Josie Luetke:
Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey
The Liberals and NDP are locking metaphorical horns over which party loves baby-killing more.
The NDP calls for improved access to abortion, slams Conservatives for their “anti-choice” sympathies, and criticizes Liberals for insufficient action. The Liberals respond by going after ever-threatening and odious “crisis pregnancy centres,” which audaciously venture to help women without offering them abortion.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, are hastily making themselves scarce on this issue, no doubt under strict orders from leader Pierre Poilievre not to embarrass him.
In this political climate, the approach of pro-lifers has been to shut up and pray to escape notice, or else to propose bills as gently and as timidly as possible, like Bill C-311, which, had it passed, would have made pregnancy an aggravating factor in sentencing, without any mention of abortion or the pre-born. I do understand the motivation behind playing it safe, but it’s hard to expose the left’s extremism on abortion when the media is providing cover. Eventually, a different strategy becomes worth exploring.
When the climate won’t change, we must.
If I may be so bold as to prescribe how: Pro-lifers need to go whole-hog—to ask for the moon, for the lives of the pre-born. If a valiant MP regularly tabled legislation to criminalize abortion or put forward motions to recognize the humanity of the pre-born, then he or she could single-handedly shift the Overton Window on this debate. I’d like to see pro-lifers take a page from the playbook of Manitoban Minister of Families Nahanni Fontaine (NDP, St. Johns), who tabled her bubble zone bill six times before it became law.
If—as the Parliamentary track record from the past few decades suggests—no pro-life bill, no matter how watered-down and uncontroversial, is going to pass, then it’s easy to get discouraged and give up. It’s easy to be tempted by the illusion of political success dangling in front of us if only we compromise.
There is political opportunity, unique to Canada, ahead—the type that comes from having nothing left to lose. If it takes almost the same amount of political capital to table a bill banning abortion as it does to table a bill banning just sex-selective abortion, then let’s get a bigger bang for our buck. Let’s aim higher. Let’s teach by example.
Now that we’ve realized we’re in this for the long run, settle in. Let’s forget about short-sighted strategies that just come back to bite us in the future.
We need to understand the purpose of any proposed pro-life legislation as primarily educational. These proposals are not fruitless if understood as public relations exercises aimed at reducing the incredible ignorance currently paralyzing the nation to act to protect preborn children.
Both Parliament and the public need to hear the pro-life argument over and over: Human rights begin when human life begins, human life begins at fertilization, and human rights belong to all humans, regardless of their age, development, abilities, or level of dependency.
Any time a pro-life policy or petition is put forward, it must advance this human rights argument. It is our only path forward.
Only a third of Canadians believe that life begins at fertilization. We can’t win on abortion (to say nothing about IVF!) without that statistic changing, especially considering that just five years after becoming publicly available in Canada, first-trimester chemical abortion comprised 40 per cent of all abortions, and will likely soon comprise the majority, as we’ve seen in many other countries.
In a rather roundabout way, I return to well-traversed ground in the pro-life movement, that of gestational limits.
A gestational limit—restricting abortion after 13 weeks, or 24 weeks—does not advance the human rights argument. In fact, it undermines it. The implicit message is that age does matter; it’s just that we should be drawing the arbitrary line earlier. Many Canadians would merely be vindicated in their belief that the preborn are less valuable than their mothers because they’re less developed. Instead of correcting the scientific illiteracy of the population on the fundamental question of when life begins, gestational legislation just complicates and confuses.
When the media is not our friend, our message needs to be as consistent, clear, and simple as possible. We cannot afford contradiction. We cannot afford to shoot ourselves in the foot.
If we truly believe abortion to be a human rights injustice, why would we tolerate it earlier on in pregnancy? Why would we trade the lives of these younger humans if we profess that all humans are equal?
A bill completely proscribing abortion will be derided as a silly pipe dream, but at least it possesses the dignity of credibility, of taking seriously the problem it purports to fix.
Even if we continue with the milquetoast bills, again let us, at minimum, ensure they complement our educational efforts and human rights messaging. They must be principled, containing no compromise, exception, or division of human beings into protected and unprotected classes.
Check the political temperature today. Stick your head out; find out if you need an umbrella or two.
When the question is not whether or not pro-lifers will be made the whipping boy, but whose turn it is to do the whipping—under an orange, red, or blue banner—then realize there’s no further to fall.
Where we’ve landed lies opportunity: to emerge from the fog, from the noise of bickering over child sacrifice, to present a clear and compelling moral vision about human worth and reclaim the high ground.
