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Thoughts on equality or lack thereof

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I heard about this latest bit of pro-abortion news yesterday afternoon. Normally, I would have been seized by the urge to blog. But I have been flying solo this week, taking the full brunt of running the household while my husband is out of town. Not to mention finishing my [expletive deleted] LL.M. thesis and looking for gainful employment. I am tired. And suddenly, I was overcome by a feeling that the battle had been lost, that everything had been written, every argument laid out, and still, people didn’t care.

 

But when I heard that the said award had been granted for “outstanding service to humanity and for his contribution to the cause of equality for women” the feeling of hopelessness was quickly replaced by an overwhelming urge to yell at someone. I tried writing, I did. But I couldn’t write anything that wasn’t seasoned with a generous dose of profanities. Out of respect for our beloved readers, I chose to run 5 km during my daughters’ gym class before heading home at 9 pm to make lunches, clean the kitchen, run a load of laundry, sign permissions, take out the trash, read bedtime stories, and watch three consecutive episodes of Jon & Kate +8 while checking my emails. In the end, I went to bed way too late to be angry and am therefore in a much better disposition to write a well-balanced thoughtful post. Well, we’ll see.

 

Equality for women. The cause of equality for women. And what would be abortion’s contribution to equality for women? We hear it so much we no longer pause to wonder “oh yeah? and why is that?” This is not a rhetorical question. We need to reflect on the underlying assumptions of making abortion an “equality” issue. Because if equality between men and women really hinges on access to abortion, we are a lot farther behind achieving meaningful equality than we flatter ourselves to be. Women need abortion to be equal in order not to be weighted down by children.

 

This premise contains, at first glance, two important inequalities. The first one being that men are not (or shouldn’t be) weighted down by children. The second one being that children are social dead weight. I believe that thoughtful abortion advocates would see clearly through the inequality of equality through abortion but would counter-argue that in the present circumstances, it is unfair to make women bear the brunt of our social inertia. But what pro-woman pro-life advocates see is that equality has been achieved at the cost of fairness and that access to abortion has only promoted the inferiority of women as bearers of children. The vicious circle has to stop an we need to make women equal as they are — with a uterus and all — not as society wishes them to be.

 

Equally problematic is the notion that equality in society is somehow “granted.” Think about it: we have “achieved” equality with access to abortion. Shouldn’t we just “be” equal? Doesn’t the very idea of having to achieve equality fundamentally unequal and unfair? It would be equivalent to saying that immigrants achieve equality once they become white, anglo-saxon and Protestant. What kind of equality is that?

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Tanya adds:

Tanya points out from the link above:”The court’s ruling in 1988 declared the law that prohibited abortion to be unconstitutional, thus confirming women’s reproductive rights.”

Let’s not wonder why there’s misunderstanding over the fabric of the abortion issue in this country.

To correct the above phrasing, the court’s ruling in 1988 declared the law that regulated access to abortion to be unconstitutional. Over 20 years later, and no new law regulating access to abortion has been passed, contrary to the wishes of the Supreme Court. “thus confirming” nothing…nothing at all. On se permet des choses, en tout cas!

 

A difficult “hero,” indeed

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Abortion is a personal and private matter, unless you’re on a crusade to change the law, in which case writing the prime minister to highlight just who you’ve conducted abortions on is entirely appropriate. So desperate was Dr. Henry Morgentaler to legalize the practice that he wrote a personal letter to Dear Pierre detailing how he had done abortions on members of Trudeau’s family and other politicians…

 

The letter, reported on in Maclean’s and by Terry O’Neill, was written in August 1973.

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Brigitte is flabbergasted: How come everybody is so shy about using the term blackmail to describe, well, blackmail? He writes:

Do you know that in my clinic, I have helped wives, daughters, mistresses and relatives of members of the Federal and Provincial Cabinet, including some relatives of yours?

And then he says:

I also want to assure you that if I refer to prominent people having had safe abortions in my clinic it is not with the intention of embarrassing anyone but only to bring into stronger focus the hypocrisy and absurdity of the law.

I’m not buying it. Had I been in Trudeau’s shoes I certainly would have felt threatened by that letter. Which, as Terry O’Neil notes in his piece, “is perhaps a testament to the strength of Trudeau’s character that he refused to budge from his position, even though Morgentaler’s letter could be viewed as a none-too-thinly-veiled threat that, failing to amend the law, names would be named and alleged hypocrites exposed.” Indeed. You can say a lot of unflattering things about Trudeau (I have done so myself, more than once), but he was no pushover.

 

Morgentaler symposium summary

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Sorry about the delay on this. Here are my thoughts about the Morgentaler and the law conference I attended on Friday last week.

Toronto-January 25, 2008: Henry Morgentaler is a frail old man, who walks with some difficulty and needs help on stairs. He sat at the front of a lecture hall at the University of Toronto’s prestigious law school – some 200 students, doctors, activists and lay people in the audience. The average age was probably mid to late 20s, though there were also a fair number of grey heads in the crowd.

Vicki Saporta, president and CEO of the National Abortion Federation opened the event, with the dean of the University of Toronto’s law school, Mayo Moran, looking on. Saporta lauded the efforts of Morgentaler (and gave him a hug) but remained concerned about further anti-choice action, and limits on access.

And access became the most common thread of discussion for many of the speakers: Abortion should be “available, accessible and acceptable” (Joanna Erdman’s phrase, UofT faculty of law). After Saporta, Colleen Flood, Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy introduced Morgentaler.

And so a standing ovation later, the man himself rose to speak. Morgentaler’s voice was weak; the words predictable. He is proud of his efforts. “I believe the world is a kinder, gentler place because women have the right to make choices,” he said. His work

marks a milestone in the emancipation of women…  

After he was done, another standing ovation – pro-choicers herald the presence of Morgentaler as if it was 1950 and Elvis Presley were in the building – it’s all weak knees and breathy excitement merely to be near him.

The morning was devoted largely to… you guessed it – access. Lorraine Weinrib, faculty of law at the University of Toronto, mused about how doctors are protected from performing or referring for abortions. “How did it come to be about protection for doctors, not women,” she asked. She also spoke about how the Morgentaler decision was the first time that she heard the sentiment expressed publicly that

women have lives, women have jobs, women have aspirations that are more important than an unwanted pregnancy.

Shelley Gavigan of Osgoode Hall Law School appeared nervous throughout her talk and acknowledged at the end that perhaps pro-choicers would be wise to acknowledge the “dominant ideology” of the unborn child:

If you must acknowledge the discourse of the unborn child,” she said, “if we must reinsert the vernacular of the unborn into the discourse, [then the] pregnant woman and the unborn child speak with one voice and that voice is hers.

Dawn Fowler of the NAF emphasized how few late-term abortions happen in Canada for social reasons. But then a particularly enthusiastic pro-abortion conferee from Holland stood up to ask this:

Sometimes women need abortions after 24 weeks, even for social reasons, and so why doesn’t Canada offer this?

Fowler replied that this lack of access is “physician driven.”

Garson Romalis, abortion provider in BC, spoke of his own work as saving women’s lives with some particularly distressing examples of a woman with six feet of bowel outside her body, who he was able to save, another jaundiced with infection, but she died. He spoke of how unique his specialty is because women are so completely grateful. “It is only my work where women say not only ‘thank you,’ but also ‘thank you for what you do.'”

And there were also interesting offline discussions: A very young woman from Canadians for Choice explained how, in spite of good access to clinics in the Toronto area, many women still self-abort. “You can find out how on the internet,” she said. Her concern? That there is still stigma attached to abortion, so women won’t come in to the clinic. I asked her how she hoped to combat the stigma – a genuine question, which was met with confusion. She reverted back to… access. “Some women just can’t get to a clinic,” she said, “What if you live in Scarborough [a suburb of Toronto] and can’t afford the bus ticket to Toronto?”

I was not able to stay and listen to the last session, which included Heather Mallick, journalist and Carolyn Bennett, Member of Parliament. But simply seeing Mallick up close reminded me that the person behind written vitriol might be fun – Mallick made a joke in the sunny lunchroom that she would stand in one of the rays and get a tan. It reminded me of a quote from Margaret Thatcher:

It pays to know the enemy – not least because at some time you may have the opportunity to turn him into a friend.

And all the old-guard feminists rolled their eyes and said “turn her, turn her into a friend… are you saying women can’t be perfectly good enemies?”

I remain convinced that most pro-choice young women are more open to a pro-life message than we currently hope. The empty rhetoric at the conference, the neutral tones of the discussion, the complete and total failure to acknowledge the difficulty of having an abortion and in many cases, the deep and lasting pain for women – it all makes me more convinced of this than I ever was before.

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Brigitte adds: Excuse me for rolling my eyes all the way to my shoulder blades, but really. Worrying about the price of a bus ticket from Scarborough to Toronto when between 4 and 5 MILLION Canadians have no access to a family physician is more than a little déplacé. It’s almost obscene.

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