Tory crooners just singing for the girls
Just when you thought the long and winding Conservative battle against abortion rights was over, the fightin’ fetal protectionists are back, and in a particularly shameless way, both here and in Britain. They’re doing it for the girls. B. C. Conservative MP Mark Warawa, proud father of Bill M- 408, after the failure of dopey Kitchener MP Stephen Woodworth’s M- 312, wants you to know that he likes girls. He likes them so much that he urged us to celebrate the UN’s first- ever International Day of the Girl. It was Thursday.
It’s the first time a current Conservative has ever liked anything the UN has done, but he couldn’t say no to Girl Day. Girls! They’re so great, especially when they’re fetal.
But apparently certain ethnic- type women have been getting ultrasounds, and after that, a suspiciously high number of second and third babies turn out to be boys. It makes you think.
M- 408 would condemn “discrimination against females occurring through sex- selective pregnancy termination.” In other words, Canadians of South Korean and Indian origin are to be condemned, and by extension all parents who want to know the sex of the fetus, and by extension, ultrasounds themselves, which give women unnecessary information.
The Tory boys’ plan is this: If we oppose aborting female fetuses, that might be a backdoor way to ban all abortions because surely women can’t back the slaughter of baby women. It’s as though Conservatives think grown women and cell clumps are members of the same voting bloc, as though they have the same interests, and the same IQ.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said he does not want the abortion debate reopened, as has British PM David Cameron. But Cameron has just appointed a health minister named Jeremy Hunt who wants the 24- week limit on abortions cut to 12 weeks.
Hunt said, “Everyone looks at the evidence and comes to a view about when that moment is” — do they, Jeremy? — “and my own view is that 12 weeks is the right point for it.”
The tests for conditions like Down syndrome cannot be done before 12 weeks. Women will be rushed into abortions, or miss the deadline, or get a back- street abortion or give birth to a severely damaged child neither they nor their partner were warned about.
Hunt doesn’t like ultrasounds, which won’t be needed if a woman can’t end her pregnancy anyway. Warawa takes it further: if we condemn sex selection, then we must end it. This can only be done by not telling women about the gender of the fetus and not giving them scans. This is Warawa ruining a couple’s private gorgeous moment.
It never occurs to Warawa that parents might prefer boys because the lives of girls are so awful. But it’s people like him who make girls’ lives awful, only partly by refusing to give women dominion over their own pregnancies.
I give up hope on these backwater MPs — almost always men — who come up with these fantasies about controlling women’s bodies and lives. Poke into their backgrounds and you find the most extraordinary things.
Warawa is a tenor in MP5, a southern gospel music and comedy group of five western Tory MPs, including farmers, pastors and CSIS watchdog Chuck Strahl.
There they are in their publicity photo, five middle- aged men in sports jackets perched on a weathered log fence in front of a lake, poised to croon. Do they have groupies? Hey, I’m with the band.
They’re the 2012 Conservative version of 1980s comedy show SCTV’s cool singing band, Five Neat Guys, John Candy and four others in letter sweaters and gold lamé pants. “Dave ( Thomas) was the happy singer,” Rick Moranis said later, “and John was the comfortable relaxed borderline retiree. Joe ( Flaherty) was a drunk. Eugene ( Levy) was damaged in some way. I was the least neat guy.”
Of the guys in MP5, Warawa confides to his local paper, the Langley Advance, “Chuck has a beautiful bass voice, Kevin is the lead singer and they are all fantastic.” And neat, no doubt.
I don’t know where the Conservatives dig these people up. My problem is not that they exist. I’m sure that in person they are perfectly pleasant and I would hire them to sing at my cousin’s wedding, if I didn’t like my cousin.
But 1952 called and they want their glee club back. Be gone, MP5.