By Naomi Lakritz, The Calgary Herald May 25, 2009 8:28 AM

Last week was a time of discussions about life and death. U.S. President Barack Obama talked about abortion when he gave the commencement speech at Indiana’s Notre Dame University. And Bloc Québécois MP Francine Lalonde reintroduced for the third time her private member’s bill decriminalizing euthanasia.

The parallels between abortion and euthanasia are striking. They’re both about when — and where along the continuum — it should be legal to take someone else’s life. The short, simple answer, before someone trots out all the “yeah, buts,” is: never.

Obama, who intends to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which permits partial-birth abortions, called on pro-life and pro-choice factions to find common ground.

Unless pro-choicers are prepared to acknowledge the scientific fact that a fetus as early as four weeks after conception is a human being with a beating heart and brain waves, and not a mere clump of cells whose humanness is relative only to its degree of wantedness, then no common ground is possible.

Obama made some redundant points when he said “let’s make adoption more available” and “let’s provide care and support for women who do carry their child to term.”

Adoption is already widely available through state and provincial governments and private agencies. What really needs to happen is for pro-choicers to stop limiting their talk to abortion when they discuss choice, and start promoting adoption. They need to talk in terms of women choosing life, as in putting their babies up for adoption, not in choosing death by condemning those unborn babies to being ripped apart and consigned to oblivion.

As far as providing care and support for women to see their pregnancies through to the end, there are plenty of pro-life agencies, both secular and faith-based, that are busy doing just that.

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel; there is only a need to promote the existence of the wheel so people can take advantage of it.

Obama also made two nonsensical points. The first was when he said, “Let’s reduce unintended pregnancies.”

Unless “we” are in the room at the propitious moment, handing out contraceptives to an amorous man and an ovulating woman, that is probably not a realistic goal.

The second point was when he urged abortion providers to get women to consider other options. Not likely, Mr. President. Each one of those babies consigned to the aforementioned oblivion means money in the pockets of the abortion providers. When death equals profit, those who make their living from it are not going to sabotage their earning potential by taking the moral high road.

The pro-life slogan has always been “choose life.”

How interesting that the opposing faction never says “choose death,” although that is exactly what opting for both abortion and euthanasia entail. Their approach is not so straightforward; they prefer to couch their ideology in euphemism. Lalonde, for example, refers to assisted suicide as the “ultimate compassion.”

But compassion for whom? For the health-care system, which saves money by moving elderly patients out of their beds and into their graves more quickly? For the patient’s relatives, who really ought to be spared all the messy, depressing, nasty realities of what death is like when it is allowed to take its natural course?

In her lucid moments during her last year of life, my mother would ask: “When can I go home? I want to get out of here.”

My brother did not tell her that she would have to go to a nursing home if she left the hospital, because she couldn’t live alone anymore. Instead, he would promise her, “When you’re well enough.” She had dementia and suffered a lot of pain, but she still wanted to live; she still had hope. She still had her sights set on getting well.

Yet, she would have fit to a T the description of the type of person Lalonde has in mind as a candidate for the “ultimate compassion,” someone who “continues … to experience severe physical … pain without any prospect of relief.”

Who dares to presume that within a patient who does not seem lucid, who is in pain, or who can’t speak, there is no spark of life that burns stubbornly and does not want to be extinguished?

Although Lalonde’s bill comes with requirements for the patient to furnish written requests to die, 10 days apart, or to designate someone else to make such a decision on his or her behalf, the Netherlands’ nightmarish experimenting with euthanasia has led to doctors killing patients who never gave their consent.

Life is a continuum and there is no demarcation zone on it where life is more hazily defined or has lesser value. I think if one must err, somewhere, at any place on the continuum, then it must always be on the side of life.

Naomi Lakritz writes for the Calgary Herald.

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This article is reprinted from the Ottawa Citizen.