(L-R) Stephen Harper (Conservatives), Elizabeth May (Green), Tom Mulcair (NDP), Justin Trudeau (Liberal)
With Canada’s next federal election right around the corner, it’s a bleak landscape for Canadians who care at all about the issue of abortion. Stephen Harper has repeated again and again that he will never touch the issue as long as he is Prime Minister, and both Tom Mulcair and Justin Trudeau have made it clear that their Mp’s must support the status quo on abortion.
Since 1988, Canada has been one of three countries without abortion laws, resulting in abortion on demand through all nine months, usually tax-funded. However, according to a 2011 Environonics poll, 77% of Canadians disapprove of third trimester abortions, 58% want restrictions after the first trimester, 54% want tax coverage only on medically necessary abortions or in case of rape, and a whopping 92% of Candians favour a ban on sex-selection abortions, which recent studies and a CBC investigation have shown are happening increasingly in some part of Canada.
In anticipation of the upcoming election, the pro-life community has spent the year campaigning against Justin Trudeau’s prochoice extremism. With tweets, graphic postcards, and cross-country demonstrations, the #No2Trudeau campaign sought to discourage voters from backing a leader who would bar prolifers from his party and champion unrestricted abortion.
Unfortunately, the NDP leader Tom Mulcair shares the same conviction as the Liberals: no anti-abortion candidate will be allowed to run for the NDP. If you’re a socialist who thinks women deserve better options than being told to abort the kids they can’t afford, you’ll have no voice in the NDP.
And of course pro-life Conservatives still exist, but true to his word to not reopen the debate, Prime Minister Harper has squashed all private member’s bills. He voted against MP Stephen Woodworth’s Motion 312, which merely sought an investigation of human beginnings in light of modern science. Even MP Mark Warawa’s Motion 408, “That the House condemn discrimination against females occurring through sex-selective pregnancy termination” was stomped out despite its wide public support. A Conservative government may prevent Trudeau’s intended abortion funding overseas, but that’s as good as it gets.
Only Green party leader Elizabeth May, despite being pro-choice, has shown receptiveness to public debate on touchy issues like abortion. Last November, during the Q&A at her lecture on Proportional Representation, I asked May in light of Canadian abortion polls:
“How is it possible for the majority of us who want some sort of restrictions or protections for the humans in the womb to have any kind of say or representation in parliament, if our leaders refuse to even allow us to have the debate in parliament?”
May responded by assuring me that unlike the other parties, the Green party has no whipped votes and therefore “No Green Party member has to vote according to our policies.” She added:
“It is to me not a good situation when any issue is viewed – especially an issue of public policy – as too tough to handle, too sensitive to discuss. I personally prefer the status quo in not reopening the debate because there are so many hard-won victories for women to ensure legal and safe abortions… but the courts are likely to say to parliament again: ‘You’ve got to have something on the books, we have nothing on the books.”
… I personally am very disturbed by the notion that Canadians would go get an ultrasound and abort a healthy fetus because they didn’t want a girl. It’s concerning. But if we can’t even discuss it in parliament… I’m with you there! … There are a lot of questions that are profoundly moral questions that are tough to handle. But our constituents are talking about them. If our constituents are talking about it, then I think we ought to be able to talk about them as parliamentarians.”
In fact, upon rejecting the 1969 abortion law, the 1988 Supreme Court told parliament that it was up to them to enact a new and better law with the interests of the later-term fetus in mind. We’re still waiting for them to do so. No issue that continues to so widely divide Canadians more than 30 years after its onset can honestly claim to be a closed debate – even if most of our leaders want to pretend that it is.
“However, according to a 2011 Environonics poll, 77% of Canadians disapprove of third trimester abortions, 58% want restrictions after the first trimester, 54% want tax coverage only on medically necessary abortions or in case of rape, and a whopping 92% of Candians favour a ban on sex-selection abortions, which recent studies and a CBC investigation have shown are happening increasingly in some part of Canada.”
Yes, and how is any of this relevant? Who cares what Johnny Redneck thinks about third-trimester abortions? Can he even define what “third-trimester” is? Get this through your heads, people: Abortion, whether you want it to be or not, is a medical procedure, a SURGERY, to be left to the realm of licensed, qualified EXPERTS… e.g. doctors, psychologists, trained social workers, and most importantly the WOULD-BE MOTHERS. Not Harriet Homeowner, and certainly not corrupt politicians. These oft-touted claims of public opinion of what “should” be allowed for women we don’t know the situations of and will never know personally are literally the DEFINITION of irrelevant. Acknowledging them as anything else gives them an air of authority they do not deserve.
So are you suggesting that simply because something is a medical procedure that this automatically makes it a moral one? Infant circumcision is a medical procedure, so is the organ harvesting taking place on followers of certain religious sects in Asia. Not every medical practice or procedure is automatically justifiable simply by virtue of the medical license of the individual performing it.