The case of Brenda Drummond, the Ontario woman who fired a pellet gun up her vagina two days before giving birth to a six-pound baby boy, is as bizarre as it is tragic. Quite properly, the judge in her case declined to find her guilty of attempted murder, just as the courts were right earlier this year to reject confining a Manitoba woman with a glue-sniffing habit until her baby had been safely brought to term. Under current Canadian law, as the courts have many times ruled, a fetus is not a person, and not being a person, has no rights, nor any claim to the protection of the state.

That the courts have declined to make law, however, does not absolve Parliament of that responsibility. Quite the contrary: these and other cases add up to an urgent plea for Parliament to act. While we are unlikely to confront an epidemic of women shooting themselves in the abdomen, there is all the same such a thing as infanticide. And as the law stands, it is the next thing to being legal.

Since the Morgentaler decision in 1988, when the Supreme Court struck down the Criminal Code provisions against abortion, it has been legal for a woman to do just about anything she chooses to a fetus, for any reason, at any stage of the pregnancy. The old law was tossed out because of its arbitrary and unequal application across the country. Yet the present state of affairs is no less arbitrary. One second after it is born, a child is a person, possessed of all the rights and claims to our protection of any human being.

One second before it is born, it has none of these. Can anyone find this defensible?

Take two children, conceived on the same day. Nine months later, one is born, but the other, for one reason or another, is delayed. They are at precisely equal stages in their development. The one born after could just as easily have been born before -- indeed, weeks before. Is it any less human, any less deserving of mercy, of tenderness, of justice, merely because of the happenstance of its time of birth?

The absurdity of such a limited definition of human life may be judged by the system's brave attempts to apply it. In the Drummond case, the mother could have been charged with murder under the Criminal Code had the child, once born, then died of its injuries. The boy having survived, however, she could be found guilty neither of murder nor even of attempted murder, since it was not the born child against which she acted but the fetus.

The glue-sniffer, for her part, could have poisoned her baby with strichnine for all the law cares so long as she intended to kill it in the womb. What moved the authorities to intervene was only her declared intent to carry the child to term and thus to risk, by virtue of her own self-destructive tendencies, giving birth to a severely deformed child. Yet even that injunction was struck down, implying as it did that the child that will be in future might have some claim to protection in the present.

We may always debate where life begins, of course, or whether the criminal law is appropriately applied in matters where consensus is so lacking. But can we really continue with a legal regime in which it is permissible to destroy a child even as it is sliding down the birth canal? Is there no consensus even in defence of the late-term fetus, separated from childhood only by the lottery of its birthdate?

The worst of it is that this situation arises not from any law, but from the absence of it; not from any deliberate democratic choice, but from the suspension of it. There was an attempt, you will recall, to pass a new abortion law in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. Then-Justice Minister Kim Campbell pieced together a difficult compromise which pleased no one, but probably best reflected the division of opinion in the country and in Parliament at the time. Yet the law died, not for want of support in the Commons, but on a tie vote in the Senate.

The Senate! It is one thing for the Supreme Court to rule that a given law conflicts with the higher law that is the Constitution. But for such a fundamental matter of public debate to be decided, or rather left undecided, by such a discredited relic as the Senate is a black stain upon our democracy, as the resulting lack of protection for the unborn child remains a stain upon our conscience.