cancer.
9. Harass politicians into seeing abortion on demand as the sure indication that they are truly pro-woman.

And what are we left with? Enormous numbers of dead fetuses. And enormous numbers of abused women. We haven't addressed the nature and extent of the abuses. We've just burned down forests.