Resident Fellow  David Frum

On Jan. 28, Canada marks the 20th anniversary of what may be the most astounding decision in the nation's legal history: R. vs. Morgentaler, the case that struck down Canada's abortion laws.

The Morgentaler case was followed the next year by Daigle vs. Tremblay, which clarified and amplified the Morgentaler ruling.

The result of the two decisions was to give Canada the Western world's most radical abortion regime. The mother's ownership of the pregnancy is absolute and final, and she may end it at any moment, for any reason. Neither the father of the child-to-be, nor the government, nor the child itself has any rights in the matter at all.

Almost every other advanced country on Earth grants the fetus in the womb some measure of protection.

British abortion laws are famously permissive. Yet even in Britain, late abortion must be medically certified as necessary to protect the health of the mother. Last year, a British court convicted and sentenced a woman who had procured a seventh-month abortion without medical permission.

Denmark, France and Norway ban abortion after 12 weeks; Germany, Austria and Belgium after 14 weeks; Sweden after 18 weeks.

Even America's famous Roe vs. Wade decision, which created a near-absolute constitutional right to abortion, draws a line at the moment at which a fetus becomes "viable." After 24 weeks, the Supreme Court has said, governments may impose at least some restrictions on abortion. In 2007, the court upheld the constitutionality of one such restriction: a ban on the abortion procedure known as "partial-birth abortion." In a partial-birth abortion, the head of the fetus is pulled out of the mother's body, then crushed. The body of the fetus is then carved and extracted in pieces.

Late-term abortions remain legal in Canada. When it was reported that no Canadian doctor would perform them, the Quebec government acted to create a new clinic in Montreal specifically for this purpose.

All this is the legacy of the Morgentaler case--even if Morgentaler himself condemns late-term abortion as ethically offensive.

Yet the profoundest ethical consequences of the Morgentaler case may have only begun to arrive.

If a 24-week fetus with a head, heart, eyes and hands is not a person deserving of protection, then how much less human is an eight-day old embryo? The Morgentaler case opened the door to radical scientific experiments with early human beings--and Canadian scientists have availed themselves of the opportunity.

In 2002, the Canadian Institutes for Health Research issued the first ethical guidelines for such research, and they seem sensible enough. But it is hard to see how these restrictions can last.

Imagine it: Here are the scientists and doctors, compassionate people, promising cures to Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or other terrifying diseases if only the federal government would allow them to, say, clone and destroy a few hundred or thousand cell clusters now frozen at fertility clinics.

How could any minister or government justify refusing them? The federal guidelines on stem cell research urge "respect for community notions of human dignity." But the supreme arbiters of human rights in Canada have ruled that the fetus-in-the-womb has no humanity to respect.

Cures, no--but late-term abortions, yes? How does that make any sense? It makes no sense and cannot endure.

As law, R. vs. Morgentaler is a strange document, suffused with the weird argot of 1980s vintage feminist ideology. Justice Bertha Wilson argued that no man could ever properly appreciate the abortion issue "because he can relate to it only by objectifying it, thereby eliminating the subjective elements of the female psyche, which are at the heart of the dilemma."

To the extent that Wilson's words carry any meaning at all, they claim that the moral problem of abortion is a problem only of the feelings and emotions of the pregnant woman. Even in 1988, that was an obtuse thing to say.

At the heart of the abortion dilemma is the question of what it means to be human. In this new century, that problem will challenge us again and again and again. As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from human intelligence, we will have to wonder: Can a machine become a "person"? As a new generation of environmentalists stake bolder claims for animals, we will have to consider: Are human rights only for human beings? And as the science of human genetics advances, we will encounter opportunities to reshape our very species.

Ahead of us, in other words, await some of the most difficult and awesome moral questions ever faced by human beings. And as those questions intensify, the answers offered by R. vs. Morgentaler will look more and more inadequate, shallow, short-sighted and obsolete.

David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.