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Canadian abortion rights are wispy, like clouds
Read the article / show / issue that provoked me to write a letter and my response below that or go straight to my response
Date Posted on this Site
December 18, 2010
Publication
Toronto Star
Publication Date
December 15, 2010
Published Content
Abortion rights across Canada are like computer-generated word clouds, or to use a more old-fashioned analogy, ordinary sky clouds. Abortion availability is good and prominent in bigger cities in bigger provinces, wispy in small towns and the more backward provinces like New Brunswick. And in P.E.I., as always, it's a heartless and empty sky.
You can talk Anne of Green Gables all you like but imagine this country containing a province that treats its women the way the Irelands do. You must gather cash in your apron from kind friends and leave the island for the 10-minute procedure that's easy to get in Toronto but would send you straight to hell in Potato Island, you filthy slut. So no change there then.
New Brunswick is continuing its torment of Dr. Henry Morgentaler, the bravest man in Canada, by dragging its heels on his lawsuit that would make the province actually obey health-care laws. Abortion is legal and covered under medicare, therefore free. But since timely abortions are extraordinarily difficult to get in the only two provincial hospitals that do them, women have to go to clinics where they pay upfront.
The province is clearly waiting for the good doctor, who is 87 and not in good health, to die. In his boyhood, my dear friend Henry also distressed people by not dying. They happened to be Nazi soldiers in Auschwitz, and no, I am not making a link. I am, however, pointing out an irony.
There are now three women in the Conservative New Brunswick cabinet. One would hope they'd extend a generous hand to their youthful rural sisters and push for abortion care in the province. Thinking of you, Attorney General and Minister of Justice Marie-Claude Blais!
Calgary has seen more anti-choice clamour this year, although the protesters at the University of Calgary appear to be the same as those who protest at other universities too, reports the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada. This rather dilutes the local effect. Calgary is a sophisticated city. I won't compare its new mayor to ours, as it hurts too much.
Another issue is Bill C-510 on "coerced abortion." Priests for Life loves it, and is passionate in its desire for women to bear more children, even unwanted ones.
As always, I see political debates in graphic terms, mainly because I translate debates on principle into the suffering they cause to actual humans. And I remain disgusted by the continuing efforts of anti-choicers to figuratively stick their fingers into the uteri of women, as though they have a right to set up shop there.
They do not. A person's body is their own fenced-off area and it is their choice what they do inside it.
And yet we have hard-right Canadian newspapers and magazines debating whether women should be allowed even to have caesarean births or to cut back on the number of embryos that survive implantation during IVF procedures. No, a woman shouldn't have twins if she doesn't wish to. No, she shouldn't have to be an octomom if her IVF has been badly handled.
Women will find it almost impossible to be self-supporting or have satisfying careers until they can direct their own reproduction. So childbirth must often be delayed till their 30s. As usual, Quebec is at the forefront, paying for IVF procedures but with the goal of a woman ending up with one healthy infant as opposed to six damaged ones (which is what happens in private clinics that charge enormous fees and roll the dice on infant health).
It will never end, this need for troubled obsessive people — the Harperites of Canada — to take ownership of others, to prod inside the female body — and into the stuff of our souls — for control. Should Stephen Harper win a majority in a possible spring election, every right women have won over the decades will drift into the ether, like clouds.
My Response Letter
Women should be offended by Heather Mallick's assertion that abortion is necessary because they "will find it almost impossible to be self-supporting or have satisfying careers until they can direct their own reproduction".
Does she really believe that women are animals unable to control their sexual appetites and unhappy with their lives unless they can dispose of their children....children conceived as the natural consequence of intimate relations?
Jason Gennaro
Was my response published?
No