Anti-abortion activists wrong — but so is law
Alarm over abrogation of reproductive rights is entirely justified.
In the U.S., anti-abortionists — absolutists — have made no secret about their longer-range goal: That state bills severely limiting abortions are designed to ultimately overturn Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationally. The hope is that lower court cases, racked up across the country, will encourage the Supreme Court to revisit and reverse abortion rights as defined in 1973. With a court that now leans distinctly to the right, the antis are more emboldened than they’ve been in nearly half a century, optimistic that conservative justices, a majority, will give them what they’ve never stopped fighting for.
Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio and Georgia have already approved bans on abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected, which can occur in about the sixth week of pregnancy.
Fetal heartbeat laws are all the rage now. They would effectively outlaw abortions after one missed menstrual cycle, when most women don’t even know they’re pregnant.
An Alabama bill, which was to have been voted on Tuesday evening in the state Senate, goes even further. It would criminalize — make it a felony — to perform an abortion at any stage of pregnancy. Serious risk to a woman’s health would be the only exception.
Not rape. Not incest. Not severe fetus abnormalities.
That legislation passed overwhelmingly last week in the state House, despite some Republicans’ reservations about a bill that didn’t include an exception for rape.
“We can’t say on the one hand that it is a life and then the other because of some very bad circumstances that it’s not a life,” said Republican Sen. Clyde Chambliss, who is marshalling the draconian bill through the Senate.
Alabama Gov. Will Ainsworth, who was expected to ward off any attempt to amend the bill — and he will need to sign it — posted a video on social media declaring “abortion is murder.”
Canada has had no abortion law since 1969. Abortion is legal at every stage of pregnancy, though accessibility varies widely from province to province.
As prime minister, Stephen Harper had zero interest in reopening the debate. That doesn’t mean a future Conservative government in Ottawa will steer clear of the issue. Tory Leader Andrew Scheer has said he’s staunchly opposed to reopening the matter. Yet a callow Sam Oosterhoff, 21year-old PC MPP from Niagara West, recently addressed an anti-abortion rally at Queen’s Park with these combative words: “We have survived 50 years of abortion in Canada and we pledge to fight to make abortion unthinkable in our lifetime.”
His lifetime has been very short. He would have no memory of back-street abortions, botched procedures, desperate women mutilating themselves with hangers, and toxic aftereffects. Globally, 47,000 women die every year from unsafe abortions, mostly in povertystricken regions of Africa, Latin America and Asia.
In the U.S., abortion rates have actually never been so low — total number of reported abortions decreasing by 24 per cent between 2006 and 2015, according to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Both because of better access to contraceptives and health care, particularly for low-income women, but also because of a reduction in access to abortion services.
The abortion rollback is happening very fast, as the antis gallop from one victory to another. It is crucial to remain vigilant, even here in Canada. And to fight the battles again, south of the border.
But absolutism — the tyranny of fanaticism — is dismaying at both ends of the spectrum. Because not giving an inch, while tactically understandable, ignores the vast majority of public opinion.
While sharing no views with the mobilized antis, I do appreciate that tenets of faith forbid abortion in most major religions, at least for the observant. The Catholic Church, for one, will never allow it. But laws — except in theocratic nations — must be secular, religiously unhallowed.
And I recognize that, for some, including the irreligious, abortion is as vile as capital punishment. At least they are consistent. If I have admiration for protesters in the U.S. who gather outside prisons where an execution is scheduled, then I must grant some latitude to those who are as passionately, resolutely, condemning of abortion.
The truth is, my truth is, that a viable fetus in the womb is a life. I have to admit this, even as I object to any limitations on abortion.
That’s a baby and I can’t pretend otherwise.
A life that quickens in the womb, that can survive outside the womb, is a baby. We don’t say, “When is your fetus due?” We don’t have fetus showers.
Cleaving to the absolute, in Canada, leaves us with laws that deny personhood to even full-term babies, undelivered, who’ve been murdered along with their mothers.
A few weeks ago, the family of homicide victim Arianna Goberdhan spoke to reporters about the grief of burying a daughter with her baby in her arms. Goberdhan was stabbed 17 times by her estranged husband in April 2017. Nicholas Baig pleaded guilty to seconddegree murder.
Goberdhan was 20 days away from her due date.
“Two people were killed that night, not just one,” the woman’s mother, Sherry Goberdhan, insisted, as reported by Michele Mandel in the Toronto Sun.
“We’re grieving for two. My child died with her baby and somebody has to tell me why he’s not accountable for that baby’s death as well.’’ The baby was called Asaara. An unborn child isn’t considered a homicide victim under Canadian law. That designation would apply only if the baby dies “after becoming a human being,” when it has “completely proceeded, in a living state, from the body of its mother.”
The Goberdhan family has launched a petition calling on Parliament to pass legislation recognizing that “when an assailant in a commission of a crime attacks a pregnant woman and injures or kills her pre-born child, then the assailant may be charged with an offence on behalf of the preborn child.”
That’s too broad a definition and, in any event, probably too tangled in reproductive rights to ever be adopted. A similar private member’s bill died in 2016 after opponents argued that its hidden agenda was to erode abortion rights.
Three years ago, Candice Rochelle Bobb — five months pregnant — was shot to death while sitting in the back seat of a car in Etobicoke. Though pronounced dead at hospital, doctors performed an emergency caesarean. The baby was born alive but died three weeks later.
At the time, police said anyone arrested in the shooting would also be charged with homicide in the death of Bobb’s baby. Because the infant, a boy named Kyrie, was born alive. But no one has ever been arrested for the crime.
These distinctions between life and nothingness — a fivemonth premature newborn, a nine-month term baby that never drew breath — fly in the face of logic and humanity. They’re legal concepts spun out of rigid definitions to avoid the Pandora’s box of demarcating when life begins. There’s no anti-abortion agenda.
I am pro-choice and I say that law is madness.