NDP Leader Tom Mulcair said last week that,
“Women who are victims of criminal sexual violence in those countries have a right to get care and help, including a safe abortion,” Mulcair said.
“We find it simply unacceptable that Stephen Harper is sending out his ministers to stake out that type of ideological position instead of helping victims who need and deserve our help.”
Now, obviously Tom Mulcair can’t possibly be thinking that abortion is any kind of solution during times (years and decades) of continuous grotesque violence against women. To think that he would have to believe that women being held captive and brutalized have the kind of so-called “free will” that Canadian women enjoy on a daily basis. He would have to believe that a woman can be a prisoner of war in her own home and yet still have the luxury of an idea we call choice.
To think that he would have to believe that advocating an abortion-access policy in Africa is less “ideological” than trying to implement programs that aid women in coming up with their own solutions to crisis pregnancies, solutions that are in keeping with their beliefs and their values. Tom Mulcair can’t possibly be thinking that the colonialism of telling African women, of which the majority are Christian (40%) and Muslim (45%), that they are wrong and that Canadian women are right is the best option, can he?
Tom Mulcair must be aware of the failures of the Canadian Indian residential school system, failures that resulted in children being deprived of their native cultural heritage and are best not reenacted in our policies abroad. I can’t believe that Tom Mulcair actually meant what he said, because to believe that would be to think he believes prisoners have choices and that Canadians (namely himself, and a handful of very aggressive abortion advocates) know better than everyone else.
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Touche! well said Jennifer. This kind of attitude is so patronizing and colonial.
I do think that people who see red at “abortions denied to victims of rape” in developing countries are missing a bigger picture. I likely am too. There’s no doubt this is the trickiest situation anyone will face. How to help? What to do? We need to discuss this cautiously. and politics is not a place of caution, it’s a place of partisan backstabbing and blaming. Thanks Jennifer for a thoughtful post.
Very nicely done, Jennifer!
I met a really lovely woman from Tanzania last year. She said that, even though abortion is completely illegal there, there are quite a few doctors who will perform one if circumstances are dire enough and both the woman and her family are on board. She didn’t see this as a problem. To be honest, neither do I.
I beat this dead horse often enough, but it isn’t the law that denies women abortions. It is the doctors who deny women abortions. The only time a woman would not be able to get a (safe) abortion is if there is no doctor around who is willing to perform one. And even if there were laws around that permitted women to abort, if no doctor around would perform abortion, then she still would not have access.