If I didn’t have experience in the matter I would have thought the media was just trying to be fair, to provide some balance. That I have found is highly unlikely when it comes to the emotionally charged issue of abortion.

There were thousands of people on Ottawa’s Parliament Hill Thursday as the pro-life movement sought to raise awareness of both beginning and end-of-life issues. The media gave almost equal coverage to those pro-choice protesters who showed up to demonstrate their views.

This small cluster of protestors at least had signs that I can show on this family rated blog. Most of the pro-choice signs I saw used deliberately offensive language.

In a previous post I mentioned that you can have widely varying estimates when trying to judge the size of a crowd in a field. Depending on whose estimate you believe, the pro-life group was between 8.000 and 25,000. That’s a sizable difference.

The pro-choice demonstrators on the other hand were easier to quantify. There were 17. And that is counting the woman holding a pro-choice sign I saw a block away while walking to the bank.

I did find it rather amusing, because I expect logical inconsistencies. The pro-choicers seemed very concerned that tax dollars were being used to fund the demonstration.

I don’t know if that is true. The pro-choicers claimed that Roman Catholic high school students were in attendance and that the buses they used to get to the rally were paid for out of school funds. I suppose this is possible, however I can think of a couple of other ways the bus money could have been provided, all from private sources as opposed to tax revenue.

The ratio of pro-life to pro-choice supporters was possibly as high as 1,000-1. Politicians however don’t want to have to deal with the issue.

I applaud anyone who is concerned about the spending of tax dollars. We have seen too much waste from politicians of all political persuasions – they need to be held accountable. But this concern seemed to be solely because they thought tax dollars were being used for a cause they disapproved of.

From their signs and behavior I could deduce that they approve of tax dollars being used to fund an activity that I am not in favour of: the funding of abortions as a form of birth control. The protestors’ rationale seems to be that spending government funds on something contentious is acceptable only if it is something they approve of.

Where do we draw the line at the use of citizens’ funds by the state? Does the average person have the right to direct his or her taxes so that they are not spent on practices that are seen to be immoral?

That has been debated for years, mostly involving pacifists and government military spending. The pacifists don’t seem to have won many battles. Governments take a dim view of anyone who wants to hold them to a high moral or ethical standard whatever that standard may be. That may be because governments are only as moral as the politicians we elect and the civil servants they hire to run things.

I guess that explains who we have no laws restricting abortion in Canada. If the people want change it will have to be effected first at the ballot box.