Dear Mr. Harper

I strongly support Mr. Woodworth’s initiative regarding the personhood law, Section 223 (1), given current medical and scientific research.

It is indeed telling that even the old law still on the books refers to the child’s becoming a human being. This is reminiscent of slaves’ being recognized as human beings in the nineteenth century and of Canadian women’s being similarly recognized in the twentieth.

I have a bright, healthy, five-year-old niece who had to be delivered at barely seven months’ gestation because she was in imminent danger of death. Even after delivery, she was given only a ten percent chance of living. No one ever referred to her as a fetus.

Please, amend this law for the twenty-first century.

Yours sincerely

Christine Runstedtler