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Whoops, not Canadian, no reproductive rights for you!
The Conservative government of Canada once again proves that it is anti-choice, anti-rational and anti-woman. The CBC said:
“A Liberal motion to include a broader range of family planning programs, including contraception, in a maternal health initiative for developing countries, was defeated 144-138 in the House of Commons Tuesday.”
A Liberal motion in the house of commons that was based on fact and evidence in the field was voted down.
“The motion tabled by Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae said Canada’s maternal health proposal to G8 nations must be based on “scientific evidence, which proves that education and family planning can prevent as many as one in every three maternal deaths” and refrain from the “failed right-wing ideologies” of former U.S. president George W. Bush.”
Shocking as it may seem to the CPC, access to reproductive services saves lives.
“Earlier in the day, Rae said the government has refused to acknowledge scientific evidence that shows reducing deaths of women during childbirth in developing countries is inextricably linked to the availability of family planning”
So rather than own up to their anti-woman, anti-science platform the Conservatives decide this is an attempt to reopen the abortion debate? How the frack does this make sense? The question of Abortion in Canada has been settled legally (Access to facilities though is another story). Women have the legal right to access abortions and other health services when they deem fit. Nothing to debate. What minister Oda says is just a sad attempt to cover the Canadian government’s twisted socially conservative roots.
Denying Women Rights World Wide - A compassionate conservative.
“Oda described the Liberal motion as a “transparent attempt to reopen the abortion debate that we have clearly said we have no intention to getting into.”
She insisted the government understands the urgency of ensuring that women can have a safe, healthy pregnancy, and she cited statistics suggesting that as many as 80 per cent of deaths during childbirth are easily preventable by providing basic needs such as clean water and access to trained health-care workers.”
Just be open with us Bev, the freedoms Canadian women have should not apply to women of other countries, after-all it is God given right for a woman to die in childbirth.
Canada, despite being currently ‘governed’ by a conservative minority government is still a pretty good place to be. The important date that I refer to in is January 28th, 1988. It was when the Supreme Court of Canada made this landmark ruling on abortion in Canada.
Jan. 28, 1988: The Supreme Court of Canada strikes down Canada’s abortion law as unconstitutional. The law is found to violate Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms because it infringes upon a woman’s right to “life, liberty and security of person.” Chief Justice Brian Dickson writes: “Forcing a woman, by threat of criminal sanction, to carry a fetus to term unless she meets certain criteria unrelated to her own priorities and aspirations, is a profound interference with a woman’s body and thus a violation of her security of the person.” Canada becomes one of a small number of countries without a law restricting abortion. Abortion is now treated like any other medical procedure and is governed by provincial and medical regulations.
One of the few times that I’ve actually felt some national pride for Canada. Canada in this one instance lives up to it ‘reputation’ for being a caring progressive nation.
I shudder at the kludge of access and availability of reproductive services in the United States. It is certainly not perfect in Canada, as access is not %100 in all provinces, but at least we have the notion that women are autonomous beings codified in law and can use the law to further access to reproductive services across all of Canada.
I saw part of this discussion going on at the Drudge Retort in a thread that I sadly cannot remember. Chalk it up to the fire-hose nature of information here on the web. Anyhow, as I was looking at the thread that shall remain unnamed it turned out that a strong possibility for the lowering of the crime rate in the US was the 1973 Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision based on the following wisdom:
“When a woman does not want to have a child, she usually has a good reason…” – Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J.Dubner in Freakonomics p.138 of the paperback edition. (all further quotes from the same authors).
Amazing what happens when you give women the autonomy that they deserve. But the argument is as follows.
“[…] two factors – childhood poverty and a single parent household-are among the strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future. […] In other words, the very factors that drove millions of American women to have an abortion also seemed to predict that their children, had they been born, would have led unhappy and possibly criminal lives.” – [ibid, 139].
Factor in other sociological factors like the propensity toward of child criminal behaviour in single parent households and the effect of the level of maternal education on children one can conclude that leaving the reproductive choices in the hands of women is the right choice, not only for women, but society as a whole.
“In the early 1990’s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe vs. Wade was hitting its late teen years-the years during which young men enter their criminal prime- the rate of crime began to fall. What this cohort was missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest change of becoming criminals. And the crime rate continued to fall as an entire generation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted to bring a child into the world. Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness;unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime.” (emphasis mine). -(ibid 139-140)
So it would seem, abortion is a good thing and a feature of societies with low crime rates. The funny thing is that in the US at the time the remarkable drop in crime was erroneously attributed several memes that received a lot of play in the media.
“Innovative policing strategies, increased reliance on prisons, changes in crack and other drug markets, aging of the population, tougher gun control laws, strong economy, increased number of police, and other (capital punishment, concealed weapons laws, gun buybacks…)” – (ibid 119)
The supply of cocaine greatly increased as well as the number of police officers these two factors did play a role in the decline of crime during the 1990’s. The rest as the authors say:
“The others [options], for the most part, figments of someone’s imagination, self-interest or wishful thinking.” – (ibid, 119)
I imagine this sort of correlation must gall the staunch reactionaries that populate the right wing these days. What? Abortion is Tough on CRIME? *head explodes*
Sometimes here at DWR headquarters I get a little discouraged by all the people whose beliefs are so horribly vapidly wrong about the reproductive issues women face.
ENTER THE UN: with little snippets such as :
- All women have access to contraception to avoid unintended pregnancies
- All pregnant women have access to skilled care at the time of birth
- All those with complications have timely access to quality emergency obstetric care.
Wow, people working to actually help women, instead of stripping them of their rights.
I’m not one to pull punches here at DWR, but sometimes you gotta farm out the smack-down. What Pedgehog from Anti-Choice is Anti-Awesome has to say about the people protesting at the clinic. Read the whole post here.
“[…]Also, one thing I want to set straight – you guys are not saving babies. I have worked here for over two years and I’ve never seen one woman change her mind because of the protesters. Some of them change their minds, of course, but for their own reasons. The closest the protesters come to changing minds is when women drive by and are too intimidated or scared by the protesters to come in. If that’s how you want to “save” “babies”, by bullying women into continuing pregnancies, then congratulations. You are absolute scum. […]”
Good show Pedgehog, we appreciate you manning the front-lines against the induhviduals who wish to denude women of their reproductive freedom.
Well, it is good to see that oversimplification and deliberate obfuscation of fact is still alive and well. The misuse of scientific fact to support the don’t kiiillll baaaabeeee trope is wonderfully (mis)stated at the abortionfacts.com website. The disingenuous ‘Milestones of Early Life’ article provides a bountiful harvest of misinformation ready for dissemination by the anti-choice horde. This particular pro-life site is a testament to the duplicity of our opponents, enter at your own risk.
Milestones of Early Life
At no time in your life does more growth and change occur than in the first nine months before birth. Here are the amazing milestones of that time in your life:
Day 1: Conception: Of the 200,000,000 sperm that try to penetrate the mother’s egg cell, only one succeeds.2 At that very moment, a new and unique individual is formed. All of the inherited features of this new person are already set – whether it’s a boy or girl, the color of the eyes, the color of the hair, the dimples of the cheeks and the cleft of the chin. He or she is smaller than a grain of sugar, but the instructions are present for all that this person will ever become.
The first cell soon divides in two. Each of these new cells divides again and again as they travel toward the womb in search of a protected place to grow.3
“At that very moment, a new and unique individual is formed.”
Conception is a process, not a distinct point in time
“The process of conception, also known as fertilisation, involves many chemical reactions and processes. It is not an instantaneous occurrence. Look at the diagram I made:
So somewhere along that set of chemical reactions, which finally result in two cells with a unique human genetic combination (the zygote immediately after the fusion of sperm has two pronuclei – one from the sperm and one from the ovum), are we to say that a single human life has started? If so, at what point does that happen?
The fact of the matter is that conception is no less of an arbitrary ‘line in the sand’ than any other point that one picks, such as the development of the brain, birth or development of self-awareness. But there is nothing wrong per se with something being arbitrary (after all, the time when people are old enough to vote is arbitrary), so we should now look at whether there is a good reason for not using conception as the start of a human being’s life.”
“He or she is smaller than a grain of sugar, but the instructions are present for all that this person will ever become.”
Oversimplifying and anthropomorphizing a complex process to further a political agenda. Wonderful. The pro-life movement relies on clear cut definitions that are patently false and misleading. I assume their gambit is that if they repeat the misinformation long and hard enough it will imprint on the body politic as “fact”.
Pro life advocates claim that conception is the beginning of human life, making it the point at which human’s become morally relevant. Birth is just some event that happens later and has no bearing on things like rights. Thus, blastocysts deserve full legal protection that adult humans get and the death of a zygote ought to be weighed equally as the death of people outside the womb. It’s been repeatedly pointed out why this is either incorrect or irrelevant but this has failed to sway most pro lifers. So today I shall explore the implications of pro life reasoning were it actually sound.
What happens if we up the accuracy a bit and apply pro life reasoning? And by ‘up the accuracy’ I mean that we look at the actual beginning of a human’s life cycle. Pro lifers claim that its conception. But any high school biology student could tell you that there is a lot that has to happen before that. An egg has to be released by the female, which must then float down a long tube. During the brief period when this is happening, a sperm cell must travel from the male, through the birth canal, and meet up with the ovum. Only then can conception begin to take place. Thus, human life has an earlier chapter that pro lifers currently ignore.
Now you could point out that each of the gametes only have half the required chromosomes that ‘actual’ people have, but the response is the same as when its pointed out that blastocysts have no brain. According to Pro lifers such things are purely developmental issues, that have no bearing on person-hood. Physiology is nothing to base moral worth on, after all.
In fact any argument you could possibly come up with to say that the gamete is NOT a person, but a zygote is, there is a synonymous argument saying that the zygote is not a person, but a birthed human is. And since, for the purposes of this thought experiment, I’m granting the pro life position that the latter wouldn’t work, then I must also grant that the former wouldn’t work either.
Gametes fulfill the pro life criterion for human life and therefore moral worth. They are 100% human cells and their sole purpose is to develop into a separate human being, they are merely people one step back from zygotes. Conception is just some event that happens later and has no bearing on things like rights.
Can we go a step further? Well, I suppose we could look at oogonia in females and spermatagonia in males (the gametogonium that develop into their respective gametes) , but my grasp of biology starts getting hazy about that point, and so gametes are as far back as I can go right now. No matter, it is sufficient to reveal the absurdity of pro-life arguments.
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