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A special kind of biased reporting

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Women don’t earn less than men, access to abortion is not about women’s rights, and Bill C-484 is not about abortion. Other than that, I suppose this article is just fine.

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Véronique adds: There is an interesting dichotomy here. In 1928, the Supreme Court decided that women were not “qualified persons” and we look back with righteous indignation: How can “personhood” be so arbitrarily determined? Yet, in the same breath, we condemn Bill C-484 thus reaffirming our right to arbitrarily determine the non-personhood of the fetus. Pushing the irony even further, we can see that the same court — although differently made-up — declared women and fetuses non-persons.

I would like to know what is the moral basis of that argument. What makes arbitrary determinations of personhood and humanity wrong when it comes to women yet right when it comes to fetuses? Is it just that excluding fetuses is easier? More convenient? That’s not much of a moral argument.

Are food and water extraordinary?

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Samuel Golubchuk was, as per this piece in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, “at the threshold of multiple organ failure in a Winnipeg intensive care unit.”

The piece describes how “fundamentalist religious beliefs” are propping up his life at the expense of giving the bed to a more needy patient.

An obligation to provide extraordinary care to dying patients, including patients who are minimally responsive, forces one to breach the everyday duty of care, which is to provide the best balance between probable harms and foreseeable benefits. That is why an approach that excludes the option to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining care is unworkable.

I’m not a doctor, but I never thought of food and water as “extraordinary measures.”

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Tanya adds: I’m not sure I follow their point about “exploiting the dubious distinction between acts and omissions.”

 

If withholding food and water (in this case by removing a feeding tube) is simply an omission for which no one can be held liable, why is it called neglect when it is done to a child? It is inevitable that anyone who cannot feed himself will die if no one else feeds him. Seems like a pretty deliberate act to me. But I’m no doctor either.

 

I don’t get it

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So is she saying that “One Body. One Person. One Count” is not accurate? And where does that leave “My Body, My Choice”? I’m so confused.

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Tanya adds: In the above link:

Raymond Gravel, a Bloc MP and a priest said he was “uncomfortable” with the bill “because the member putting it forward is part of a pro-life group, the Campaign Life Coalition”

To paraphrase:

Let’s not vote for a bill based on what it is. That would be far too reasonable. Instead, let’s say words like “backdoor attempt” and “conspiracy” and “dangerous” until we’ve sufficiently confused people on a simple issue like C-484.

 

With friends like these

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Once again, Canada is making records for The Most Liberal Practice in the World. The morning-after pill or Plan B, a chemical concoction meant to “prevent pregnancy” after a failed condom or unexpected sex could be available without any consultation. (All the sophists assure us that’s what it does–prevent pregnancy. Because it prevents implantation, which marks the real moment at which life begins, so they say.) Pharmacists are concerned, “women’s rights advocates” hail the victory. Are there no female pharmacists? I’m sure there must be some, somewhere.

In practice, perhaps the new rules are not that different from the current situation: After all, especially if you live in a big city, it’s not as though you couldn’t get this drug from any pharmacy, no questions, no consultations. But in theory, this would mean once again, women are left alone. No counselling necessary (how offensive). It also puts Plan B in the same league as picking up tylenol.

I can assure you that teens won’t hesitate to use this drug multiple times, whether or not they even have a remote chance of truly being pregnant. Even if the chance of pregnancy is slim to none, it’s better to be 100 per cent sure, right? So just take the drug. (Neurotic anxiety and I, we are fast friends. I don’t mean to show off, but I can really relate.) But from Abby Lippman, of the Canadian Women’s Health Network, this:

I would just as soon that it be sold anywhere…

With friends like that, women don’t need enemies.

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Brigitte admits she doesn’t know much about this drug, but wonders anyway: Do we have any idea what the long-term effect of taking this sort of stuff (more than once, I mean) can have on a young woman’s fertility? Are there studies? What do they say?

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Tanya adds:

Since birth control pills require a prescription and a doctor’s supervision during use, how can the FDA or the drug manufacturer condone providing Plan B (a mega-dose of the same drugs) over-the-counter? Widespread access to Plan B would expose women to the health risks that heretofore were acknowledged by doctors who screened women before prescribing birth control pills and then monitored them for the wide variety of contra-indicators for their use. Some of the health risks associated with birth control pills — life-threatening ectopic pregnancies, for instance — are a clear danger for some women with Plan B, too. Also, some physicians are concerned about the long-term effects of high-dosage birth control pills (Plan B) and others worry about their effect on adolescents and the fact that there are no constraints that would prevent repeated use of Plan B for “emergency contraception.” (http://www.cwfa.org/articles/11365/BLI/dotcommentary/index.htm)

Reprise to the long list of possible side-effects they list on the back-side of ads for the pill in Glamour:  venous and arterial thrombotic and thromboembolic events (such as myocardial infraction. thromboembolism, and stroke), hepatic neoplasia, gallbladder disease, ocular lesions, glucose intolerance, pulmonary embolism, cerebral hemorrhage, migraine headache, nausea, vomitting, spotting, amenorrhea,  fluid retention, emotional disorders (including severe depression) and hypertension… The effects of long-term use of oral contraceptives remain to be determined… Etc., etc., etc.

Economics and dating

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It was the words “eligible bachelor” that caught my eye. But I love it when economic theories are applied to relationships: 

Where have all the most appealing men gone? Married young, most of them—and sometimes to women whose most salient characteristic was not their beauty, or passion, or intellect, but their decisiveness.

But in this case, the discussion of choice is most interesting: The fact that men are not dragged kicking and screaming into marriage, but rather that they choose to ask, also that women, according to this piece, initiate the asking, and then can choose to say yes or no. Both men and women have a whole lot of autonomy in entering into this thing called marriage. Alas, it eradicates the long suffering looks for being forced into the institution.

These times, they are a changing…

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Pro-lifers are frequently chastized by pro-choicers as being “behind the times.” I’d suggest we are really quite far ahead. In any event, get ready for that closed-issue, divisive abortion debate to be in the public square a whole lot more often. Richard Bastien says in the Ottawa Citizen today that in questioning sex selection abortion, Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal MP for Vancouver South, is challenging our elite political culture (he may not know it, but he is), which says that abortion is private and we can never, ever question it. Except that he is, if only in cases where the baby is a girl.

Canada’s Supreme Court has even gone so far as to declare that a baby is entitled to legal protection only once he is completely out of his mother’s birth canal, which means that as long as so much as one of his toes is still linked to his mother, the doctor may, with her consent, chop off the infant’s head with total impunity. This is the Canadian way. What is being questioned, in short, is a basic tenet of our contemporary political culture.

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Tanya corrects Bastien: Well, Section 238 of the CCC prohibits partial birth abortion. So, no, more than the toes need to be inside the mother, or else it is homicide.

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Andrea read the Criminal Code and Section 238 says this:

Every one who causes the death, in the act of birth, of any child that has not become a human being, in such a manner that, if the child were a human being, he would be guilty of murder, is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for life.

“…any child that has not become a human being… if the child were a human being…” Gosh. Must take a high falutin’ law degree or somethin’ to do those mental calisthenics. 

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Véronique concurs: Yes, indeed, I pride myself in having reached this higher degree of academic education that allows me to see human beings not yet human beings as if they were human beings. This is why we have entrance selection in law school, 100% end terms and bar exams. It protects the profession from the kind of shallow thinking that would see any child not yet a human being as being human… but smaller.

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Brigitte worries about herself: I somehow managed to get a law degree and I still don’t get what S. 238 means. What kind of bizarre person does that make me?

Bill C-484 as abortion debate

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Chantal Hébert in The Toronto Star today on Bill C-484. Predictably, she has equated abortion access with equality for women. But also has equated Bill C-484 with a recriminalization of abortion.

Seeing as the Bill is not about recriminalizing abortion, we ought to ask why it is that every pro-abortion critic believes that is the case. The answer is fear: Would recognizing the fetus in cases where where the mother wanted it result in recognition of the fetus in other places as well? It is still not immediately clear to me why that would have to result in “recriminalization,” but I’m perhaps not well-positioned to comment on that, seeing as I aim to have women recognizing the hypocrisy of abortion and the ills for their own person prior to doing so “for The Government tells me so.”

Bill C-484 so far as I can tell might well result in a recognition of the hypocrisy of our current system: This is a baby when wanted, not a baby when not wanted. “Wantedness” is such a funny concept, and yet our current ideas of what constitutes humanity rest on that notion. Not comforting.

Our work cut out for us

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This argument comes up quite often:

Please, isn’t it about time to use the correct 21st century medical nomenclature. A fetus is not a baby any more than a man’s sperm or a woman’s ova is a baby.

Er, actually, there’s a big difference between sperm and a baby, and an egg and a baby. Modern man: You’d think we’d have nailed down the birds and bees by now.

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Tanya adds: This letter is a great example of non-sensical pro-abortion thought.

As for those people who seek out an abortion for sex selection, this reflects their misogynistic attitude towards or about women… 

The fight for enlightenment and equality and access to safe medical abortions is part of the women’s movement and is still an ongoing struggle.

Pairing abortion with equality is misogyny. If we embrace women, why draw the line at rejecting their capacity to reproduce?  It’s not an illness, the fact that we get pregnant from having sex!

 

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