Catholics for Choice

From their Twitter page (an account that I follow):

A voice for Catholics who believe that Catholic tradition supports one's right to follow her/his conscience in matters of sexuality and reproductive health.

This is an article that was recommended and linked to, in a recent tweet. It is relevant, given the obfuscation and lies that CPC MP Stephen Woodworth and his antichoice Attack Parrots™© are saying about third trimester termination of pregnancy.

“This was our baby that we had waited a long time for and the decision was not made lightly. We had to think of our life too and that of our families. What would happen after we died? Nobody could love our child like we could. We had to let go, try to be unselfish. Perhaps many would say that this decision was not right, but we made it for what we considered the right reasons.”
— “Jill” 2007

Since Antenatal Results and Choices (ARC) was founded in the UK in 1988, we have had contact with thousands of women like “Jill.” In our lifetime, we have seen a rapid development in and implementation of genetic testing technologies. What has definitely not changed is the emotional impact on a parent who is told their baby has a fatal, life-limiting or disabling condition. After receiving the news that their baby is not developing as expected, parents then face the difficult decision about continuing or ending the pregnancy. I use the words “parent” and “baby” because this is the way women like Jill who come to us most often refer to themselves and the fetus. [...]

It is worth pausing to consider the political context in which women now make decisions after prenatal diagnosis. In recent years we have seen laudable gains made by the disability rights movement. There have been legislative changes to combat discrimination against those living with disabilities dis-abilities and inroads made in constructing a more inclusive and accepting society. At the same time, antichoice campaigners have seized the opportunity to attack the clause in the UK Abortion Act of 1967 that allows for abortion if “there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped” and called it “eugenic.” Antichoice advocates have attempted to enlist disability campaigners to their cause. The Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (a small but vociferous UK antichoice organization) uses its website to accuse ARC of being “actively complicit in the fatal discrimination of disabled people enabled by legal abortion.”

It is a clever move by the antichoice lobby, as they are aware that many who would class themselves as “prochoice” worry that ending a pregnancy on the grounds of disability may devalue the lives of those living with some sort of impairment. Furthermore, when antichoicers decry that those women who have terminations for fetal anomaly are pursuing perfection or taking the “easy way out,” they know that it is rare for a woman who made this choice to speak out publicly against such vilification. In such a deeply private and personal experience, most women understandably do not want their circumstances put under public scrutiny.

The antichoice movement also readily exploits public squeamishness about late abortions in the hope of restricting access. There are regular media flurries around late abortions, in particular those performed past the legal limit of 24 weeks for non-medical abortions in the UK. The fact is that these post-24 week abortions are few in number (according to government statistics there are fewer than 200 post-24 week abortions per annum in England and Wales—0.1 percent of the total) and the majority are carried out due to indications of serious fetal abnormalities that do not manifest until late in the pregnancy.

This charged context can add an extra layer of difficulty for women and couples dealing with a diagnosis of fetal anomaly. They struggle with complex and often conflicted feelings over ending the pregnancy while being fearful of the judgment of those around them and in the wider world. I hope that by exploring the perspective of parents who come to ARC, it will be clear that they are not denigrating those living with a disability, but making responsible decisions informed by their individual values and personal circumstances.

It continues in this rational, compassionate and prochoice manner. An excellent read and also a necessary antidote against the glurge and disinformation that antichoicers Somerville, Blob Blogging Wingnut and other supporters of the Vatican Taliban religious dogma always shriEEEk.

Yo! Margaret! (Somerville)

Margaret Somerville is a pearl-clutching dissembler and distorter. (But you knew that.)

In yet another screed railing against Canada's lawlessness on abortion, first she offers the Baby Seals Gambit, with a bit of a new pretzelly brain twist.

Legal protection does not require giving rights to an unborn child, or recognizing him or her as a person, or even that the child is human. We use the Criminal Code to protect from cruelty kittens and puppies and baby seals, which have none of these attributes. Surely, we have at least similar obligations to unborn children.

Legal protection does ^NOT entail rights? Huh? What does it entail then?

Next, the Fetal Pain BS.

There is an increasing recognition and, at the least, resulting deep concern that past a certain point in gestation abortion is a cause of severe pain for the fetus. There is quality evidence (U.K. research) suggesting the beginnings of pain perception in the fetus at 16 weeks gestation and most researchers agree that is a reality at 20 weeks.

BLAAAAT. Nope.

Real scientists agree that the fetal brain is simply not developed enough until about 28 weeks' gestation.

A more recent and very interesting study suggests that fetuses cannot differentiate between pain and touch until perhaps as late as 35 to 37 weeks. Very shortly before birth, in other words.

Next, the Conflation of 'Human Being' and 'Legal Person' Shuffle.

Then the No Restrictions/Regulations SHRIEEEEK.

(I can't believe I'm going to quote a CON to refute that one.)

Gordon O'Connor giving the government's response to Woodworth's Wank last week.

This does not mean, however, that abortion is unregulated in Canada. Abortion is regulated through provincial governments' responsibility for the delivery of health care services in conjunction with the medical profession. All provincial and territorial colleges of physicians and surgeons have declared that abortion is a medically necessary procedure, and delivery of this medical service is regulated accordingly.

Hey, Margaret, I can keep this up as long as you can. But why can't I get paid to do it?

Gawd Says: as interpreted by Focus on the Family

Shorter Candi Cushman of US Focus on the Family: Homophobes? Nonsense, we're here to preach God's love for heterosexuals and only heterosexuals.

Only rightwing intolerant christian zealots *really* know what God says and so The Focus on the (fundamentalist religious nuclear) Family will shrieeek as loudly as it can over the "Day of Silence".

Other families - here, and there - are offensive to the christianists and their Gawd and are thus rejected as 'unnatural'.

Noted catholic bigot Margaret Somerville used academic flourishes to disguise the hideous loathing, and perhaps envy, that seethes from her form of family worship. So shallow is the defense of her opinion that her final resort is a quote from a woman (who owes her existence to reproductive technology) equating these medical interventions with the crime of sexual assault.

Responses to Somerville's peroration can be found here.

But, but, Canada is lawless! ShriEEEkkk!!!

In other past news, The Fetus©™ fetishists are up to their old lying tricks - again.


Margaret Somerville - their Bee Queen - got trotted out for her annual 30-second sound bite because Right-to-Lies would rather not show a frothing-at-the-mouth, knickers-in-a-knot lunatic like John "Sperm Holocaust" Pacheco as their media rep.

[...] between the two poles of a spectrum from unrestricted availability of abortion throughout pregnancy – the present situation – to prohibiting it entirely, there is a wide variety of opinion and certainly no overall consensus on any given approach.

Somerville propagates many untruths and bits of truthiness in her opinion piece which is titled - in typical lying liars' fashion - "The Facts on Abortion". The quote above is typical. Medical practitioners provide the means to terminate pregnancies, which range from pharmaceutical to surgical, in the case of fetus which have ceased to develop in uterus.

There is NO "unrestricted availability" as she claims, but you can be certain that Somerville, her acolytes such as Blob Blogging Wingnut and the Vatican Taliban would enforce pregnancy as a gynophobic control over women's sexual and reproductive power if they could.

That is the purpose of Somerville's perorations.

Honorary doc from catholic college for Mahg-wet.

Is it a consolation prize - like Miss Con-geniality or something along those lines? Because poor Mahg-wet may not be getting the Order of Canada any time soon, no matter how much she whines.

As fern hill pointed out here, the GG-in-waiting is not at all popular with The Fetus©™ fetishists. In fact, there was likely some shrieeeking from that camp when his nomination was confirmed by Stevie. After all, David Johnston chaired the panel whose proposals were shredded by the zygote zealots. The feelings may be reciprocal; they may not his favourite folks either.

Recently, Mahg-wet vociferously championed the interests of donor-conceived offspring and proclaimed the harm they suffered was equivalent to the trauma experienced by aboriginal, "home" and native children who were separated from their biological/'natural' families by government interventions.

Dr Dawg has addressed the question of whether Mahg-wet is a "religious zealot in academic drag--opposing gay marriage, euthanasia and abortion, inveighing against stem cell research and adoption, but avoiding specifically religious vocabulary" before. Yesterday he provided observations then posted an email exchange initiated by professor Amir Attaran with Somerville about her recent Op-Ed.

There's nothing much to add to that brilliant exposé except Mahg-wet's McGill bio photograph that I found through links. Goodness gracious. A picture that's worth more than 1000 words especially if they're mutton, lamb, dressed as, etc. etc.

Religious or naught... ? Before and after? Good twin / evil twin? Dr Somerville and Ms Naugahyde?

Wake up Maggie

... I think I got something to say to you
It's late September and I really should be back at school.
I know I keep you amused
but I feel I'm being used ...

Margaret Somerville - a cougar? Unlikely, though stranger things have happened. No, I suspect Maggie is a latex - errr, latent and likely self-suppressed dominatrix though that orientation breaks out when she launches in one of her predictable and tedious public floggings of public morality.

Dr Dawg, who can run epistemological circles around Somerville, nails her sanctimonious hide to the wall. Metaphorically, of course.

...while on the subject of public intellectuals, the Citizen graces us today with another incompetent column by Margaret Somerville, the popular self-anointed authority on bioethics from McGill who is fond of telling us how to live and what to think under the guise of ethical discussion. There is, in fact little real discussion in Somerville's writings: it's all moral claims and assertions.

This time she's on about stem cell research and the sacredness of the embryo. ... "We are all ex-embryos," she says, in her sloppy way. We are, of course, all pre-corpses, too. ... Somerville makes much of the potential of an embryo, its "becoming," and summons up that phantasm, "moral intuition," which she has referred to, in other columns, as the "yuck factor." But the same abstract argument of potential could be used about contraception, since sperm and ova are, at least potentially, joined. In fact one could trace a chain of potential back to the origins of life. A protozoan has the potential of evolving into a human being. Morally speaking, must the chain never be broken? How can it be avoided?

Frances Kissling has a much better understanding of these issues, in addition to being more rigorous and honest in her intellectual analysis.

Surely I'm not the only one scratching my head at Somerville's never-ending perorations and wondering what deep, dark private secrets she knows about selected gros fromages. It's certainly not her MASSIVE moral authority or intellect that keeps McGill officials in her thrall.