Richard Dur is the volunteer Executive Director of Prolife Alberta and an award-winning political consultant with experience on campaigns across Canada.The provincial government’s new “meat chart” for its no-fault auto insurance plan has done something extraordinary: it has literally assigned a dollar value to the loss of an unborn child.According to the draft regulation, a “loss of a fetus” under twenty weeks caused by a car crash is worth $13,234. That is now the province’s draft valuation of a “pregnancy loss” — the kind of wording that makes you forget a heartbeat ever existed.It is difficult to overstate the moral dissonance. In the same province where the government pays for abortion on demand — covering the deliberate ending of pregnancy as a publicly funded “medical service” — it now proposes a fixed payout when that same life is lost through an auto accident..KEENEY: The hollow virtues of the progressive Left.Picture it: a 24-year-old woman drives toward an abortion facility. She isn’t in danger. She isn’t sick. She feels scared, pressured, cornered — like most.Then it happens.Metal on metal, a squeal of tires, a flash of glass and daylight.The crash ends the pregnancy before the abortion procedure ever could..According to the “meat chart,” her loss is now worth $13,234.If she’d been a few weeks further along — twenty weeks or more — the government would bump that number up to $18,906. Congratulations: the late-term bracket.Had she made it to the clinic instead of the ditch, Alberta Health would have covered the abortion in full (through your taxes, of course) and declared that nothing human had died at all. Just a “Reproductive system organ tissue disruption.” (Don’t you just hate when that happens?).BERNARDO: Disarming good people does not make bad people harmless — It makes good people helpless.But here’s where the story turns from sad to surreal.If a life ends by accident, we mourn it — and insurance pays for it.If a life ends by choice, we erase it, pretend it never happened — and still we pay for it..In Alberta, it seems a baby’s worth depends entirely on who kills it.If an abortionist ends the pregnancy, it’s a right.If a careless driver does, it’s an insurance claim..THOMAS: The politics of members of the new Calgary city council.This is not merely dehumanizing; it is incoherent.A government that refuses to recognize the unborn as human in one policy cannot credibly assign them a cash value in another. Either that child is nothing, or someone. If the loss of an unborn child in an accident merits compensation, then Alberta has already confessed what it denies in every taxpayer-funded abortion facility it finances: that a child existed. That a life was taken. That something — no, someone — precious was lost..The real horror isn’t in the crash. It’s in the contradiction.The same people who talk about “compassion” and “choice” have built a machine that prices out human life by trimester. It exposes a province incapable of deciding whether it believes human life begins at conception or at convenience.By compensating accidental miscarriages and stillbirths, Alberta has inadvertently admitted what abortion denies — but what every parent who’s ever held a miscarried or stillborn child already knows: that an unborn child is a someone whose death causes real loss..RUBENSTEIN: Anti-Semitic bigotry is now 'fashionable' in Canada.But it seems this truth is acknowledged only when there’s an insurance form to process. Our laws and bureaucracy recognize it only when there’s paperwork attached. But moral truth does not bend to bureaucracy.Here, in one draft regulation, is revealed the essence of modern moral bureaucracy: a system that pretends to measure compassion in dollars while denying the very existence of the human being to whom that compassion should be owed. And until Alberta recognizes that, its books will balance, but its soul will remain bankrupt.Richard Dur is the volunteer Executive Director of Prolife Alberta and an award-winning political consultant with experience on campaigns across Canada.
