More Harper Hypocrisy

Earlier this week, we found out that Canadian troops in Afghanistan are backing a regime that is moving, quite explicitly, to subjugate women instead of treating them as equal partners.

It used to be a mission to give a future to little girls. Now the government is scrambling to explain why Canadian troops are fighting for an Afghanistan that legalizes rape within marriage.

The new Afghan law, apparently approved by President Hamid Karzai, led Western diplomats in Kabul to call an emergency meeting and hammer out a concerted response, pressuring the Karzai administration to back down.

Canadian officials insisted that Mr. Karzai still has some "wiggle room" before the law is implemented, and waited impatiently for the President's first public comments on the law.

The Conservative government expressed outrage, and opposition politicians said Canadian soldiers did not fight and die for an Afghanistan that would pass such a law.

Anyone else remember all the right wingers in this country bragging about how our troops were "over there liberating people"?

But that isn't the hypocrisy at all. Only the completely clueless would believe that little lie.

No. The hypocrisy is in the actions of the Harper government themselves. Think back to 2006. Remember the spending cuts they did back then? Kind of focused on Women's and minority programs, didn't they? Then there is Harper's personal support for Bill C-484, which would essentially strip a woman of the right to control her reproductive destiny and Bill C-537, the so-called "medical practitioner's conscience" act - another piece of moralizing garbage legislation which fundamentally affects women disproportionately.

In this light, the government's "outrage" over Afghanistan's law suddenly seems just a trifle contrived.

That Slithering Sound is The Base Squirming

I'm not even sure Coren's latest column can even be parsed using the rules of the English Language. Even if it contains the odd sentence that is correctly structured, the overall argument makes somewhere between little and no sense.

Stephen Harper has been told by his advisers that he must avoid social issues if he is to win the election and, horror, unborn children were mentioned twice in the past seven days.

Pesky little things. Why can't they just agree to being slaughtered and stop muddying the waters of Canadian politics ...

Of course, Coren's whining about Bill C-484, which the Tories have suddenly decided to stop supporting because it is now a political liability.

These current mentions are tenuous at best. In a desperate attempt to make the prime minister look like the president, Stephane Dion asked Harper where he stood on abortion. A sordid attack.

Is it such a "sordid" thing, Michael? The Leader of the Opposition has asked our Prime Minister to state what his position on the subject is. It doesn't take a genius to suspect that there's an inconsistency or two between Harper's statements and his support for Bill C-484. I think what is far more significant is Harper's outright refusal to answer a simple question.

Even though Harper has proposed alternative legislation on the issue that is insultingly weak, he and his party are still held up as vile fundamentalists who want to force women barefoot into the kitchen.

Something I've never understood in that when my wife is making dinner I'd far rather she wore shoes. Choice, however, is apparently all important in this discussion so I shan't dictate footwear.

How generous of you Mr. Coren. I'm sure your wife appreciates your magnamity in the matter.

Harper hasn't proposed any legislation yet - there's no government bill before the house to replace C-484, and the Con$ don't seem overly interested in promoting C-537, which would do the correct thing in the first place.

Thing is, almost every survey shows that at least 50% of Canadians are opposed to abortion.

Really? Let me see if I get the reasoning here correct. Even if I accept the assertion that 50% of Canadians are opposed to abortion, since when does that have anything to do with an individual woman's right to make that decision for herself? There are lots of life decisions that people make that others would oppose. The issue around abortion is not a matter for some kind of "will of the majority" to decide. The long term, legal issue is really about a woman's access to health services in general, and reproductive health in particular. But, then again, Mr. Coren is also the same man who argues that teaching about sexuality in school is a bad thing. I suppose I should not be too surprised.

But at heart it's about doing what is right. Our beliefs regarding health care, welfare, housing, education, foreign policy and general social justice are all vital, but ultimately irrelevant if we deny the most basic right of all -- the right to life -- to the most vulnerable.

Perhaps, Mr. Coren, you would do better to argue about what is right for yourself, and let others lead their lives in a safe, peaceful manner. But thank you for admitting by your own reasoning that C-484 really is about abortion, and that the Fetus Fetishist crowd really is all about regulating everybody else's sex lives.

Cue The Violins

With the CPC formally taking C-484 off the table, you had to know Canada's wingnuts were going to start whining - and so they have:

Mr. Epp concluded, "What right does anyone have to deny a pregnant woman the right to have the child she has chosen to bring to term protected in law? I can't imagine any pregnant woman feeling that justice has been served if the person who brutally and intentionally killed the baby in her womb simply gets a stiffer sentence for assaulting her.

Mr. Epp is being so utterly dishonest here it's not even funny. If his law is only about that, then he should not have a big problem with C-543. Instead what he proposed was a piece of garbage legislation designed to establish a beachhead for "fetal rights". {Rights which can only be exercised by proxy, I might add}.

This is the second time this year that Nicholson has betrayed and shocked Canada's social conservatives. In May he presented the Conservative government Justice Department's 50-page defense of the notorious subsection 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act that has permitted major assaults on freedom of expression and freedom of religion by the Human Rights commission kangaroo courts.

Amazing, with all the pandering to their wingnut base lately, the base is still whinging away about things when they don't get their way.

What a bunch of juveniles.

Bill C-484 Dies

I see that in their preparations for a fall election, Harper has killed Bill C-484 in favor of a yet to be tabled piece of legislation.

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson announced Monday that the government will draft a new bill to replace Bill C-484, the Unborn Victims of Crime Act, so that it closes the debate about fetal rights and focuses instead on penalizing criminals who harm pregnant women.

Hmmm...isn't there already a bill before the house that does that? Why yes, yes there is - Bill C-543.

I suspect that this is little more than Harper realizing that C-484 is a political hot potatoe, and he can't afford to give the oppositions a club:

A free vote in March on Mr. Epp's bill passed in the Commons 147 to 132. Mr. Harper voted in favour, as did more than 25 Liberals. Mr. Dion was absent. Four Conservatives, including cabinet ministers Lawrence Cannon, Gordon O'Connor and Josée Verner, voted against the bill.

Now, the problem here is that the majority of the Conservative caucus voted for this bill, in spite of its many blatant flaws, and the obvious attempt at creating a legislative wedge to introduce the concept of 'fetal recognition' in law. This tells me a great deal about what the current 'front lines' of the CPC really represent, and it's not pretty. The fact that Harper allowed this bill to fester its way along this far without killing it sooner suggests strongly that Harper is not only deeply anti-choice, but that he is not above 'back door legislation' to achieve his goals.

Bill C-484 may be effectively moribund at this point, but feminists would do well to consider carefully the implications of putting their 'X' beside the local CPC candidate in any future election.

So What Is It, Mr. Epp?

I see Ken Epp is trying to brainwash us into thinking that his terminally dishonest Bill C-484 is all about protecting pregnant women.

am deeply disappointed that a number of physician groups are opposing my private member's bill C-484. I want to believe that any opposition is sincere and based possibly on publicly stated misconceptions that the bill will, in some way, reduce a woman's right to make choices about her own body, and also about possible legal consequences "down the road."

I respectfully ask doctors to consider this matter as individual physicians, and not as part of a collective interest with any particular agenda. In that spirit, let me try to address the above concerns.

Yeah, right Mr. Epp. Do you think we forgot what you said back here? If you did, you really are dumber than I thought.

Losing an unborn child in a violent act is beyond heartbreaking. It is a devastating tragedy which is only exacerbated by the fact that our legal system, not to mention society in general, has for too long turned its back on these most vulnerable of women and their families. By not charging an assailant in this tragic circumstance, we only add to the hurt and sorrow that survivors experience. C-484 is a compassionate response to their cry for justice.

Spot the strawman argument here. Would somebody show me the sudden rash of cases where criminal assault has involved pregnant women? Oh wait - it's Mr. Epp's imagined threat - the one he's busy knocking down.

Also, and significantly, the bill does not change the definition of "human being" or recognize fetal "personhood" in any way. What it does, is to give legal recourse to lay charges against a third party only in the very specific, very narrow circumstance when a pregnant woman is the victim of a crime, the attacker knows she is pregnant, and, in the process, the attacker intentionally or recklessly harms or causes the death of her unborn baby.

Ummm...bullfeathers, Mr. Epp. You have, by the very wording of your legislation given legal status to a fetus that is separate and apart from the mother:

238.1 (1) Every person who, directly or indirectly, causes the death of a child during birth or at any stage of development before birth while committing or attempting to commit an offence against the mother of the child, who the person knows or ought to know is pregnant,

If this bill were seriously intended to do what Mr. Epp says it is, all it needs to do is impose an additional penalty for the fact that the assault victim was pregnant - as Bill C-543 does.

I suggest, Mr. Epp, that you quit trying to do the women of Canada any more favours - it's pretty obvious that you have no clue.

Antonia Z Says What We've All Been Thinking

Here

Not that those who consider the Order of Canada, to use Toronto Archbishop Thomas Collins' term, "debased" now that Morgentaler has finally earned it, care much about women's well-being – except to assert that those of us who have abortions suffer emotionally for the rest of our ruined lives.

Paradoxically, most pro-lifers would accede to terminating pregnancies caused by rape or incest – as if some "unborn children" are more worthy than others.

Abortion, they say, just shouldn't be something women use for retroactive birth control.

Yes, well, that's what we do. Drop round to the clinic every other month for some gut-wrenching pain because it's so much easier than popping the pill. Bad girls.

Better we bear our children in shame and poverty than do what many of the men who impregnated us usually do. That is, go on without any consequence to life, womb and independence.

She also has some interesting updates on C-484. A bill which should never be allowed to pass parliament.

C-484 Is About Abortion - And Epp Admits It

I've said since I first saw Ken Epp's dishonest bunch of hackery called Bill C-484 that it was all about attacking a woman's rights - especially pregnant women's rights.

Over at Broadsides, Antonia Zerbisias has found some beautiful gems about the bill - straight from Mr. Epp's own writings:

"Even if people do start questioning abortion, it does not necessarily follow that they will change their minds about whether a woman should have the freedom to choose that option," Epp wrote in The Ottawa Citizen last month. "What it means is that pro-choice advocates will be in a position of having to justify abortion without relying on the illusion that the fetus is absolutely worthless.

"They will need to defend the view that, in spite of the unborn child being recognized as something of value, the woman's interests are paramount."

So, Mr. Epp, would you quit being a dishonest misogynist and admit that what your bill is really all about is feeding your festering desire to control women and create a world where male dominated "medical panels" decided if a woman would be allowed to have an abortion, or if she should be forced to carry that pregnancy to term.

As for Rona Ambrose's asinine claim that C-484 being about "an issue of protecting pregnant women ", it is such a dishonest statment it's not even funny.

By Epp's own admission, this bill isn't about protecting anyone. It's not like we have a sudden rash of people running around violently assault pregnant women these days.

Ambrose says it's Dion who's turning C-484 into a renewed abortion debate.

"I think he's taking a very partisan tack on what could be a very non-partisan issue that we could address together," Ambrose said. "I think he's fear-mongering women on this issue."

No Rona - Dion isn't fearmongering - women aren't stupid, and strangely most of them can read what's in C-484 just fine. It lifts most of its wording out of the wingnut arguments about abortion, and transplants them. If C-484 isn't about abortion, then why are you idiots in the government not adopting Bill C-543, which accomplishes the same thing without the slimy wording?

Would You Want To Return To This?

With Canada's wingnuts occupying the House of Commons, and the opposition seemingly missing in action, it's time to consider the ramifications of Bill C-484, which is unquestionably a direct attack on women's health, and abortion in particular.

Via Feministing, I found this essay from the New York Times - written by a retired gynecologist who lived through what is now often referred to as the "Pre-Roe era":

The worst case I saw, and one I hope no one else will ever have to face, was that of a nurse who was admitted with what looked like a partly delivered umbilical cord. Yet as soon as we examined her, we realized that what we thought was the cord was in fact part of her intestine, which had been hooked and torn by whatever implement had been used in the abortion. It took six hours of surgery to remove the infected uterus and ovaries and repair the part of the bowel that was still functional.

Yes, it's gruesome. That's the point. If Canadians allow Bill C-484 and its cousins to come into force, we run a very real risk of our doctors encountering scenes like that in hospital emergency rooms once again.

All because some zealots are all about "consequences" for everyone except themselves.

Consider this - if Bill C-484's backers were actually being honest with Canadians about their intentions, why aren't they supporting Bill C-543? - as the keeper of 'Benediction Blogs On' points out.

The Logical Consequences of C-537

If the brain-damaged rantings of Maurice Vellacott become law, we can look forward to scenes like this tragedy in India happening here.

Why? because bill C-537 creates an environment where a practitioner's religious beliefs trump the patient. Is bill C-537 as sweeping as the societal attitudes towards India's "untouchables"? No, but it is rooted in the same class of stupidity - where someone allows their superstition to guide their treatment of somebody else down a path that will be damaging to the patient.

Truly sad is that C-537 makes women Canada's "Untouchables" when it comes to health care.

Shorter Barbara Kay: Feminists are SOOOO awful

It appears that the National Post wants to descend below the intellectual depths that Wingnut Daily currently occupies.

Besides doing a "wingnuts on parade" editorial sequence drawing from such intellectual luminaries as Kathy Shaidle, we have the latest bit of near-psychotic stupidity from Barbara Kay published on Wednesday.

According to Ms. Kay's slightly rancid reasoning, anyone who objects to Bill C-484 is engaging in "hysterics".

nderstood as irrational emotional flailing about whenever public discussion touches on a woman's fruitful uterus, Hippocrates' neologism is spot on. Try to say out loud in this country that what's in a woman's pregnant belly is a human being, not a blob of tissue, and hysteria emerges in three interesting variations.

She then goes into a series of utterly brain dead defenses of Bill C-484 - such as the following:

Until now, a woman and her fetus have been treated as a single legal person. By laying two criminal charges in a pregnant woman's murder, C-484 will validate the unborn baby's existential human uniqueness.

Now, either Ms. Kay's lost her ability to grasp the very complex issues that Bill C-484 opens, or she's choosing to blithely ignore them. First of all, Bill C-484 infers a degree of "personhood" upon a fetus still growing in the womb. The first question that I would have to ask is at what point in pregnancy does that recognition take effect? Biology understand the process of gestation pretty well, but the process itself is somewhat imprecise. Law requires a fair degree of precision in such matters, and I find it hard to believe that it's anywhere near so simple.

Second, the moment we confer a discrete notion of "person" to the still-biologically dependent fetus, our legal system confers a series of rights and obligations. In such a situation, we have in effect taken a pregnant woman's autonomy over her body, and the pregnancy itself away from her. At what point is the "unborn child" (to borrow Ms. Kay's somewhat noxious terminology) a "tenant" in the mother's womb? What are the mother's legal obligations in such a situation? What are the fetus' obligations? If this starts to sound a little ridiculous, it's because it is. Bill C-484 confers a status upon an entity that cannot exercise its apparent legal status as a distinct entity from its mother.

An Environomics poll suggests that 75% of Canadian women approve of the bill. As Suzanne Fortin of the Family Coalition Party of Ontario (herself pregnant) wrote in these pages Monday, "Bill C-484 is a common-sense bill that would address the true nature of a woman's relationship with her fetus."

I call bullshit on that claim. Bill C-484 is not "common sense", it is a direct and blatant attack not merely upon those who would do harm by intent to a pregnant woman (a pretty vile creature to begin with), but further it is a direct attack upon the a woman's right to make her own moral and ethical decisions with respect to her pregnancy. The provision of that legal status as "distinct", this bill creates a legal pretext under which a woman could be detained in custody on the grounds that she intended to harm the fetus she was carrying. (No Bill C-484 doesn't say this explicitly, but once you create the notion that a fetus which is biologically dependent upon its mother is distinct from its mother, the door to such moves has certainly been opened.)

But wait: Women were not "legal persons" until 1929. That didn't mean that before 1929 their husbands had the right to kill them.

Here's where Kay tips her hand about the real intent of Bill C-484. The comparison with women's suffrage in the early 20th century is utterly bogus. While a fetus is unable to exercise or express its rights as a distinct being from its mother until after it has been born, a woman is an adult human being and is physiologically distinct from her husband. Also, Ms. Kay might want to consider that men certainly did have the right to beat their wives (quite legally, actually) up until relatively recently. (and sadly, far too many went well beyond slapping someone - and some still do).

Bill C-484 is in fact about restricting a woman's access to abortion - largely on the assertion that a pregnant woman is not capable of making a rational, moral decision on her own.

that mother and fetus are one person because their biological systems operate symbiotically -- well, the same is true of Siamese twins, indisputably two human beings. If one is murdered, and the other dies in consequence, should only one charge be laid?

Again, this is a false comparison. Not only legally, but biologically, we recognize conjoined twins as distinct beings for good reason. Short of major surgery, the co-dependency of such twins simply cannot be resolved - it is a lifelong condition - literally. This is quite distinct from the biological process of gestation which has a discrete end point called birth, at which point the fetus becomes a distinct individual separate from its mother, and able to begin to express itself - and thus exercise the rights that legal recognition as a distinct entity provides in law.

In spite of the weakly phrased provisos in Bill C-484, the bill does not protect medical professionals from investigation and charge under that law. All that someone has to do is come up with an argument that the doctor is "attacking" the woman (thus committing a crime of sorts) in any situation where some kind of medical intervention is involved in the pregnancy. (e.g. in-utero surgery where the fetus dies comes to mind as an example). If you think it's hard finding an ob-gyn today, just wait for C-484 to become law.

The intellectual cupboards of the no-abortion-constraints crowd are bare. Their fallback position has become ever more unworthy of enlightened democrats: censorship, personal attack and scare-mongering. Such is their logical desperation, they prefer to advocate that murderers escape justice rather than admit that an unborn child is a human being.

Incorrect, Barbara. What today's feminists will not tolerate is a return to the deadly era of "back alley" abortions, or of male-dominated medical panels evaluating whether or not they should be "granted permission" to end a pregnancy. Ill-worded, poorly conceived legislation that underneath it all is nothing more than an attempt to return us to that era is unacceptable - Bill C-484 is so poorly thought out that it didn't (and doesn't) deserve to have passed first reading in the House of Commons.

If Bill C-484 was written to exact greater punishments if a criminal attack disrupted the gestation process, that would be a much different thing, as the bill itself would then be framed correctly in terms of the mother carrying the fetus. Instead, it grants a status to the fetus that is not logically tenable unless your long term objective is to guarantee that the moment a woman becomes pregnant that she is nothing more than Herbert-esque Axlotl Tank. (If you haven't read Herbert's "Dune" saga, go read it - followed by reading Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale if you want some idea of just how horribly wrong-headed Bill C-484 is in its implications.