Selective academics

I’m in a bad mood this morning. Which means I should probably step away from the keyboard. Too late.

From the National Post this past weekend, one Kelly Gordon, PhD candidate at University of Ottawa, commenting on the anti-abortion movement:

“That’s a huge part of their strategy,” she said — to focus on “exceptions” rather than the majority of abortion services carried out in Canada.

“There’s no evidence that sex-selective abortions happen in Canada, but that’s definitely an issue in which people say ‘Well I believe in women’s rights, and I thought I believed in abortion, but you know…’” she said. “It disrupts the narrative that abortion is a women’s rights issue.”

Either Kelly Gordon doesn’t know any Indo-Canadians, or she is choosing what she hears and reports very carefully.

These days it is hard to comment on what kind of abortions are happening in Canada. Our official stats are officially shoddy. As someone who has tried to quantify sex selection abortions in Canada, I’ll freely admit there were shortcomings to the very sincere effort I made, furthermore, my work is now out of date. Still, to pretend they don’t happen at all is to foist deceit on the Canadian public.

Another thing: This notion of the movement “rebranding” to include women is a total falsehood, I’m convinced. It seems to me that there have always been equal parts of men and women on both sides of the abortion debate. What has happened in the pro-life movement is that it is increasingly dominated by women.

One notes the irony that the key founders of “abortion rights” are mostly men, Morgentaler and Nathanson, to name but two.

I’m pretty confident Kelly Gordon’s book will mention both me and ProWomanProLife. But she never made any effort to reach out to me and ask any questions.

I would not want to write a book about anything without trying to talk to the people I’m assessing and in effect critiquing, for the fear that my words would ring hollow–people in the movement being assessed generally know when others have made an honest attempt to understand what they are about. No such honest attempt was made here. I have always found it enriching to talk to opponents–like Joyce Arthur and Celia Posniak–both of whom are in the article linked above, both of whom are completely, thoroughly and utterly pro-choice and both of whom have sat down and talked to me.

But not so with our finest minds in academia.

And NOW I will indeed step away from the keyboard.

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