Humpty Dumpty Initiative in Canada

Personhood initiative in Oklahoma.

Who does this remind you of?

I asked Skerbitz what he thought of the “war on women” rhetoric that had lately taken root. He replied, perfectly on-message, “We believe our first and foremost duty is to protect the rights of all people, including the unborn, including unborn women.”

Born women, you’re on your own.

Oh yeah. Our own Personhood Promoter.

@AntoniaZ When we allow any law to say that some human beings are not human we endanger everyone's rights #TellAntiChoiceMPsEverything

— Stephen Woodworth (@WoodworthMP) March 14, 2012

We've gotta stop this in its tracks. We do NOT need a War on Women here.

Online petition approaching 2,000 signatures. Sign and pass on if you haven't yet.

Emma the Embryo: the early years

Earlier this week we launched a new Emma the Embryo strip, as penned by Alison at Creekside and voiced by pro-choice activists - every one, once an embryo - I might add.

Alison created Emma a few years ago and she's been going strong since then.

Watch for her!

She has a LOT to say to Womb Wacko MP Woodworth and to his anti-choice colleagues in Parliament.

^NOT the sharpest knife in the drawer.

As fern hill demonstrated in the previous blogpost, the dumbassitude bar has been set low, when CPC MPs claim they're the smartest guy in the room.

MP Woodworth has been working on this Motion 312 - his anti-science project for awhile now.

Choice Joyce at Abortions Rights of Canada has exhibit XY:

Attention supporters! We need to help out Stephen Woodworth because the poor guy lacks imagination. He couldn't even think of a title for his motion! Let's help him out by naming his motion for him. Please email your clever, funny, or subversive titles to info@arcc-cdac.ca. We'll pick the best one and go public with it!

Joyce ArthurExecutive DirectorAbortion Rights Coalition of Canada (ARCC) joycearthur@shaw.cawww.arcc-cdac.ca

This contest has spilled onto Twitter, of course. Check out some of these #M312 gems:

"Women Aren't Persons Unless Childbearing Act"

"Motion to Regress and Oppress"

"Kanada's Kinder, Küche, Kirche Act"

"Hidden Abortion Agenda Motion" or HAAM

"The Handmaid's Tale' Motion."

"The *Catholic Sharia* Pregnancy Control Act"

"The Coathanger of White Male Prominence act"

The "Everything I Know About Being Pregnant I Learned From Watching TLC" Motion

So far, the usual zygote zealots and womb zombies have been unusually quiet. They probably learned their lesson from the last or perhaps before-last time they counted their preborns before they were hatched.

Bill C484 will be forever known as "Kicking Abortion's Ass" because John "Sperm Holocaust" Pacheco unfortunately crowed about it passing 1st reading in the House.

Emma the Embryo is back.

Emma is the potential everyhuman being.

She is prochoice because gestation is a procreative process.

She's a pragmatist because pregnancy is not *motherhood*.

She believes that every child should be wanted and welcomed, and every mother willing and supported.

Added: deBeauxOs is co-author on this post.

Added by fern hill: Please steal and post farnwide.

Today's Weasel Award

Back here, we found a conveeenient connection between the Knights of Columbus who were looking for an anti-choice MP to push their fetal rights agenda and -- SURPRISE! -- a member of the KoC and current stalking horse for the Hidden Agenda® Stephen Woodworth. I said I'd ask him on Twitter and I did.

@WoodworthMP Care to comment? …hinglywrongrightwingnutz.blogspot.com/2012/02/how-co… Are you KoC's point man on fetal rights? #prochoice #cdnpoli #HiddenAgenda

— Fern Hill (@fernhilldammit) February 16, 2012

First, the acronym defeats him.

@fernhilldammit I'm not sure what you mean by KoC,but I'm no one's point man #prochoice #cdnpoli Nor is mine a #HiddenAgenda

— Stephen Woodworth (@WoodworthMP) February 18, 2012

And he clearly hasn't had the grace (or wit) to read the link. I try to help out.

@WoodworthMP You belong to Knights of Columbus or KoC. Share fetal rights as goal. Working with? Prohint: info to be found in links often.

— Fern Hill (@fernhilldammit) February 18, 2012

Next, he goes all McCarthy-esque (with some Freudian lingerie showing in 'Knoghts'?) on my ass. Still clearly NOT having read the link.

@fernhilldammit "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Knoghts of Columbus?Good grief!! #abortiondebate #prochoice

— Stephen Woodworth (@WoodworthMP) February 18, 2012

His aw-shuxing doesn't go over well.

.@WoodworthMP @thereginamom @fernhilldammit @ToewsVic Just a humble backbencher, opening a discussion the PM promised not to. #cdnpoli

— Diddy Boo (@DiddyBoo1) February 18, 2012

Nor his McCarthy refs.

Isn't that cute?! @WoodworthMP makes McCarthy references, while his #CPC cohorts make warrantless searches legal. Bravo! @fernhilldammit

— Tweeting Ninja (@parliament_nil) February 18, 2012

And now Woodworth again. Not answering questions, aw-shuxing it up -- while respectfully flinging red-scare poo -- WINS today's Weasel Award with:

@fernhilldammit#prochoice #cdnpoli I am simply focussed on the policy not the politics

— Stephen Woodworth (@WoodworthMP) February 18, 2012

I think I'm done with direct contact with the guy.

Now imagine him on a Standing Committee on Abortion. With Trost, Vellacott, McVety. . .

Aieeee!

Before we start that 'respectful' conversation, Mr Woodworth. . .

Did you have a respectful conversation with your constituents before the election about your plan to reopen the abortion debate?

Ooo. Seems not, according to local political blogger King and Ottawa.

Yet this week when directly asked if he supported a woman’s right to choose in a debate televised on Rogers TV, Woodworth refused to give a direct answer. Instead he called for a dialogue on abortion, something that Stephen Harper lead us to believe was off the table. Mike Farwell who moderated the debate picked up on this discrepancy and wrote about it on his blog.

There is no doubt about where he stands on the issue. He tweeted it earlier this year.

'My principles incline me to favour preservation and enhancemt of human life in all end of life issues.'
-- Stephen Woodworth on Twitter as preserved by Tweetcommons

His position is also on the public record thanks to Campaign Life which recommended its supporters vote for him due to his social conservative views. In the quote section, he supports the traditional definition of a family and in the questionaire section he promises to strive to introduce and pass laws to protect unborn children from the time of conception (fertilization) onward.

Supporters of his pro-life position must be concerned about his answer this week. Should they continue to support him if he isn’t going to deliver on his commitment? Or do they know something we don’t. Has Stephen Harper asked him to refrain from talking about this issue? Have Woodworth or another Tory MP been promised they can introduce the issue as a private member’s bill after they win a majority government? That is how they tried to kill the long gun registry.

And here's K&O on Woodworth's recent gambit:

Woodworth loves to play word games. I suspect he prides himself on fancy rhetorical footwork worthy of Mohamed Ali. He never allows himself to be pinned down. He bobs and weaves around just about any policy issue. Pick any issue you like and have a dialogue with him on Twitter, you’ll see exactly what I mean. He refuses to answer a direct question even when I tried to do so around his opposition to funding International Planned Parenthood and what that might mean for women in Canada. He appears to relish the type of slippery logic that gives both lawyers and politicians a bad name.

I recommend that we respond, “Even if a dialogue on when human life begins could be beneficial, we do not trust you and the Harper government to lead the dialogue and act on it. Instead, we want your government to act to eliminate poverty and prevent unexpected pregnancies both across Canada and around the world. “

“Oh, and by the way, let’s take care of the economic uncertainty!”

Your constituents don't trust you, Mr Woodworth. You got elected by people who believed that you were toeing the Contempt Party's nauseatingly oft-repeated line of 'our government will NOT open the abortion debate'.

We will not debate anyone so patently disingenuous.

The *Hidden Agenda* decloaks.

One wonders if Stephen Woodworth has been given explicit or implicit permission by the Contempt Party and Stevie's "strong stable mandate" to use an official government media room for his February 6 event.

More about those fetus fetishizing *Hidden Agenda* balloons that Con MPs have been testing out.

Grand merci to @goddamitkitty's tweet.

UPDATE: Kady O'Malley covered Woodworth's "happening" which was competing with the Harper government's ballyhoo for The Queen's Jubilee™©.

And, right on cue ...

... while PMSHithead is in Switzerland the grip he keeps on a muzzled Contempt Party caucus is not as tight, so Con MP and fundamentalist religious pastor Maurice Vellacott barges into view, revealing yet another facet of the CPC hidden agenda on abortion.

Vellacott's test balloon is this turgid media release about the recent CTV investigative series on pregnancy crisis centres in BC.

Note the quote marks he uses to frame the word investigation throughout this alleged "exposé". Does he expose the fact he is he is a founding Board Member of *Real Choices* Crisis Pregnancy Centre in Saskatoon ... ^NOT.

Vellacott's personal politics have been scrutinized by DJ! - here and here. In 2008 he introduced C-537, a private member's Bill that anticipated the re-criminalization of abortion and birth control - by adding to the Criminal Code an amendment facilitating the prosecution of organizations and individuals whenever any zygote, embryo and fetus fetishist feels threatened or persecuted for their beliefs.

Charter Rights actually provide for the protection of such religious notions so Vellacott's bill was really an anti-abortion tactic disguised as pious interventionist meddling.

Links to Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of the CTV series - an outstanding piece of investigative journalism that is objective and not blinkered by Vellacott's religious dogma as well as his ludicrous claim that "thousands" of women have told him that they were coerced into submitting to a medical intervention to terminate their pregnancies.

#FetusLobby = #thick

Readers may have noticed that we here at DJ! have recently been promoting the use of the term Fetus Lobby®. We still like 'fetus fetishist', but Fetus Lobby® is succinct and evocative.

We have also been trying to get people on Twitter to use the hashtag #FetusLobby, and to be frank, we can't understand why it hasn't taken off more than it has.

On Twitter, I've been arguing with @WoodworthMP, one of the backbench stalking horses for reopening the so-called abortion debate.

This has been going on over several days. (I realize I should Storify it, but I don't have time to learn how at the moment and, besides, Storify just told me my browser is not supported.)

People familiar with Twitter will know that hashtags are used for several purposes: to help in a search, to join an existing discussion (like #cdnpoli), to declare your stance on a subject (#prochoice), to add an ironic comment, or just to be silly.

And hashtags can also be used to snark.

In his replies to me Woodworth MP has been copying the hashtags I used. Hashtags are NOT automatically copied when one replies, so he's doing it deliberately.

I tweeted thusly this ayem:

@fernhilldammit fern hill
This is fun! I'm arguing with @WoodworthMP and he's using my hashtag, #FetusLobby. #thick #prochoice #cdnpoli

That got retweeted a bit. Then Woodworth MP replied to it:

WoodworthMP Stephen Woodworth
@fernhilldammit I don't mind my views getting broad distribution.Do you? #FetusLobby #thick #prochoice #cdnpoli

I wonder how wide an audience he thinks #thick gets. But, hey, if wants to help in DJ!'s campaign to popularize #FetusLobby, that's A-OK with me.


Anyway, had to share, now back to the salt mines.

Hidden Agenda Watch

To keep up with DJ!'s mission of eternal vigiliance, aka 'Fuck the Debate', here's the latest addition to the Contempt Party abortion recriminalization crew: Jeff Watson*. That's four: Trost, Woodworth, Ambrose, and now Watson chimes in on the effort to 'reopen the debate'.

“My layman’s read of the public mood, if you will, around life issues [is] I think most people mistakenly believe that there’s already restrictions on abortion, and so this issue is already settled,” he explained.

Watson said that when he informs people that there are, in fact, no restrictions, “they’re quite alarmed and feel something should be done about it.”

Waaaah. Something should be done about it!!!

But, despite the 'strong, stable majority' -- hey! the abbreviation would be SSM, let's use that! -- LifeShite gripes:

Since winning a majority in the May election, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government has remained adamant that they will support the status quo on abortion, and has re-emphasized the point in the media whenever one of its caucus members raises the issue.

Under Harper in recent years, pro-life MPs have struggled to bring forward any discussion on abortion, even around broadly supported initiatives such as a ban on abortion coercion and or protections for unborn victims of crime, in part because abortion supporters frame them as backdoor efforts to re-criminalize abortion.

Um. Yeah. Because that's what they fucking are.

Oh, but look. We sane people are 'old-fashioned'.

“My gut feeling is that groups who support free access to the procedure of abortion won’t have the broader discussion. They’re content to frame every discussion as being about the re-criminalization of abortion,” Watson observed. “They want to frame it in old terms. … I expect a very strong resistance by groups that favour full access to the procedure of abortion. I expect them to be full-out name-calling and everything else that characterizes groups like that.”

“I think we’re mature enough as a society, I think we need to be mature enough as a Parliament, to deal with these questions head on,” he added.

Again with the characterization of prochoice being insensitive and immature name-callers.

See what they're doing here? The Fetus Lobby® is trying to paint itself as the serious ones, the mature ones, the *gag* 'modern' ones.

And they are absolutely wrong. Read the comments on two recent stories about the lack of abortion services in PEI, here and here.

The overwhelming majority of Canadians DO think this is a settled matter and do NOT want the so-called debate reopened.

The overwhelming majority of Canadians are sane, modern, mature, and sensitive. They, unlike the Fetus Lobby®, understand and respect a woman's right to autonomy. And do NOT want to go backwards as a society.


* We checked out Watson's rating at Campaign Lie . Yup. Anti-choice all the way, babeeee.

Rating Comments: Has not responded to CLC's 2011 questionnaire, but in 2006 he said he would support measures to introduce and pass a law to protect every unborn child from the time of conception (fertilization) onward.

No hidden agenda there. It's right out in the open.

ADDED: Dave at the Galloping Beaver is paying attention. He says the LifeShite story is older, from the December 26 Windsor Star, playing now to keep the faux 'debate' current. He also points out that the religious, anti-science Contempt Party members have been sitting on their hands in quest of the Strong Stable Majority (aka SSM). Now they have it and they're going to call in their markers. The Hidden Agenda decloaks.

CPC fetus lobby breaking out all over.

First it was Trost.

Then Woodworth.

Now Ambrose. Pay attention to the words used in this superficially supportive message, framed in accordance with reformaTory ideology: "Sex selection feticide denies millions of girls the right to be born merely because they are girls."

Yes, Stevie Spiteful's Contempt Party MPs have received their talking points from his Politburo. They're breaking out all over the Canadian political landscape like boils on the Teflon-dipped butt of their *strong stable majority*.

The spin varies, but the underlying message is the same: the Cons are planning to criminalize a medical intervention.

My co-blogger fern hill, spin spotter extraordinaire.

Con Jobs are planning to criminalize abortion - again.

Yesterday, picking up on the posts here at DJ! about Contempt Party MP Stephen Woodworth, DrDawg produced an important overview of the Con Jobs' ongoing attempts to re-criminalize abortion.

It's interesting that the reformaTory tacticians did not choose to include the first shot across that bow in their new Hard-On Crime omnibus bill C-10. After all, they could have bludgeoned yet again Parliamentary tradition to pass it without debate.

Ah, but you see, the Contempt Party's overweening arrogance requires a game plan that reframes reality. In accordance with their ideological premise, it's called "re-opening the abortion debate".

As Beijing York points out:

They are also repackaging/rebranding broad cuts to services, pensions and social safety nets as "austerity measures".

And let's not forget the rebranding of "preemptive war" to "humanitarian intervention".

You know that they must be grooming one of their few female caucus members to run with whatever they come up with. That's one of their favourite tactics regarding any legislation that directly impacts women.

To which I responded:

That is a brilliant flash of insight into the Con tactics cesspool.

Let's try to deduce who that'll be. Likely Rona Ambrose unless it's Leona Aglukkak if they approach it as a *medical and scientific problem* - at least that's what it appears to be from the 3 talking points Stevie's Politburo has provided to Woodworth.

You're right. The Contempt Party will hang that political albatross around the neck of one of their female ministers.

Earlier posts about the Con game plan and Woodworth's role: here and here.

Is that a hidden agenda in your pocket Stevie

or are you just happy to be campaigning?

So the élection érection is out of the pants bag. It sounded bizarre when the word slipped out during Harper's press conference on Saturday but I assumed my hearing was off and I needed more coffee.

As it turns out, this isn't the first time Stevie has said érection instead of élection.

Now, what does that say about bilingual members working for the PMO politburo that they're all too scared stiff to tell the boss he keeps getting his French *l* & *r* mixed up?

Lusting after a majority is Viagra to Harper? That's hardly a surprise. But since we're rubbing up to the edge of vulgarity here - what the hell, let's go all the way. One could blame it on Dan Gardner since he wrote "Stephen Harper is Richard Nixon on a bad day." back in 2008.

Stevie Peevie. Tricky Dicky.

Don't Switch Dicks in the Middle of a Screw, Vote Nixon in '72

Harper desperately desires a majority. His strategy so far is to warn Canadians they shouldn't switch, that they should stick with the one who'll provide them with a steady and stable ride economy. WTF? Is that some weird subliminal tactic, an attempt to seduce undecided female voters?

In what other weird, frantic, unattractive ways is Harper like Nixon?

Keep Talking

We at Birth Pangs are laffing our asses off at Ken Epp, the Reforma-Tories, the so-conned, etc etc on the demise of Bill C-484, aka The Kicking Abortion's Ass Bill.

But this, as they say, is gonna leave a mark.

The freakin' Editorial Board of the National Pest, main MSM stirrer of the C-484 pot, has also made a screeching 180. Under the title 'Conservatives choose clarity over compromise on Epps' Bill', it opines:

(Quick, swallow anything you have in your mouth.)

As Mr. Epp explains here, the bill is careful to define lawful abortions by willing women as non-criminal acts, and in explicitly taking away the possibility of the defence that a fetus is not a human being, it even acknowledges, in a sense, that it is not necessarily founded upon any unstated notion of fetal rights. The Conservative government could probably have defended and passed this bill on that basis, without making the public uncomfortable or in any way reviving the abortion debate. But it rightly prefers not to take chances conveying nuance to the Canadian public through the generally cockeyed instrument of the media.

Nuance . . . generally cockeyed instrument of the media . . .