Father De Souza hits one nicely on the head:
What drives the hostility to the government’s motherhood issue? Motherhood. The heart of the opposition to the initiative is its starting point – expectant mothers. To a certain cast of mind, considering women as mothers constitutes something of a retrograde step. Hence the objection that helping mothers to have safe deliveries is somehow illegitimate unless similar help is offered to women to avoid becoming mothers at all.
In most elite circles, the great social liberation of the past generations has been the liberation of women from the expectation, to say nothing of the reality, of motherhood. Indeed, liberation from the fear of motherhood due to easy contraception and unlimited abortion is considered perhaps the greatest item of social progress in the last half-century. Consequently, for a program to explicitly favour motherhood, even at the minimal level of ensuring safe deliveries, causes howls of outrage from those who think that African villagers should behave more like liberal society matrons – if one might use that pregnant word, figuratively speaking of course.
In many African countries, for example, for Canada to fund abortions would be breaking the local laws. To flout local laws and undermine local customs was once called paternalism. It’s an odd turn for Canada’s abortion extremists to be paternalistic, but such is the strangeness of this controversy.
by 
“for there exists a great philosophical divide between those who think that advancement for women requires the differences between men and women to be minimized, or even ignored, and those who think that progress for women means advancing women as women, rather than trying to make them more like men.”
Here here! I’m on the women as women side of that divide. However, I think the definition of woman still needs work. We’re not one monolithic group of people, so women’s rights/advancement needs to cover the broad spectrum of womanhood. Like we do here at PWPL 🙂
Exactly! I have found that my “choices” are constantly under attack, from early-ish marriage (which really caused some head-scratching, since at the time I was a pretty staunch atheist and no could understand why we would make that commitment to each other for any other reason), to bearing 3 children and wishing for more. Now I’m nearly 30 with a life I’m perfectly happy with, but which “Feminists” despise and attack…even though it’s totally by choice.
I certainly don’t think all women should be mothers, in the kitchen, nurturing others, yada yada yada (in fact there are women I would trust with many areas of my life that I would NEVER let babysit my kids or cook me a meal) … but why can’t I be, if it makes me happy?
“Leave aside the politics of the matter, which, after all, in Canada, are strange beyond parody. In the past few months, both sides of the issue have accused their opponents of raising issues that should not be discussed because they are “divisive.” The idea that political debate should avoid topics on which there are disagreements is odd, especially when the parties are eager to manufacture disagreement on all other matters, even where none exists.”
This part made me laugh. We are a weird bunch, aren’t we?