On "Matters Of Conscience"

So, one of the Roman Catholic Archbishops thinks that Justin Trudeau's recent implementation of party policy needs a rethink.

Collins pointedly mentioned that there are two million Catholics in his diocese. He said he encourages them to get involved in politics as both voters and candidates. 

"It is not right that they be excluded by any party for being faithful to their conscience."

Let's get something absolutely clear here.  Abortion (which is what this is primarily about) is a matter of individual conscience.  That is to say, if you object to abortion on "conscience" grounds, then don't have an abortion.

Access to Abortion is NOT a "conscience issue".  Abortion is a medical procedure.  Plain and simple. The right of women to have safe access to medical procedures is well established in this country.  You cannot take one procedure off the table simply because someone else objects to it "as a matter of conscience".

More pointedly, it's time that we dug a nice big hole and dumped all of the nonsense rhetoric about "conscience rights" around this issue into it, and filled it back in.  The decision to have an abortion or not is a pregnant woman's decision to make.  Her conscience and her conscience alone has something to say on the matter.

Those who raise "conscience" objections as an excuse to deny a woman access to abortion are not exercising any valid right to object.  The Archbishop, for example, may have something to say about whether or not he things abortion is "moral", but he has no right whatsoever to demand that a woman's access to abortion be restricted on that grounds.  Conscience rights do NOT give anybody the right to restrict other people's actions.

The only other party in the discussion who has any right to object is the doctor who might be asked to carry out the procedure.  Even there, that doctor has an ethical duty to provide a referral to another doctor in such a situation.

While the good Archbishop's "conscience" may prevent him from having an abortion (should he ever become pregnant), his "conscience rights" do not allow him to restrict others from safe access to the procedure should they choose to access it.

The last policy convention of the Liberal Party of Canada made it abundantly clear that a woman's right to choose is not open for debate in the party.  This nation's lack of any law on the matter since the last laws were struck down in the late 1980s speaks further to that.  The matter is one between a woman and her physician.  Nobody else has a legitimate say in the matter.

Decision Making and Pregnancy

Think that the Harper Government doesn't have an anti-woman agenda?  Think again.

From LifeSite:

Conservative MP Kyle Seeback openly admits that he was once “fairly comfortable” with the viewpoint that a pregnant woman should have the option to abort in the case of rape. He also says that even though he saw abortion as okay for rape and incest, he still thought of himself as “pro-life.” 

But all that changed one day when Seeback was invited by Campaign Life Coalition in 2006 to attend a talk by Rebecca Kiessling, a woman who was conceived in rape and adamantly defends the right to life for everyone conceived in rape. 

“It just resonated with me right away. I kept thinking: ‘Why would someone get to choose that she would not have a life.’ It didn’t make sense to me,” the MP from Brampton West told LifeSiteNews.com in an interview during Campaign Life Coalition’s National Pro-Life Conference in Toronto earlier this month.

What gets me about this position is that it presumes that once pregnant, a woman is incapable of reasonable, intelligent agency with respect to being pregnant.  More or less, the moment that you are pregnant, the so-called "Pro-Life" crowd seems to think that you have no further ability to be an intelligent agent and act in your own best interests, or to consider the best interests of the fetus developing in your body.

The Inherent Misogyny of the Anti Abortion Protestors

One of the biggest problems that women have faced over the centuries has been getting beyond being treated as mere objects ... or even outright property.

After reading some of Cardinal Marc Ouellet's comments at the "Fetus Festivus" event recently held on Parliament Hill. (and if that name doesn't creep you out, I don't know what will - the implications of it with respect to women's autonomy over their own bodies are staggering)

Cardinal Ouellet thanked the attendees at the march for defending the unborn and called on all to speak out also “in defense of life until the end.”

“I thank you for standing up in defense of the unborn – those who cannot come to life, those who cannot develop and enrich our country because their right to be born is negated,” he said. “The battle for life, the right for life, is a spiritual battle, so we pray. It is also a cultural battle, and it is a juridical battle, so that’s why we come together and we ask for justice.”

Uh huh ... no - it's a battle to control women's bodies. Let's call it what it is - anything else - whether you use the language of 'fetal rights', or 'right to life' is window dressing.

The fundamental issue underlying the anti-abortion movement is misogyny - and it is the misogyny that has been used against women for centuries - rooted in a masculinized worldview, and a long-held misunderstanding of female fertility and sexuality.

Referring to Dictionary.com, the term Misogyny is defined as follows:

mi·sog·y·ny
   /mɪˈsɒdʒəni, maɪ-/ Show Spelled[mi-soj-uh-nee, mahy-] Show IPA
–noun
hatred, dislike, or mistrust of women.

This isn't outright hatred at play here, it's more like mistrust. Fundamentally, the fetus fetishists don't trust women to make sensible, intelligent decisions about their own bodies - and in particular the biological process commonly called pregnancy.

The anti-abortion arguments reduce the pregnant woman to an object - a mere vessel whose role it is to produce a baby at the end of gestation.

Consider Cardinal Ouellet's comments the other day:

Asked by a reporter about the Church’s teaching on abortion in cases of rape, the cardinal said: “the child is not responsible for how he was conceived, it is the aggressor who is responsible. We can see him (the child) as another victim.”

"I understand very well that a woman who's been raped is dealing with trauma and that she needs to be helped,” he added later. “But she needs to do so with respect for the being that is in her womb. It is not responsible for what happened. It's the rapist who is responsible. But there's already a victim. Do we need to have another one?"

There are some key observations that I want to raise here - and it is the assumptions in the Cardinal's statements:

1) Note that the Cardinal is talking about a rape victim as "needing help", but he is unwilling to allow that same rape victim the freedom to decide for themselves whether they should bear the child that some violent asshole has spawned in them.

2) The fetus as supreme over her needs as a human being. The Cardinal talks about "respect for the being that is in her womb", implying that the fetus has a status that overrides the woman's right to control over her own body.

3) The Cardinal's language treats the fetus as distinct from the woman, and in doing so disregards entirely the enormous biological - and emotional - price that pregnancy exacts for the woman.

Not only has the Cardinal repeated the oft-heard lines of the so-called "pro-life" movement, but he has shown us a window into the blatant and utter misogyny of this line of reasoning.

In the Cardinal's world, the woman is reduced to a mere biological vessel the moment she becomes pregnant. The reason she became pregnant doesn't matter, nor does her circumstances or desire to be a parent. In fact, her decision making with respect to the pregnancy ends at that point. In essence, a pregnant woman is seen as unable to make rational decisions about the progress of her pregnancy. In short, the woman is not trustworthy once she's pregnant. This shows a clear, and unmistakable mistrust of women - simply based on whether they are pregnant or not.

The "pro-life" types go a step or two beyond this and argue that even when the woman's life is at risk, that abortion is unacceptable:

The Bishop of Phoenix has announced that a Catholic nun and administrator of St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix has automatically excommunicated herself by approving an abortion on a woman who was 11-weeks pregnant, and whose life hospital officials allege they were trying to save.

Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted said the excommunications apply to all involved, and lambasted the hospital’s defense of their decision by comparing the ill woman’s unborn child to a disease that needed to be removed.

The Arizona Republic reports that in late 2009, Sister Margaret McBride, then vice president of mission integration at St. Joseph’s, joined the hospital’s ethics committee in determining that doctors and the hospital would be morally justified in performing a direct abortion in the first trimester, because they felt that the mother’s life was at risk.

The woman, whose identity is anonymous, was reportedly seriously ill with pulmonary hypertension.

Just consider the moral and ethical stance that this represents. The woman's life was endangered by being pregnant, and the Bishop (who has how much medical training?) dares to condemn the decision providing her with an abortion.

To me, this just reinforces the rather offensive idea that women exist solely as vessels to produce babies. Everything else a woman may do or accomplish is secondary - the moment she is known to be pregnant, these people want to take away her right to make her own decisions about her body.

To reduce women to non-sentient vessels for bearing children the moment that they become pregnant is not just misogyny - it is the worst kind of misogyny because it perpetuates myths about women that have been used to hold them down to second class citizen status for centuries.

... and make no mistake about it - the so-called "pro-lifers" in Canada would happily legislate away a woman's right to decide her own destiny.

More Dog Whistles From Harper's Back Benches

I said it when Harper was first elected, and I continue to stand by the claim that he is letting his back bench run amok with bills and other activities designed to play to the social conservative base deliberately.

He doesn't expect to have many of those bills get very far, and if he has to, he'll kill them off if he thinks that there will be a political cost to it (e.g. Bill 484 - for example) But ... because he can 'let his caucus vote "freely"' on these matters, Harper allows his caucus to keep their "social/religious conservative credentials" by voting for these bills.

The latest entry in Harper's efforts to keep his base happy emerges in the form of MP Brad Trost's petition to defund Planned Parenthood.

A petition calling for a stop to federal funding of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) has been launched by Saskatoon-Humboldt MP Brad Trost.

Trost presented the petition to the House of Commons Monday. IPPF is funded through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and, according to Trost's petition, "promotes the establishment of abortion as an international human right and lobbies aggressively to impose permissive abortion laws on developing nations."

Most people won't pay attention to this little turd of a petition - they rationally understand that IPPF does some real good in the world. The so-called "pro-life" crowd on the other hand thinks that anything to do with contraception and birth control is pure evil. It's not as if Trost hasn't opened his yap before - inevitably to groups like Lifesite, and conveniently closed-mouth towards mainstream media.

There's nothing hidden about Harper's agenda - you just have to know what to look for.

Lifting The Barrel ...

Just when you think you've found the bottom depths that humanity can descend to, someone lifts up the barrel and shows you what's squirming underneath.

Of particular note is a link to a conversation from a Quiverfull movement message board talking about Dr. Tiller's assassination last Sunday. (Do not follow that link unless you have a strong stomach for the kind of bilious rhetoric that gave Roeder the excuse he needed to justify killing someone)

However, they underscore my point for me from back here - namely that there is a collective responsibility from the ranks of the "pro-life" movement for Dr. Tiller's murder.

The flaccid "I condemn but ..." statements from the more publicly visible parts of the pro-life movement, and the utterly insane commentary on that message board serve as an indictment of a movement that has inspired others to kill in its name previously.

It is past time for the "Pro Life" movement to look at its own bloody rhetoric and imagery, and take stock of the implications of how they have argued their "righteous beliefs". If that is how they intend to continue to conduct themselves (and I include Calgary's own "Campus Pro Life" crowd in this), then it is high time that society hold these groups collectively responsible for inciting violence.

There is a fine line between civil disobedience and provoking murderous violence, and the collective "pro life" lobby has arguably stepped over it.

H/T JJ @ Unrepentant Old Hippie
and
Sabina at Hollow Hill

Moral Bankruptcy in the Pro Life Movement

If there was ever a case of moral bankruptcy, it is the so-called "Pro-Life" movement's sqawking over a 9 year old girl's abortion in Brazil.

Sure enough, over at Lifesite, they've found an authority to say that the girl could have carried the twins to term:

But in a recent interview with LifeSiteNews.com, Dr. Paul Byrne, a neonatologist and clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of Toledo, Ohio, strongly refuted the assumption that the Brazilian girl's life was threatened by the pregnancy, simply because of her age.

Byrne told LSN that it is certainly medically possible for a young girl safely to carry a pregnancy of twins to term. He acknowledged that the circumstances are unusual, but said that the problem of giving birth with an undeveloped pelvic structure could be safely avoided by a caesarean section.

This is not exactly a doctor who has examined the girl personally, so he's speaking from a purely hypothetical perspective. Hypothetically, just about anything is possible. That doesn't make it right, does it?

Dr. Byrne cited the case of Lina Medina, a Peruvian girl from the Andean village of Ticrapo who made medical history when she gave birth to a boy by caesarean section in May 1939 at the age of five years, seven months and 21 days.

Do I really need to point out that cases like this are exceedingly rare to begin with. Perhaps once in a while, a child carries the fetus to term (7 months is not "full term ... do I really need to point that out??) The doctor in this case is conveniently ignoring the fact that the case in Brazil involved multiple fetuses (twins), not a singleton - a situation that complicates pregnancy even further - and increases the risk to the pregnant female considerably - even as an adult.

But he emphasized that no matter what the situation in the case, "abortion is not the solution." The girl, he said, "was sexually abused" and needed treatment. "Someone should have tried to help this girl."

Which comes around to the problem, doesn't it? The girl was raped - by a parent figure no less. At the age of 9, did she have any say in the matter? No - or very unlikely.

Forcing a child to bear children is little more than repeating the rape that caused the pregnancy in the first place - every day until the pregnancy ends, and then every day after that the girl has to deal with the babies. I cannot even begin to imagine the horror that would be.

Dr. Byrne noted also that the girl now faces the usual long-term health risks associated with abortion, including possible future pre-term births and miscarriage due to an "incompetent cervix," a cervix that is too weak to stay closed during a pregnancy.

Prove it, Dr. Byrne. This is a 9 year old girl. Her body is still growing, and will heal a lot better than an adult body does. I'm sure that there are some risks involved here - any medical procedure bears risks with it. Somehow, I think being alive far outweighs the probability that pregnancy would have killed her - slowly and painfully.

Dr. Byrne decried the emphasis in the press and among Catholic bishops on the excommunications that were formally announced against the girl's mother and the doctors who performed the abortion by the Archbishop of Recife. "The focus is on excommunication when the focus ought to be on life of these three persons created in the image and likeness of God," said Byrne.

Wrong. This is so wrong on so many levels it isn't even funny. What this represents is nothing less than the moral bankruptcy of "Pro Life" politics. When a nine year old girl is to be repeatedly raped and forced to give birth afterwards, the "movement" has lost all credibility to take a moral high ground. In essence, they are saying that a child's life is of lesser value than a fetus. More to the point, they are arguing that the life of any pregnant female is worth less than a fetus.

Some notable pro-life twits will accuse me of being "utilitarian" about the matter, but in fact it is the pro-lifers who are being utilitarian - and they are doing so by treating women as nothing more than vessels of procreation. How much more utilitarian can you possibly get?