Kelly Holloway

The question: Is abortion a woman’s right or a moral wrong?

The date: Wednesday, March 19th, 7-9 pm

The place: 103 Steacie Building, Carleton University, Ottawa

Stephanie Gray from the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform will represent the pro-life side and the Carleton Debate Society will present the pro-choice side. Guess the ladies of Planned Parenthood called uncle after the last round against Jojo Ruba in December 2006. Now I think this debate will go ahead: The student union can hardly afford to cancel it, given all the negative publicity York U just received.

Still, our friendly totalitarian, Kelly Holloway of the York University Student Centre is busy justifying just how and why she shut down the abortion debate at York in the Ottawa Citizen today. Read all about it! here…

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Véronique adds: Read the letter. I’d hate to see what an un-friendly totalitarian sounds like.

My question is if the student union is not accountable – specifically – to conservative pundits, are they accountable to liberal pundits?

If moral considerations pertaining to abortion are personal, what makes yours righter than mine?

What makes an “entitlement” to an environment free of harassment and intimidation weightier than a right – a Charter right I must add – to freedom of expression?

Who decides?

Why?

I don’t need an answer today…

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Tanya adds: Kelly Holloway says,”York University can make its own decisions and, if the York University president wishes to host a debate organized by these anti-choice campaigners, the university will have to take responsibility for that.”

I’m happy to see they are attempting in some way to show students there are responsibilities to be accepted for choices made. Does anyone else think they may be nullifying this lesson just a tad by advocating for consequence-free sex?

Reasonable people have reasonable concerns about abortion-and, I might add, about pro-life arguments.

But you don’t find reasonable people at student unions, for the most part. And you certainly don’t find them at “women’s centres.” (That’s a place on campus the vast majority of women just don’t go.)

Yet these are the people who have power, as we’re seeing at York right now. They are the quickest to take offence, and their voices are the loudest. Precisely because they are completely unreasonable, they are heard.

The reasonable students are studying, playing sports and doing whatever it is students do.

These centres represent a fringe, barricade mentality: They are trapped in 60s ideology and unable to move with the times.

I’m glad Ms. Kelly Holloway of the York University Graduate Students Assocation banned the abortion debate: It highlights the strange alternate universe she inhabits for all to see. And I thank her for the national, front-page coverage on the abortion debate that never was.

Perhaps soon we can all move on a little from the notion that pro-lifers are the extreme ones here.

cross-posted to The Shotgun.

Carleton University abortion debate, this Wednesday

The squeaky wheels of student unions

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