As Colby Cosh pointed out this morning, it appears that retinal cells harvested from aborted fetuses can cure blindness in some people. I really want to say "harvest away," but I have no small degree of ambivalence about abortion, so it's not all that simple for me. My response to Mr Cosh was as follows:

Though the dominant pro-choice argument (that is, on day x it's fine, but on day x+1 it's not) leaves me very unfulfilled, I am pro-choice, simply because abortion is so historically and currently omnipresent that pro-life seems to me an indefensible position. One might as well march against the changing of the seasons. However, it seems to me that for Canadians to consider the rightness or wrongness of harvesting retinal cells from aborted fetuses is to put the cart several miles before the horse.

Murder victims' organs are not disqualified for transplant purposes, nor would any potential recipient refuse them, simply because of the circumstances that made them available. And yet: "Although millions of terminations are performed each year in the US alone, the fetal tissue is rarely donated." Why? I imagine because of the totally understandable stigma that surrounds abortion. Thus, while traditional organ donation is a triumphantly positive thing no matter if the donor died a heroic death or a meaningless one, harvesting useful material from abortions can never be, for the simple reason that the "donor" never got a chance to live or (if you believe the dominant pro-choice argument) even to die.

That's not to say we shouldn't do it. But for a country such as Canada in 2004, which has refused to decide one way or the other on abortion, to do the deed and quickly dispose of the evidence seems to me the only appropriate method. If we're going to start deriving concrete benefits from abortion, surely we first need to reconcile ourselves to the moral implications of the act itself.

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