In short, Joyce Arthur is claiming the polling company is biased for asking Canadians about whether or not there should be restrictions on abortion. Angus Reid replies:
[Angus Reid's] Canseco further lambasted Arthur for taking to task the wording of the answer when ARCC’s own website defends what the organization calls a “constitutionally-based right to unrestricted, fully-funded abortion, without legal or other barriers or discrimination due to gender, class, ethnicity, race, age, location/region (or area of residence), or any other characteristic, including reasons for choosing an abortion.”
“This is not something we wrote—it is the second affirmation in the ‘Our Vision’ section of the ARCC website,” said Canseco. “Ms. Arthur now writes that this ‘unrestricted right’ does not exist, yet it certainly does in her own organization’s documentation.”
This is one of the most interesting parts of the exchange. Organizations like Joyce Arthur’s actively support a Canada in which women can have an abortion up to the time of birth, no questions asked. Yet to state that this is what we have legislatively, on paper, right now, is apparently controversial.
I always find it interesting, how stating this fact of Canadian law raises pro-choice ire. It doesn’t matter to me if few abortions are late term, or if they are done for “good reasons,” like fetal abnormality. (Pains me to write that, but I digress.) We permit it in law to be so, and that’s a fact. Furthermore, I’ve witnessed a conferee at a pro-abortion conference at University of Toronto Law school in January 2008 ask questions about why ninth month gestation abortions should be denied women, even for social reasons. The hosts were disquieted, but that’s their stakeholder group. The premise for pro-choicers is that female autonomy means women can choose to have an abortion for any reason at any time. I disagree with that, vociferously, in fact. But that is their point of view and it is reflected in Canadian law. They should celebrate it, instead of denying it.
223. (1) A child becomes a human being within the meaning of this Act when it has completely proceeded, in a living state, from the body of its mother, whether or not
(a) it has breathed;
(b) it has an independent circulation; or
(c) the navel string is severed.
(2) A person commits homicide when he causes injury to a child before or during its birth as a result of which the child dies after becoming a human being.
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Andrea adds: No, I don’t, for one. And I don’t know many expectant mothers who would agree with this, either.
Here’s an interesting article about body modifications and whether or not they should be made/kept legal. The arguments in favor of keeping them legal are along the lines of…
“It’s here to stay regardless of whether the medical community wants it to be here,” he said. “Now it’s a case of how do we make it safe, because kids are dumb and they’re going to do it themselves if they don’t have a professional they can go to.”
I’m not against body modifications, people who want them can get them, but is this heading in the direction of funding professionals for every “dumb” thing kids do?
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Andrea adds: I am against body modifications:
Public health authorities across Canada are struggling to address the growing popularity of body modifications such as splitting one’s tongue like a snake’s and surgically altering ears to make them elf-like and pointy, fearing the spread of infection in an unregulated industry.
I’m not “against them” the same way I’m against abortion, to be sure. I would not, for example, start up a web site to protest them, but if you asked me, I’d say I think it’s wrong to mess around surgically with your body for kicks. The sad truth for the extreme Lord of the Rings fan is that humans don’t have pointy ears… And elves aren’t real… The Shire is fictitious… I could go on…
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Jennifer adds: You’re too funny!
I also wouldn’t advocate for body modifications. I think of them in the same terms as breast implants and similar forms of plastic surgery. People probably do it for various reasons, self-esteem, attention, etc, but for me the problem is in understanding the self as something that needs to be represented by your physical appearance. What a person who gets a “body mod” doesn’t see is that it stems from the same desire for someone else to get breast implants, it’s all about the perception other people have of you. It’s not rebellious, it’s an enslavement to whatever group you’re trying to appeal to. “The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.” -Virginia Woolf
…if a woman decides that the best thing for her to do is to self-induce an abortion, she should have access to the best information available on how to do this safely (ie with medicines, NOT herbs) and know where to go in case of a complication. Criminalizing her choices does not protect her health. If we believe that women have the right to control their fertility, then we must also trust women with the right to choose the methods that make the most sense for them.
A few things spring to mind as to why this is a very bad idea. One is the fact that making abortion drugs available for at-home use might cause a higher rate of coerced abortion. Coerced abortion is still legal in Canada, and sometimes the only person who actually asks if you’re being coerced is medical staff. Remove these middlemen/women, and coercion becomes all the easier.
Since coercion isn’t a crime, what about slipping over-the-counter purchased mifepristone into your partner’s drink? Is that a criminal offense?
I don’t think it’s in anyone’s interest to make self-abortion a regularity, given the possible mental health effects, the possible abuses of these kinds of drugs, and the isolation a woman must experience as she self-aborts her child.
Criminalizing this “choice” may in fact protect her health and save the lives of both mother and child.
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Andrea adds: Same article I linked to for a game of Count the Euphemisms, “Self-Abortion Care” being the first one I spotted, in the title.
It is now commonplace that people around the world are told there is a new international right to abortion.
Those who receive this message are people who have the power to change abortion laws; parliamentarians, lawyers, judges and others.
Those delivering this message are influential and believable people; UN personnel, human rights lawyers, judges and others.
The assertion they make is false. No UN treaty makes abortion an international human right.
So the San Jose Articles were born, as a tool to help countries and their citizens stand up to these false claims. Read them, print them, reference them, and pass them along.
Two stories cropped up today from CBC news, and virtually every commentator to these stories was disgruntled to some degree. One is on funding for Planned Parenthood,
Canada will fund an organization that provides family planning services around the world — but only in countries where abortion is illegal in most cases, CBC News has learned.
International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda has decided to approve a proposal by the International Planned Parenthood Federation to provide sex education and contraception in five developing countries.
…and the other concerns funding for maternal and child health projects.
Canada has selected 28 maternal and child health projects to share $82 million in funding between now and 2016, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Tuesday.
The money was committed in the G-8 Muskoka Initiative, 15 months ago. It brings the total allocated under the fund to almost $740 million for projects in Africa, the Americas and Asia.
…comes legislation for babies with heartbeats. Read more here,
The bill would require a doctor to check for a fetal heartbeat and inform the woman. If there is a detectable heartbeat, an abortion would be prohibited unless there was a risk of death or major injury to the woman’s health. Supporters believe the bill would block tens of thousands of abortions, as a fetal heartbeat can be typically heard around the sixth week of pregnancy, and sometimes as soon as three weeks’ gestation.
In three new rulings, federal judges in different states have acted to block immediate enforcement of measures that restrict abortion rights and women’s access to affordable contraception, lifesaving cancer screenings and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. These rulings are important victories for women’s health and reproductive rights. [...]
On July 1, Judge Carlos Murguia, a federal district judge in Kansas, blocked immediate enforcement of a new Kansas licensing law and health department regulations imposing extensive, medically unnecessary requirements on the state’s three remaining abortion providers — like mandating 50 square feet of storage space for janitorial supplies — with the obvious goal of shutting them down.
While these rulings are preliminary, each is a determination that enforcing the law would cause irreparable harm and that the plaintiffs are likely to prevail at trial. They do not, however, address other threats to women’s health. Those include the slashing of state support for family-planning services by governors like Chris Christie of New Jersey, and attacks from Congress like the bill Republicans pushed through the House in May that would use the nation’s tax system as a weapon to end abortion insurance coverage in the private market.
Still, these rulings serve as a reminder that courts have a vital role to play in blocking the extreme anti-abortion, anti-family-planning movement accelerating in the states and in Washington.
Again, no one is against cancer screening, and no one is against treatment for STDs, but the majority of the people in these states don’t want an abortion/contraception minded agenda to go unchecked simply because an organization also offers these positive services.
Do we really still think this shouldn’t have legislation?
COLUMBIA, S.C. — A woman who had an affair with Laurens County Sheriff Ricky Chastain said in a lawsuit filed this week she was sexually harassed and wrongfully forced out of her county job after refusing the sheriff’s request to have a second abortion.
Chastain, who for more than a decade has been sheriff in the county about 70 miles northwest of Columbia, has admitted to a two-and-a-half year affair with Haley Manley but has denied that he forced her to quit.
According to her lawsuit, filed Thursday in Laurens County court, their affair began a month after she started working for Chastain in January 2008, and Manley became pregnant in the summer of 2010. After Chastain said she’d either have to have an abortion or quit her job, Manley says Chastain drove her to Charlotte, N.C., in his county-issued vehicle and paid for her to abort their child.
In September, Manley says Chastain again demanded she get an abortion when she told him she was pregnant a second time. When Manley refused but told Chastain she wanted to keep her job, she says the sheriff told his subordinates during an October meeting to do “whatever it took” to make her resign, tactics the lawsuit says included “threats of violence.”
Manley subsequently resigned and later opted to have a second abortion, WSPA-TV has reported.
[...]
Chastain on Friday referred comment to an attorney, who did not return a message. In several media interviews, Chastain has said he drove Manley to have the July abortion but has denied he forced her to quit.
PIERRE, S.D. — Planned Parenthood filed a lawsuit in federal court yesterday seeking to block a South Dakota law that would require women seeking abortions to face the nation’s longest waiting period — three days — and undergo counseling at pregnancy help centers that discourage abortion.
The lawsuit asks a federal judge to suspend the law until a final ruling on whether it violates a woman’s constitutional right to abortion established under the US Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade. The law is set to take effect July1.
The legal challenge was filed in Sioux Falls, where Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota operates South Dakota’s only abortion clinic.
State Representative Roger Hunt, Republican of Brandon, the chief sponsor of the bill, said the lawsuit was expected.
“I don’t understand why, because it just seeks to give women more information, and it seeks to remove coercion, seeks to deal with a number of coercion elements where you have possible rapes and problems within families and whatnot, and we’re trying to help those women deal with that coercion,’’ said Hunt.
