Interesting post, Chris.

The abortion question is the same as it always was: Should the government have a right to force a woman to carry a fetus to term against her will? The current answer seems to be no.

This doesn't mean that there aren't good and bad reasons to have an abortion. But it is problematic both practically and philosophically for the government to second-guess a woman's decision of what to do with her pregancy (by saying, for example, you can abort for X reason but not Y reason) when she is the one most impacted by the decision (I assume, of course that the fetus is not a person, which is a contentious, but widely-accepted, view).

This calculus might change if society were to suffer because of the way women exercise their abortion rights. If women were to predominately abort female offspring thus throwing off the gender ratio, for example.

Incidentally, I think aborting children with genetic abnormalities (e.g. down syndrome and alike) is troubling mostly in the abstract - We don't like the idea of aborting "imperfect" babies. However, I hardly see how it is in the best interests of anyone to bring into the world a developmentally-stunted child to a family who doesn't have the resources or will to properly care for him/her. I suspect many of the people who oppose abortion in such a circumstances would sing a different tune if they were the ones faced with the staggering costs and time required for taking care of such a child. This doesn't make it right to abort children with down syndrome, but does suggest who is in the best position to decide what should be done.

Your Maclean’s article continues the editorial trend in Canada to ignore the “elephant in the room”, specifically the cost of providing heroic measures and the long-term costs to society when severely disabled individuals are saved at birth. According to one report the sextuplets in Vancouver are costing the health system $10,000/day. The parents say that "Discussions about treatment are private matters between the parents and their treating medical team," but that is not really true because you and I are paying for the treatment. The health system seems to be the one area where the people footing the bill have absolutely no say in how (or whether) money is being spent. Even more problematically, according to one report I read, the co-joined twins, recently born in BC, have already cost the medical system almost a half-million dollars. Given the likelihood that these children cannot be safely separated and will both die at an early age the question remains whether allowing them to come to term once their condition was realized was the right one.

Medical technology has gotten to a stage where individuals who once would have died at birth can go on to live long lives, often at a huge financial cost to society. Similarly, due to improvements in medical technology the “genetic load” (biological term indicating the amount of deleterious genetic material in the population) has increased significantly in the last several decades as individuals who previously would have died at birth can instead go on to reproduce and thus pass on their genetic heritage.

Since it is indeed a zero-sum-game (a dollar spent here cannot be spent there), the question has to be asked whether using precious resources to prolong the life of the cojoined twins is right when those resources could be used in the foster care system or for social workers to ensure that healthy babies are supplied with safe homes and enough food to remain healthy as they grow.

Please don’t interpret these questions as suggesting that these children should be aborted. Personally, my wife and I have chosen not to have any of the optional testing for our child (in utero as we speak) because frankly, through discussions we realized that we could never come to aborting a child, regardless of any defect uncovered. I just think it is time that we as a society brought this discussion into the open and that the people paying the bills should get some input into how their money is being spent.

Well done peice on SARS. I recall reading the the nurses in Vancouver had been clearly briefed and trained on what to do in the event that someone came in with symtpoms like this but that the ERs in Toronto really had no clue. Doing what most ERs in Ontario do an assume you're a worry wart with the flu and put you aside for a few hours.

Also you couldn't avoid coughing Asian people on the subway or Warren Kinsella would call you a racist.

I do intend to read the full report since they make for fantastinc anthropolgy. the Walkerton report was the same. Why are the Kobels still alive?

There will be more interesting stories to follow, Chris, and soon. Whatever we (Canadians, humans in general) have that passes for a serious and ongoing study of moral philosophy, it is lagging badly behind advances in medical and biological technology. I consider it almost axiomatic that we must establish our moral thresholds before any technology arrives to issue a challenge; after the fact (once people have been tempted by the convenience of the possible) is too late.

Chromosomal abnormalities do not always show up in every cell. Sometimes there is a mosaic pattern--that is, only some cells and some tissues carry the abnormality. WBR LeoP