ABORTION MERITS DEBATE
Trudeau’s edict declaring issue ‘settled’ puts Liberal party in awkward situation
Imports should get as much attention as exports in trade policy, especially in light of global supply chains. A 2014 Statistics Canada study shows that engaging in two-way trade boosts company productivity. Danielle Goldfarb Just because a party takes a position on something does not mean it is obliged to enforce it upon every single candidate. If it were truly an issue like any other, it would not be the only one to which the Edict of Justin applies. It turns out abortion is an issue of conscience after all. It’s just that only one side gets to exercise it. Andrew Coyne
Well. That certainly worked out well. Justin Trudeau’s edict on abortion — thou shalt not question a woman’s right to choose if thou wisheth to be a Liberal candidate, or at any rate thou shalt not vote against it in Parliament, unless thou art already a sitting MP in which case thy choices “will be respected to a certain extent” — has already proved a strategic masterstroke, if by masterstroke you mean it has divided and confused his party and leaves pro-life candidates unsure if they can run, or under what conditions. Could they still speak their mind on the issue, if not vote their conscience? Would they be required actually to vote in favour of abortion on demand, or could they simply abstain?
Given comfort to his rivals, Conservatives are crowing that pro-life voters now have nowhere else to go but their party; meanwhile, the NDP is quick to remind pro-choice voters that its own party line brooks no exceptions.
Shredded his pledges of “open nominations” and “free votes,” Liberal critiques of Stephen Harper’s control-freak tendencies will be less effective given how often the label is now being attached to Trudeau. And, of course, it has opened up the very debate the Liberal leader had intended to stifle. It turns out you can’t stop people from debating something just by telling them “it’s settled.” Who knew?
The question hanging in the air is this: What were they thinking, he and his advisers? The answer given — because that’s the party line — amounts to saying: because. Just because a party takes a position on something does not mean it is obliged to enforce it upon every single candidate at the point of a withheld nomination. People understand that the Liberal party is a pro-choice party. They also understand that 100 per cent unanimity doesn’t exist in a democracy.
Or if that is the leader’s notion of how Parliament works, then why single out abortion? The argument that abortion was a special case, like assisted suicide and the death penalty — because it involved, at least arguably, the taking of life, and as such ought not to be subject to the party whip — was originally the position of the dissenters. It was Trudeau’s people who maintained it was an issue like any other.
But if it were truly an issue like any other, it would not be the only one to which the Edict of Justin applies. It turns out abortion is an issue of conscience after all. It’s just that only one side gets to exercise it.
Again, why? What crisis impelled the leader to act in this fashion? Was there a vote imminent? Were women’s rights in peril? No. No great question of principle was at stake. It was a political decision, through and through, even if it was one that was not particularly well thought through.
And yet it was one taken in a certain context: namely, that there has not been an abortion law in this country, nor any serious debate about it, for more than 25 years. It has been so long since the apologists for the status quo have had to offer an argument in its defence that they have forgotten how. It was too easy to simply shout down any and all dissent, no matter how moderate or widely shared, as “extreme.” For although the status quo — no abortion law of any kind — is at one end of the possible range of abortion policies, and as such objectively “extreme,” it is, all the same, the status quo: the known, the familiar.
In consequence, their intellectual muscles have atrophied. They seem genuinely bewildered that anyone could disagree — as if all the other countries of the democratic world, where abortion laws are the norm, did not exist. When Trudeau insisted that the Charter of Rights prohibited any restriction on abortion, he may not have been consciously peddling a convenient fiction. He may simply have been unaware that the Supreme Court, in its 1988 Morgentaler decision, not only said no such thing, but in fact said the opposite: that restrictions on late-term abortions, provided they made exception for the life and health of the mother, were quite in order. It was a long time ago, after all.
I’m not here to make the case one way or the other. I could well be persuaded there was no need for legal limits on late-term abortions, as they are so rarely carried out already: Canadian Medical Association policy is not to perform them save for “exceptional circumstances.” On the other hand, one could equally argue in favour of such a law on the same grounds: it would scarcely constrain women’s autonomy to prohibit something that hardly ever happens, while establishing that the fetus had at least some standing in law. The point is, it’s a debate, one that a civilized democracy can and should be able to have.
That’s really what’s at issue here. When one hears otherwise rational people greet even this suggestion, that it is a fit subject for debate, with a spluttered “would you have a debate on interracial marriage?” or “are we to have a free vote on slavery?” — as if the issues were remotely comparable, as if they entailed the same degree of consensus, as if the only thing that stood in the way of a return to slavery was that we do not permit MPs to vote on it — it is indicative of a certain loss of perspective.
When, likewise, the issue is presented, with an exasperated sigh, as a matter of “women’s rights, full stop” — as if there were no other rights even potentially at stake, as if women were not as divided on the issue as men — it implies a basic unfamiliarity with how debate works.
If you do not even acknowledge the points the other side is making, how can you hope to persuade anyone? Or if you feel no need to persuade, it suggests you are not even aware there is another side.