Cheaper by the decade

As Canada kicks off the count down to the 20th anniversary of the regrettable R. v. Morgentaler decision, which created an unlimited right to abortion on demand in that country, David Frum begins the lamentations. Recent technological advances have rendered the embryonic stem-cell debate, which Frum references, moot. However, that does not make Frum's argument that the Morgentaler decision cheapened human life any less forceful.

The conception of personhood that the Morgentaler court employed, like that described in the United States Supreme Court's infamous Casey decision, is purely subjective. Personhood begins whenever the mother wants it to begin. As it usually does, subjectivity in this case leads to tyranny. Just as dissidents of Communist regimes are at the mercy of Stalin's or Mao's or Castro's whims and preferences, the unborn human baby residing in a Canadian womb lives only if her mother wants her to live.

Freedom thrives only where self-evident principles -- the intrinsic value of human life, the endowment of all men with certain inalienable rights, the value of institutions such as marriage and the Church -- are held inviolate. Tyranny thrives on relativism.