Pro smack-down of M408

One of the MASSIVE irritants that swims in the eddy churned up by CON MP Mark Warawa's misogynistic M408 is the twitter spamming campaign in which the antiChoice lobby engages.

The shrieeeking, the lack of finesse, the crude lies, the pitiful attempts at logical thinking.

My co-blogger fern hill has done a brilliant job of addressing, challenging and smacking down the most odious of those tweets.  And she has blogged frequently at DJ! in response to the obfuscation and sheer stoopidity of M408.

And yet, some in the media appear content to parrot Warawa's and Woodworth's twisty prevarications about women's right to choose —with the support of Canadian healthcare professionals— whether to continue carrying a pregnancy to term or not.

It is a simple, clear-cut proposition. The voluntary termination of a pregnancy is a medical procedure.  It is regulated in Canada through public health care.  Canada is not a christian theocracy.  It has - or used to have - a secular government.  Religious freedom implies that individuals can observe their own private religious beliefs, practices and rituals at will - but NOT enforce those upon people who have different ones.

This Op-Ed piece in the Ottawa Citizen addresses the abusive obfuscation that M408 has generated, most lucidly and potently.

That the fetus you are carrying is female is certainly a terrible reason to have an abortion — but, good or bad, your reason is none of the government’s business. It’s simply not the place of our federal Parliament to voice an opinion on the merit of this or that reason behind a woman’s choice to have an abortion.[...]

It’s not for Parliament to voice an opinion on women’s reasons for having abortions, for human fetuses are neither in fact persons nor recognized as such in Canadian law. They are not persons for they have no interests; they lack the self-consciousness necessary for having interests.

Since they lack interests, human fetuses cannot be wronged. They cannot, therefore, be wronged by being discriminated against, not on grounds of sex, not on any grounds.

Warawa’s motion, then, makes no sense. No fetus is wrongfully discriminated against when it is aborted on account of its being female, so sex-selective pregnancy termination involves no wrongful discrimination for Parliament to condemn.

Now this is not to say that the fact that some women in Canada choose to abort fetuses because of their sex is no proper concern of civil society or even of the Canadian government.

It may very well be a proper matter of concern for you and me, and perhaps our government eventually has some role to play. But no one, no doctor, no ultrasound technician, no politician should seek to place any barrier between any pregnant woman and an abortion.

"It’s simply not the place of our federal Parliament to voice an opinion on the merit of this or that reason behind a woman’s choice to have an abortion."  Expect the zygote zealots to shriEEEk in reply to this view. It is a bracing, thoughtful antidote to the religious fundamentalist, authoritarian, crotch-sniffing ideologues who are lobbying to criminalize abortion.

Update: fern hill caught tweets from @ThomasHall17 - a retired House of Commons procedural clerk, who sets the record straight with regard to M408.  That alleged sacrosanct parliamentary "right" that some mansplainers tried to foist upon proChoice supporters, bellowing that Warawa was entitled to something that was bigger and more important than our silly little hill of beans? 

All self-indulgent BS.  Thomas Hall has the real 411.

It starts here.  A very good, illuminating read.