So the British Columbian Appeals court upheld the "bubble zone", that 30 metre protective barrier that keeps protestors from physically blocking access to abortion clinics.
Good. You can have your free speech from within shouting distance of the clinic. You just can't physically intimidate the women who are making this choice.
The anti-abortion people, the ones who call themselves "pro-life", are trotting out their standard set of arguments, presenting their standard set of straw men.
"Can any "pro-choice" supporter out there please answer the simple basic question of when life begins?"
"Is the baby really going to change so much in 12 hours that now it's OK to kill it* but killing *him/her a few hours later would be murder?"
... and whining about how Canada is the only country in the world without an abortion law.
Even if that last were true, so what? What that means is that a woman is free to choose her course of action. What this leads to is a very, very small number of late-term abortions in extremely risky or nonviable situations and a larger number of early-term abortions. The system is trusting women to make moral decisions and (surprise, you fundamentalist misogynist loons) they are making moral decisions, so what's the problem?
As for when life begins, you'd think that this would be the whole crux of the matter, wouldn't you? Unfortunately, you aren't helping if you aren't going to define life either. Human sperm and eggs are alive. They move and respond to stimulus. They do all sorts of things that living things do. Combined, they represent a unique genetic combination and continue to do things that living things do. And then 60 to 80% of them spontaneously miscarry. What makes the fertilized egg so much more special than the sperm and the egg when they were separated?
But it doesn't even matter, does it? Illegalizing abortion has only ever produced illegal and dangerous abortions. Try reading some of the stories of abortion doctors when they explain why they got in to the business. It's usually because they saw the horrors that women inflicted on themselves attempting to end an unwanted pregnancy.
Women who don't want babies won't have babies. Making abortion illegal won't change that.
If you want to stop abortions - as everyone does - the answer is to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Birth control would be a lot more effective if people weren't lying about condom effectiveness, the side effects of the pill or, worse, simply refusing to teach it.
You want to stop abortions? Then start teaching sex education. Start making more effective forms of birth control. The abortions will stop when people are educated and technology advances to the point where abortions are unnecessary.
Thursday, September 04, 2008
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3 comments:
It's not really about stopping abortions. It's about controlling women. Why else would these same extremists advocate abstinence only sex education and banning the pill as an "abortificant"?
My impression is that most of the anti-abortion crowd really is anti-abortion, meaning that they don't like abortion and think of the fetus as a fully qualified human life form.
A portion of the anti-abortion/pro-life movement, however, are a bunch of religiously motivated people who feel that unwed, pregnant women are "getting what they deserve". These people also oppose sex education and birth control.
Sex, they will tell you, is only for procreation. Otherwise, you're dirty and evil and deserve to suffer through labour and single momhood for your trangression.
It's hard to say what percentage the woman-bashers are.
I agree there are many reasonable people who are against abortion for personal, often religious reasons, but they also recognize that that is their choice. They are not the ones driven to terrorize women outside clinics with their aggressive chants and over-the-top placards.
The extremists are the ones who called this bubble protection an infringement on their freedom of speech/expression. If they were really muzzled, we wouldn't have Barbara Kay or Margaret Somerville championing the pro-life cause at every opportunity, nor would we see them parading in front of the GG's residence demanding Morgentaler's Order of Canada be revoked or marching to Parliament Hill on a regular basis.
The fact that the social conservatives keep playing the victim card every time they get slapped down is tiring.
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