Counterprotesters hold signs on Parliament Hill during the National March for Life on May 12. “The experts tell Canadians that we need not worry that abortion rights could ever vanish here. This is nonsense,” Heather Mallick writes.
Counterprotesters hold signs on Parliament Hill during the National March for Life on May 12. “The experts tell Canadians that we need not worry that abortion rights could ever vanish here. This is nonsense,” Heather Mallick writes.
Never underestimate how much you are hated. I tell women this as a statement of fact. Women in the audience always understand the warning; they don’t disagree — but has this visceral dislike and desire to punish us ever been so visible in North America as in the recent U.S. Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade?
There is no aspect of this news that isn’t distressing to women and men who back women’s rights, but one’s thoughts are dominoes: women give birth to unwanted children and children suffer for a lifetime; women kill themselves and loved ones suffer for a lifetime; women die giving birth; women die from self-induced abortion; women are arrested for seeking abortion; women are linked for life to the men who got them pregnant; women are abandoned; women see their life chances destroyed.
I have used the word “woman” repeatedly, partly for accuracy but also because it annoys the Twitter fringe who prefer “people,” “menstruators,” “chest-feeders” and “gestational carriers.”
“Plenty of reasons to use ‘people’ instead of ‘women’,” someone wrote on Twitter about the abortion catastrophe. “With reference to abortion rights a pregnant 13-year-old isn’t a woman.” Agreed. She’s a girl.
I only mention these absurdities because they are one aspect of the reason the extreme right triumphed in deleting abortion rights across a massive central swath of the U.S.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s reaction is classic. Mystifyingly unembarrassed that he helped put the vengeful misogynist Clarence Thomas on the court in the first place, he hasn’t gone on the offensive.
Always defensive, Biden opposes expanding the court and won’t allow abortion services on federal lands.
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Always offensive, the haters worked for decades, kept their eye on the ball and won. Now they’re targeting contraception and gay marriage. Liberals frittered their time away on minor disputes. Such is our way.
Experts say. In the pandemic, “experts say” popped up in headlines like a rash because in a world without face-to-face contact, reporters had to consult professors and activists. The experts tell Canadians that we need not worry that abortion rights could ever vanish here.
This is nonsense. Canadian women have no specific legal right to abortion. One branch of allegedly feminist thinking is that a law protecting abortion would become a platform, a target for opponents to chip away at. (Take Leslyn Lewis, running for Conservative party leadership, who opposes sex-selective abortion, meaning female fetuses. That’s her angle.)
As the Globe’s André Picard reports, two groups — Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights, and the National Association of Women and the Law — released a statement opposing such a law.
The lengthy statement, which does not once refer to “women” or even girls or females, praises the fact that abortion is not currently singled out. It is simply another procedure offered under the Canada Health Act, like prostate surgery or hip replacement.
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Please note that you cannot get a timely hip replacement in Alberta now; desperate patients travel to private clinics in Ontario.
Please note that leaving abortion access to the provinces has meant little to no access in P.E.I. and New Brunswick. Ottawa has the power to punish those provinces. It can hardly bear to consider this.
Please note that no one opposes prostate surgery or hip replacement. But many people oppose abortion rights. If you think otherwise, perhaps you haven’t been paying attention.
You were busy with other things in your urban life, while rural misogynists, like all obsessives, were drilling down. In a vast country like Canada, it is easy to make abortions hard to obtain. It is harder to dismantle an explicit constitutional right.
I have no patience with Canada’s happy campers. Life is pleasant here. It’s easy to be smug but it’s dangerous too.
Heather
Mallick is a Toronto-based columnist covering current affairs
for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @HeatherMallick.
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