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Quote of the day

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On a truck containing “carbon dioxide”:

“This vehicle stops at railway crossings. Only in Quebec.”

Because it is common knowledge that only in Quebec do locomotives crashing into tank trucks cause grave accidents possibly endangering lives. Or are Quebec locomotive drivers more likely to accelerate when commercial vehicles cross the tracks?

Really, it’s the whole legalistic shtick that cranks me up. We can blow up neighborhoods everywhere in Canada but only Quebec requires us to stop at railway crossings. And we are law abiding corporate citizens.

It reminds me — somehow — of what passes as dialogue between pro-abortion and pro-life where the pro-lifer goes “abortion ends a human life; the fetus can feel the pain of abortion” and the pro-abortion replies “the Morgentaler and Daigle decisions by the Supreme Court have both clearly stated that fetal rights do not exist in Canada and therefore the fetus is not alive and cannot feel pain.” Yes. And the Emperor is fully clothed. By decree, I know.

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Andrea, warmly: Véronique, you make me laugh. What doesn’t remind you of the pro-life, pro-choice dialogue?

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Tanya adds: I do love how your mind works.

Quote of the day

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The National Art Gallery in Ottawa talking to the Ottawa Citizen about its rule prohibiting the carrying of small children on one’s shoulders:

“Unfortunately, we just can’t allow that kind of liberty”…

Uh, yeah… My point exactly. I have argued many times that talking about “abortion rights” wasn’t the end of the discussion, we also had to understand the basis for that right. We seem to accept the limitation of rights just about everywhere so long as they serve some notion of “greater good.” Like the protection of delicate artifacts. But suggest that abortion might weaken society and erode women’s rights and you’re told to get your nose out of women’s uteri.

Head shake. Eye roll.

Thoughts on jogging alone

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A woman is sexually assaulted on the NCC bike paths and people discuss why women can’t choose where they go and when. In fact, women are free to wander at dusk on secluded pathways. Only, they might be violently attacked and raped as a consequence for that choice. Some choice. Now I feel liberated.

In August 2003, Ardeth Wood disappeared while biking on the National Capital Commission (NCC) bike path where I did my daily jogging. When she was found forcibly drowned in a creek off the pathway, I stopped jogging on NCC paths. Aside from being devastated by her death, I was also annoyed to be confined to residential streets for my exercise. The NCC’s stretch of land bordering the Ottawa River in Ottawa/Orleans is a gorgeous and inspiring place to run. As a taxpayer, shouldn’t I be entitled to the same enjoyment of crown land as my male counterparts? Maybe, but as long as some freak will think himself entitled to the use of my body for sexual gratification, my entitlement to run alone on a secluded pathway is tainted by some serious “what if’s?”

Earlier this summer, I went jogging along the river with my son in the jogging stroller. The path ran behind a row of houses and I felt relatively safe until the path veered away from the residential area and into the deeper wooded area where Ardeth Wood met her killer. I tried to reassure myself that this was the afternoon, that the paths were well-traveled, that I was aware of my surroundings and able to defend myself but I couldn’t shake a deep feeling of fear for my safety and that of my son. I returned to the inhabited area and later learned of Pamela Kosmack’s murder on a west-Ottawa bike path. I have now reluctantly accepted that in this crazy world, single women should always be within line-of-sight and earshot of someone else. Violence against women makes us all victims.

Interesting how we don’t hear cries to protect sexual assaulters’ reproductive freedoms, or their ability to do what pleases them with their reproductive organs. No calls for women’s groups and crime-fighting organizations to get their noses out of assaulters’ crotches (you think I’m vulgar? I’m just quoting pro-choice writers who link to our website). Quite obviously I might add, since it’s been long accepted that freedoms cannot be exercised violently over other people’s bodies. Or your reproductive freedom stops where my body begins. But this short foray into the nature and limits of freedom illustrates once again to what extent the acceptability of abortion hinges on dehumanizing the fetus. Because if the fetus is even remotely human abortion becomes the violent exercise of one’s freedom over the body of another. At this point, we can clearly see why abortion advocates must oppose any effort to assign any value to any fetus – as in bill C-484 – lest it opens people’s eyes to what abortion really is. As for me, it is obvious that if the fetus wasn’t human, women wouldn’t need to abort it. Really. The reason why women feel the need to dispatch their unborn babies and the reason why others oppose abortion are one and the same: because it is a baby. And I have yet to understand why women’s reproductive freedom extends over the bodies of their infants.

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Andrea hesitates to add this: but men are also attacked–so the question is not of “a woman’s right to use the NCC paths” but one of understanding that this is indeed a dangerous world we live in… She trails off and vows not to run with headphones on again. Sad.

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Véronique begs to differ: Men are also attacked, granted. And I think that if we look at crime stats, we would quickly find out that it is generally riskier to be a guy than a girl. But I don’t think that we can simply compare statistics on violent attacks and say “there, it is more dangerous to be a guy” — we also need to look at the reasons underlying violent attacks. I am no criminologist but I would venture that women are violently attacked because they are women. Ardeth Wood would not have died had she been a guy. The latest victim of sexual assault on NCC property would not have been assaulted had she been a guy. In fact, how many guys probably passed by unfeathered on both occasions before these women were assaulted? The criminals who thought themselves entitled to the use of both women were specifically and anonymously looking for women. Any woman. And that what makes a woman’s right to use public spaces more qualified than a guy’s.

Saturday morning coffee

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Read this morning over coffee:

This feature from the Globe & Mail. I will go on the record saying that the stigmatization, guilt and shaming of women who have abortions is wrong. It doesn’t make abortion right however. This quote caused me to reflect:

Twenty-four years later, Ms. McDonnell says, little has changed: “When the characters in a hip contemporary comedy like Knocked Up can’t even bring themselves to say the word ‘abortion,’ something’s still very wrong.”

Uh… could that be abortion??

On that topic, it seems that the writers of Knocked Up are not the only ones suffering from that affliction. See Fr. Raymond de Souza’s excellent commentary on Morgentaler’s nomination to the Order of Canada.

And on a lighter note, I never thought I would be linking to this guy — and for his defense, as a former Liberal speechwriter, he will probably be mortified at being linked to by a pro-life blog — but this article made me laugh out loud.

Have a great weekend.

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Andrea adds: Pro-lifers never have to shame or guilt women who have abortions. They do it to themselves. Apparently, because the

abortion involves a web of complex physical and psychological processes that themselves pull us in two directions at once. It involves our bodies, our emotions and our spirits in a way that engages us on many levels simultaneously, and that ensures that our response will be anything but simple.”

And now in severely non-academic language, because you are killing your own offspring, which certainly would engage those emotions on many, many levels, indeed. Yeeesh. I’ll go on the record saying I’m glad for the stigma. It’s not that I have ever, ever, treated anyone who had an abortion with anything other than respect, and to be frank, in the same manner as I treat everyone. It’s that what the “stigma” here is, is our conscience: that guilt that kicks in when you’ve done something terrible, and you know it. No need for me to look down on someone who has had an abortion, I’ve experienced this terrible feeling for other reasons, at other times.  And if we “eradicate that stigma”–we would be paving over our consciences. People have been known to do it. But distancing your actions from your conscience so entirely is not generally a good thing.

I blame rampant individualism

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A letter writer has recently implied that it’s the right-wing, western-based, redneck crowd that is to blame for all social ills… that pro-life types are nowhere to be found when babies are born and that young girls who get pregnant benefit from abortion–flourishing careers, you know. As a 20-something (now 30-something) who got unexpectedly pregnant after one year in university and who sacrificed her studies (I have a law degree but was never admitted to the bar) to raise a family this question is of more than academic interest.

13 years later, I have completed some of my studies but my career is unmistakably mommy-tracked. I had dreams of traveling the world and I now find myself the least traveled person of my acquaintance. I have carried my pregnancies to term and I do harbor regrets about all the things I might have been able to do, especially when I look at my peers who are paying off their mortgages at 35 while I wonder how the heck I will pay back the $60 000 line of credit I incurred to buy a Master’s degree and with it, the possibility of developing a career.

These struggles are supposed to make me pro-choice. They don’t.

We live in a misogynistic society. This is not our children’s fault so much as our own. When we flaunt abortion as the panacea for our inability to recognize motherhood as an important contribution to society and to acknowledge that mothers may have ambitions in life other than motherhood – ambitions that are not per se incompatible with motherhood but that are made so by a myopic outlook on motherhood and ambition – we effectively reinforce prejudices against mothers, children and families. This is the heart of my position against abortion.

I am not “anti-choice.” I only firmly believe that choice in matters of pregnancy has effectively reduced the range of options available to women in society. And this occurred principally when we made childbearing a personal choice for which women alone are held accountable.

Where pregnancy is a personal choice for women alone to make, everyone else is off the hook. Fathers, families and society. You might blame “anti-choice folks” for being nowhere once a child is born. I can personally assure you, pro-choice liberals aren’t anywhere to be seen either.

For proof, I could rhyme off anecdotes from my personal experience over the last 13 years – which covered both Liberal and Conservative governments by the way – but this post is getting long enough. Let me leave you all with this homework assignment: I submitted my Master’s thesis in late June and have been looking for work since early April with no success. I am well qualified but completely inexperienced. I have spent 12 years raising five children and finished my law degree and got a Master’s degree but I don’t have experience. That’s a problem—incidentally, not pro-lifers’ fault. Had I aborted my babies, I would have plenty of experience by now. Employers demand this experience, why? Because they can. And certainly since pregnancy is a choice, they don’t need to accommodate women who don’t choose experience over life.

About three weeks ago, I found myself a little queasy and peed on a stick. Surprise: I am – very unexpectedly – 2 months pregnant. And still looking for work (see aforementioned “$60,000 line of credit.”) Now, that’s complicated. Who looks for work pregnant? Who hires people for 6 months? Where is my mat leave after 6 months? What guarantees do I have to have my job back after I give birth? Don’t look, there aren’t any, I already checked. The choice of abortion has made unexpected pregnancies an aberration, a thing of the past. Abortion and its correlating ideas about motherhood-only-when-convenient and as an individual choice have created a brick wall with a one-way sign and a prohibited u-turn for women.

P.S. I should add that I have just found work for the next six months with a pro-life, so-con employer who knows about my pregnancy. Liberal pro-choicers—top that.

Challenging the debate

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An interesting opinion in today’s Ottawa Citizen. The author is admittedly pro-choice, believing that abortion must remain a question of individual conscience, but comes swinging against Morgentaler’s Order of Canada nonetheless. I would love to hear more discussions like this one, where the outcome of the debate — should Morgentaler have been nominated? — does not hinge on one’s moral position on abortion. Morgentaler’s nomination is wrong for many more reasons than his morals (or lack thereof).

That being said, I must still register my disagreement with the author’s statement that a fetus’ moral status can be circumscribed by its inability to value its own life. I recently had to take my dog to the veterinarian to be euthanised, a decision I don’t wish on anybody. My oldest daughter was tearfully telling me, a couple of days later, how heart-breaking it was to see the dog go in the car like it was just another car ride, and had he known, etc. Warnings about the uselessness of anthropomorphizing the dog went into deaf ears. The dog didn’t understand where he went — or why — and while to Liesl this was heart-breaking, I found it somewhat comforting. Some years ago I read Sister Helen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking and I cannot yet wrap my head around the expectancy of death, particularly when it comes at the hands of another. Assuredly, the ability to value one’s own life makes looking forward to one’s own death with more poignancy or fear. Similarly, we could say that people who take their own lives do so at the end of a tragic road of self-devaluation. However, I do not think that we can so easily equate moral status with self-valuation. Because, if you will allow me a moment of very bad taste, I’m not sure my 2-year-old son is yet able to value his own life. In fact, according to the decibel register at my house lately, he would convince anybody that his life is very miserable. Still, if I took his life, I would not only be a criminal in the eyes of the law but a very sick or rotten individual in the eyes of everybody else. In a nutshell, the ability to value one’s own life may be enough to abortion supporters but it doesn’t explain why it no longer matters after the child is born.

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Rebecca adds: To take Véronique’s point further: at the moment, we (as a society) do not believe that the elderly infirm can be killed because they may not be aware of their own existence and consciousness, nor do we believe this about people of any age suffering brain damage that impairs their consciousness. There are alarming signs that this may be changing, though, thanks to the valiant efforts of Peter Singer and his fellow travellers.

Reflect and ponder

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Read in this morning’s Ottawa Citizen in the letters section (sorry, I couldn’t find the web version of the full letter):

Under no circumstances should sex lead to a life sentence.

I daresay, this letter-writer has learned her pro-choice lesson well. Sex? Leading to pregnancy? No way! But on a lighter note, her statement reminded me of a joke, you know, the one about life being a sexually transmitted condition leading to death?

Among other letters, we also read the testimony of a woman who found herself in the leftover 1% for whom the pill is not “efficient” and who had an abortion as a result. She writes: “But birth control does fail some women who are then faced with unplanned pregnancies that, for various reasons, they cannot continue.” So much for birth control making abortion rare. Sex shouldn’t lead to babies and we need abortion because we have relatively effective birth control, not in spite of it.

Interesting.

When truth bites the dust, nobody wins

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Writing something brilliant about Morgentaler’s nomination to the Order of Canada is difficult at this point, not only because the deed is done and trying to talk anybody out of it is futile, but also because the urge to scream injustice at the top of my lungs while setting my hair on fire hasn’t quite subsided. But my posting record has been rather lackluster since the end of the school year and if anything is worth dealing with the consequences of having five unattended children roaming about the house while I write, this must be it.

What I find so unjust about Morgentaler’s nomination is, once again, the absence of intelligent debate — as opposed to rhetoric, slogans and name-calling — surrounding matters of abortion. While pro-life advocates are not blameless in that matter, I believe that the failure to engage in intelligent debate rests more heavily on the shoulders of pro-abortion advocates, as the underhanded manner in which the Morgentaler nomination was managed shows. I am offended by the nomination, but I am more deeply offended that the process was planned to avoid any meaningful contribution from pro-life advocates. “We know what they think, we’ve made our decision, what’s the point in involving them?” Abortion is controversial but what is truly divisive is the lumping of all opposing opinions as “those we don’t want to hear.” Still, it takes two to be divided and I can’t say with certitude that, had the cultural momentum been in our favour, we wouldn’t have been guilty of the same offense. Now, here’s some food for thought.

Nowhere has the failure to engage in meaningful debate been more aptly illustrated than by Morgentaler himself in the wake of his nomination. This article reads like an assignment in “spot the falsehoods, rhetoric and name-calling.” Come on! Calling people anti-choice or anti-life doesn’t help anything. We are no more anti-choice than pro-choice are anti-life. We just believe that the choice to end a pregnancy is not a legitimate one, just like the choice to kill someone in revenge or the choice to kidnap a child or the choice to use another person for sexual gratification. Similarly, all pro-choice advocates have not had an abortion nor do they think that everybody should have one (unless they are population control zealots but that’s another story). The Catholic Church is not opposed to women’s rights. It just happens to think that women’s rights are not advanced by abortion because abortion fundamentally undermines women’s dignity. You might disagree but at least admit that there is something to talk about here. In the same vein, all pro-lifers are not Catholics nor will changing the Pope end opposition to abortion. I think that what disappointed me (almost) as much as seeing Morgentaler nominated was the pettiness and small-mindedness of the man himself. I can’t even look up to him as an intelligent contributor to the debate. He really debases the institution of the Order of Canada, not so much because of his expected position on abortion but because of his unwillingness (or inability) to engage meaningfully in a debate about what matters so much to him.

Of rotten apples and illegitimate choices

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I have returned from my bioethical wanderings which took me to Montreal to submit my master’s thesis – high five, anyone? — and St. John’s NFL for the Canadian Bioethics Society’s national conference. The Canadian bioethics community offers an interesting case-study in split personality, being profoundly committed to “women’s right to choose” while being profoundly horrified by its collateral damage, namely the cheapening human life, especially old, sick or disabled life. Whether or not they are able to see the link is anyone’s guess: I sat on numerous presentations decrying the effects of prenatal genetic screening and diagnosis on human diversity but nowhere did I hear a semblance of battle cry to make it stop. In cases such as these, it is more appropriate to use “pro-choice” than “pro-abortion” to describe the position of many speakers present at the conference: uneasy as they are with the termination of genetically impaired embryos, they would never question a woman’s choice to do so. From this point of view, abortion is a by-product of choice: if you want one, you will have to deal with the other.

 

I find this type of ethical reasoning both interesting and distressing. Interesting and distressing because if ethics concerns itself with what we should do, the hegemony of choice turns sound ethical reasoning on its head by stating first what we should do (don’t question choice) and backpedaling itself from its conclusion into an ethical position. It makes for somewhat cowardly ethics because paths of ethical reasoning that could lead to question the hegemony of choice – especially reproductive choice — are either eliminated or carefully circumvented. Speaking from both sides of one’s mouth will only get you so far in eliminating injustice: by refusing to take a clear stance on the injustice of genetic terminations – including sex-based terminations – the Canadian bioethics community is effectively condoning the elimination of diversity from the Canadian demographic landscape.

 

So what, you ask? The ramifications of condoning genetic terminations are not only seen in dwindling diversity. By refusing to rein in freedom of choice in matters of genetic terminations, we cause the erosion of the range of choices available to the rest of society: as embryos with trisomy 21 – to name this easy target – are less and less likely to make it to full term, the services and support available to parents who choose to bear and raise their children with Down syndrome are reduced to reflect the statistically inexistent demand. And I’m not even getting into the consequences of changing attitudes toward disability which can also erode the range of choices available to those who walk to a different drum. Illegitimate, unethical choices are rotten apples. Failing to recognize it only exposes the whole basket.

Cherry picking–not a right

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When it comes to pro-abortion arguments, a recently published opinion piece in the Medical Post — “INSIDERS: Is the end of abortion near?” (a restricted access piece) — has got it all. There’s the well-funded religious groups, fear mongering of Bill C-484 backdoorism and a return to coat-hanger abortions, abortion as standard of care for unplanned pregnancy, abortion as human right, abortion as incontestable under law, the obligation to refer, the obligation to facilitate access, and finally, freedom of conscience, sure, but my conscience, not yours.

Then there’s this brain twister:

The Federation of Medical Women of Canada (FMWC) is very concerned because we owe our deepest gratitude to our federation founders those heroes who fought so hard for the right of women to be able to choose their reproductive rights.” (emphasis mine)

 

Huh? So it’s no longer about having reproductive rights but about being able to choose our reproductive rights? This is moral relativism at its best – or at its worst–depending on how you look at it.

 

Allow me to think about it in the big scheme of things, that is, a scheme bigger than justifying individual wants and desires. Why women? Why the “right to choose”? Why “reproductive rights”? Why do women have a right to choose their rights? Men can reproduce too.

Just imagine men parading around with this slogan: “What I do with my semen is my business.”

But men are not allowed to choose their reproductive rights–and rightfully so. Society at large recognizes that some rights should be limited and others denied entirely. In civil society, rights are not chosen individually even when their scope is essentially individual. Rights are enshrined and efforts to protect them deployed because of a general understanding that they are just, good and necessary. There is a general understanding in society that men shouldn’t be allowed to do whatever they choose with their sperm; that pedophiles shouldn’t be allowed a full range of reproductive rights and that under age children shouldn’t be allowed to choose at all, to name but a few…

Pro-choice advocates please stop waving the flag of “reproductive rights.” Please stop making a case for the special status of your eggs. Or at least make a coherent argument. I’m still waiting for that.

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Andrea adds: Aaaah, Véronique, clearly you didn’t get the “it’s none of your business” memo. It’s probably my very favourite pro-choice argument, that variation on a grade four theme–none of your beeswax–said with jaw tightly clenched. Are homeless people my business? What about all the charitable groups we have to help with that? Very strictly speaking, nothing is ever our business–if that’s the kind of world you want to live in. One where you step over the bodies lying on grates on the way to work, and turn your head the other way, while you zip in to Starbucks for a latté. “Mankind was my business…” It’s always a good time to quote one of my all time favourite movies. Here–watch the YouTube clip again. (Yes, I’m aware that it is June.)

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